Rage Against The Machine
Rage Against The Machine

THE REVIEW

The debut of Rage Against The Machine is one of the most overrated albums of all time, despite the music tabloids having fed us a series of outrageous falsehoods about Morello's band. The first big bullshit you read is that “Rage against the machine invented crossover”. Now, what I mean by crossover is what people like Faith No More or Jane’s Addiction did, people who really mixed multiple genres at once with fabulous results. What Rage does in this album is take Jimmy Page's riffs (in some cases blatantly plagiarizing, like in "Wake up" which even my grandma knows is from “Kashmir”) and mix them with old-school rapping. That is, like taking the most banal things from two different genres and overlaying them. Big deal... as if they were the first to do it. Not to mention Public Enemy who sampled Slayer as early as 1986, or Urban Dance Squad, who layered many languages in albums like “Life And Perspectives Of A Genuine Crossover”. Besides, even stones know that that idiot Morello played in that shitty band – Lock Up – that opened for Urban concerts... many beautiful copied insights, right Tom?

Certainly Morello, Tommy, and Wilk are excellent musicians, but what results is an exercise in style for its own sake. Not to mention that the stylistic deviations between the songs and their albums are minimal, and Morello himself will endlessly recycle his riffs even with that geriatric circus known as Audioslave: at least De la Rocha had the good taste to disappear from the scene, even though whenever he announces his return with futuristic masterpieces, hordes of sycophant journalists extol his future feats. The second big bullshit predicted by the prophets of Rage is that they are "a thorn in the side of Yankee imperialism”. Overlooking the fact that this album is released by Sony (which is Japanese anyway, so it has nothing to do with the exploitation of Chiapas, but it's still about capitalism, and this says a lot about the intellectual honesty of the four), it's evident that Rage’s attitude was a leftist variant of the goodist attitude of various “do-gooders” like U2. An attitude that only caused damage, like when they called for abstention in the electoral duel between Gore and Bush (the White House still sincerely thanks... after all, it's easier to stay angry when you have an enemy to “fight” against, right?). A well-managed commercial trick, used to strengthen their market share among the ranks of angry young men who, notoriously, make up the majority of rock listeners. Meanwhile, De la Rocha laughs and sips a mimosa drink by the pool in his pharaonic villa on the hills of Los Angeles... “Fuck you I won’t do what you tell me”... eh, he’s the one who really understood everything about life.