04/03/2026
In 1999, Washington Post music writer Richard Harrington asked Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello whether he thought any of the band’s fans could be “oblivious” to the political content of their music. “It’s not very well hidden,” Morello said. “It’s on every Rage T-shirt, on every backdrop, in every song and every video, on the front of the amplifiers. I don’t think you can get with Rage Against the Machine without at least being aware of what it’s about.”
It seemed preposterous that anyone could have overlooked the band’s message(s) then, or that they could’ve even ignored the cover of their debut album, which featured Malcolm Browne’s still-shocking photograph of Thích Quảng Đức, the Buddhist monk who sat cross-legged on a cushion in a Saigon intersection and lit himself on fire to protest the government’s treatment of Buddhists.
It’s equally hard to imagine someone listening to literally any song on the three records that Rage had released at the time and missing the lyrics about racial inequality and class warfare (“Now I’m rolling down Rodeo with a shotgun / These people ain’t seen a brown skin man since their grandparents bought one”) about political hypocrisy (“They rally round the family with a pocketful of shells”) or about white supremacy’s prevalence in law enforcement (every word of “Killing in the Name.”)
Ignoring Rage’s unyielding activism and the political causes they’ve championed isn’t even reading Pl***oy for the articles; it’s peeling the address label from the magazine’s front page, tearing out a DirecTV ad, and throwing the rest into the bin. There’s even an entire Wikipedia page called “Political views and activism of Rage Against the Machine,” which covers everything from their support of Mexico’s Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) to their feedback-soaked, all-nude anti-censorship demonstration, with brief stops to mention how they were asked to leave the Saturday Night Live set after hanging upside-down American flags from their amps.
If you can disregard or critique the politics in Rage Against the Machine’s music, then it means that these particular injustices haven’t affected you in any meaningful way. It’s a privilege to have a “safe haven” where you can squeeze your Airpods into your auditory canals and block out the ongoing calls for racial equality, the protests against police brutality, or the other literal cries for help from marginalized communities that have been amplified by bands like Rage.
Listening to nothing but the kind of bland pop that helps you ignore any problem bigger than, like, a clogged downspout or a dead bird in the back garden doesn’t make these problems go away any more than covering your own eyes makes you invisible. And to anyone out there wringing their hands over the realities of Rage’s politics, if song lyrics make you uncomfortable, that’s a pretty good sign that you should turn that track up instead of skipping it.
