CHAPTER 18

 

 

#83: RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE

"Killing In The Name"

from the album Rage Against The Machine

Released: November 1992

 

 

If this allegedly devalued world has told us anything, it is that people respond most quickly and deeply to slogans. Repeat the same thing over and over, it doesn't matter whether or not it's true. The point is that it has been expressed, not suppressed.

This song creeps like an expectant panther. I wouldn't recommend trying it on any dancefloor - too slow, then too free, then the brain's senses get clouded and people get fatally confused. It doesn't fit square into anything, hence its efficacy at repelling squares. Its tempi follow the emotional pattern of the song; they change as often and as naturally as those of another Columbia recording artist, Laura Nyro.

What they are saying on this song, though, is pretty much "Save The Country," a nation being gladly or glumly beaten back a century and a half. Those who work forces also burn crosses with equal fervidness. The backward guard of the robber barons who recede back into the time of Brown and Lincoln remain as stolidly and violently reactionary as they are salaried to be. MAKE AMERICA WHITE AGAIN is what they crave, or savour, and too bad for any Rodney King who happens to suggest otherwise.

 

 

The song was a direct response to the 1992 Los Angeles riots and knew that the only way it was going to make any impact was to hammer its slogans to something approaching emotional home. The singer howls and hisses the song because what did you expect him to do, croon it over the reassuring backdrop of some incredible high school marching bands? The solo - what is that? A guitar? A synthesiser? Nothing you could hitherto pinpoint? Exactly.

 

 

The reaction, the only workable reaction to a dead anti-culture poised to kill everything you and I were taught to believe while we were growing up, which determinedly fails to differentiate between life and existence, which would regress civilisation into an everlasting medieval feudalism with lords who think that everybody else should be serfs, that having been the default setting of human society since forever, with democracy an accidental and momentary blip, is to refuse, and to refuse loudly. Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me. The singer final, extended shriek of "MOTHER-FUCK-ER!!" is a moment of exultant triumph, as though he knows that we have already won. Then the song tangos to a halt because it's made its point, abruptly and lengthfully. The social contract is smash, smash, smashed. Cornelius Cardew would have thought Rage Against The Machine impossibly vulgar and naïve. But the ancestry of lies and deception have been thought through, and transcended.

 

 

Or so it was hoped. An online campaign hoisted the song to number one in the U.K. at Christmas 2009. Victory. The following week Joe McElderry climbed to the top as though nothing had happened. The song was chanted by Trump supporters following the 2020 Presidential election. You tied one set of door knockers to another for a week then went back to school. But it's like Eric Dolphy said; you send those notes out into the air, it's up to us to make what we will of them. Los Angeles, home of punk rock. Where else could it have started?