Fire starters

Rage Against the Machine's new battle of Los Angeles

by Josh Kun

In 1974, a visual artist named Beto de la Rocha crashed through the moneyed, whitewashed gates of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. De la Rocha was one of Los Four, a Chicano agit-prop art group who threw graffiti placas on the museum wall, finessed murals out of spray cans, and built altars cluttered with devil masks, bleeding hearts, and palm trees. Los Four were straight-up movimiento art soldiers -- down with the politics and the consciousness-raising, we'll bomb the palace with homegrown aesthetic dynamite.

More than 20 years later, Beto's son Zack is on stage at MTV's Times Square studios with his band Rage Against the Machine. It's November 3, the day after Rage's new album, The Battle of Los Angeles, hit stores, and the group are hosting their own segment on MTV to help promote the album and the start of their new tour. Zack's shouting something about bringing "the militant poetry y'all" while his image and his words get beamed into millions of cable-jacked homes where the Chicano civil-rights movement has at best been reduced to textbook traces of moratoriums, student blowouts, and brown berets. We might as well face the ugly music: in post-civil-rights America, this is where revolutionary politics has been forced to live -- on T-shirts, in benefit concerts, on red velvet couches perched dozens of stories above Rudolf Giuliani's New York.

So to see a band like Rage -- a band who have dug themselves into the hole of being an unabashedly preachy, dogmatic, pissed-off, "them belly full but we hungry" political band -- play a "shit"-and-"fuck"-filled song like "Guerrilla Radio" (a song that takes out a hit on those "who stuff tha banks, who staff tha party ranks") in the same Total Request Live studio that only a commercial ago housed gaggles of screaming Backstreet Boys teens is about as contradictory and inspiring, about as deflating and empowering, as pop culture gets these days. On the one hand, there's the old "how can it be radical if it's on MTV" line of squashed political dissent, which MTV only helped by plastering the screen with a "Rage TV" logo that looked awfully close to the type of cultural sponsorship and advert mongering that the "Guerrilla" video makes fun of. On the other, this is pop music put out by Epic Records (the same label responsible for the Woodstock 99 CD, by far the year's most depressing artifact of music's ideological loss), and, like it or not, MTV is a prime stage for making meaning and influencing fans.

Plus, so many of the bands who usually drop by the house of Carson Daly -- your Limp Bizkits, your Kid Rocks, your Korns -- are both the very bands responsible for all this growling "metal + rap = marginal" white-kid power noise and the ones who most loudly bear the trace of Rage's influence. If it was "comin' back around again" on "People of the Sun" (from Rage's Evil Empire), then it was also comin' back around again on MTV -- a rare case where the fire starters who've watched their conflagrations get fanned by aimless violence, Carmen Electra hook-ups, and skater pimp poses take the blaze back and make sure it still knows where it's supposed to burn. Rage's third album, The Battle of Los Angeles, doesn't dispel the tension between pushing a radical political agenda and supporting a global media conglomerate like MTV. Instead, it tries to push these alternatives to their very limit -- which begs a catalogue of age-old armchair Marxist questions for cultures gone cuckoo for capitalism. Are politics even possible in commercial culture? Can a band signed to Epic/Sony records have any ground to stand on when they critique multinational consolidation? Can revolutionaries live in the Hollywood Hills and drive Volvo station wagons?

Those who give Rage what a friend of mine once called "the benefit of resistance" would like to think that Rage get all this. That they're just using the master's tools to chip away at the big house. That they slum in Britneyville not to bump album sales but to spread the gospel of revolutionary truth, to peel back the lies of politricks, to fight for imprisoned American Indian Leonard Peltier, to struggle for death-row inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal. To wit: when Rage agreed to let MTV film a concert they performed in Mexico City on October 17 (it aired on November 5), they did so on the condition that the station cover the recent student protests over public-university tuition hikes and the current progress of the Zapatista movement.

As a band who are inseparable from their politics, Rage have always ridden the line between nuanced and informed commentary and sweeping '60s lefty-speak, usually aiming for the former but too often falling back on the latter. But something's happened in the three years since Evil Empire. On Battle, Rage come out swinging with a renewed sense of specificity and purpose. They understand that true protest music has to come from somewhere -- it has to be local -- in order to transcend soundbite power-to-the-people pamphleteering.

Which is not to say that Battle doesn't have moments of political bum rush against the usual Rage line-up of anonymous CEO wage swindlers, pigs in blue, and media anesthesiologists. On "Sleep Now in the Fire," Zack role-plays as a power junkie but comes up only with a rogue's gallery of social-injustice Simon Legrees who blindly suture New World "discovery" myths to slavery and the A-bomb. "I am the Niña the Pinta the Santa María," he snarls. "The noose and the rapist/And the fields overseer/The agents of orange/The Priests of Hiroshima."

But instead of such sit-in generalities -- five centuries' worth of political mayhem treated as if it were all cut from the same ideological cloth -- what we get most of the time from Battle is an album thoroughly grounded in the race and class struggles of Los Angeles itself. "Rage Against the Machine is a product of the city," the band's guitarist, Tom Morello, told MTV, "It couldn't have happened anywhere else. . . . You can hear the city in every note."

Battle is a post-Rodney King earthquake of sprawling urban dread that condenses the city's punk and hip-hop pasts into a militant mosh-rap present. Morello is the most responsible party -- his dazzling guitar morphs anchor a noirish Mike Davis-worthy urban soundscape replete with whining car alarms, skin-shredding turntable scratches, falling bombs, and DOA flatlines. Back in Nathaniel West's classic novel of the Hollywood grotesque, The Day of the Locust, Tod Hackett imagined Los Angeles in flames in a painting titled The Burning of Los Angeles. On Battle, Rage set the city ablaze once again, only this time the fires are lit by Chicano hands. "A risin' sun loomin' over Los Angeles," Zack spouts in "War Within a Breath," " 'cause for La Raza livin' in La La is like Gaza on to tha dawn of Intifada/Reach for tha lessons tha masked pass on and seize the metropolis/It's you that it's built on."

On one level, Zack's born-again chicanismo is nothing new. The band's distance from the whiteness of the mosh pit has always informed their push to chant down the Babylon of the global economy. But it wasn't until the 1994 revolution in Chiapas, when Subcomandante Marcos led the peasant Zapatista forces out of the jungle and into the face of the Mexican government with cries of land and liberty, that the connected fate of Chicanos in LA and disenfranchised mexicanos became a familiar Rage obsession (only to be matched in recent months by their protests over the death-row incarceration of Mumia).

It was Zack, the grandson of a Mexican revolutionary fighter turned California migrant laborer, who was, on Evil Empire, "rollin' down Rodeo with a shotgun" and sniping, "These people ain't seen a brown-skin man/Since their grandparents bought one." And it was Zack who hooked the Spanish conquest of Mexico to LA's Zoot Suit Riots on the churning manifesto "People of the Sun," where he flipped it Parliament Chicanodelic style, made 1516 into 1996, and called for a funkified new-world-bordership built "on tha one, Maya, Mexica."

All this cross-border revolution talk finds its way onto Battle, where the Chiapas insurrection haunts nearly every track. In the pouncing "Calm like a Bomb," when Zack delivers an "anti myth rhythm rock shocker" tour of American social disintegration, he announces that he's "born of Zapata's guns." And in "War Within a Breath," he trades U2's "New Year's Day" memorial for the Zapatistas' New Year's Day revolution, begging us all to tune in to the screams that rush from behind masked faces, the voices that belong to those who are not supposed to have them.

Chief among these voices are Mexican women, and back on Evil Empire's "Wind Blow" Zack paid tribute to female Zapatistas who use "ejidos [government land grants] and ovaries" to face off against troops sent down from the capital. On Battle, we meet María, a worker in an American-owned Mexican factory who crosses the border in a crowded pick-up to work in a clothing plant. As a woman who is "never conquered but here," who is victimized and eventually killed by the economic system she relies on for survival, the María of the song "María" joins the ranks of the Rage pantheon of heroes alongside Zapata, Mumia, and Peltier.

Zack's father, Beto, is never named on Battle, but he ought to be added to that list as well. He shows up on "Son of a Broken Man," in which a father who "lies shaking and starving praying for someone to turn off the light" is paid tribute by the son who carries on the legacy of his work. We don't learn much about Beto here, only that he has melted into pieces, that his spirit is crushed, that his senses have left him. But it's a rare personal moment for Rage when you realize that the band's politics don't just come out of Che Guevara tracts and headline news. Mumia and Peltier are real people for sure, but they've become symbols and icons, faces on T-shirts and names to toss off as you pin on your AIDS ribbon. Battle reminds us that under all its urban bombast and ax-chopped metal rhyme ciphers, under all its ideological pyrotechnics and "turn that shit up" subcult venom, there are actual individual lives in the balance, lives that are never conquered but are here to stay.