Rage Against the Machine have scorched America with their Molotov cocktail of hip-hop, hardcore, and extreme politics.
But are they too rad for Russia?
RJ Smith moshes off to Moscow with rock's reigning revolutionaries.
The Russian revolution was supposed to lead to a higher human species, an evolutionary role model for the rest of the world: Homo sovieticus. But the downfall of communism instead suggests that the future may be more Beavis and Butt-head than Brezhnev and Bukharin.
In the lobby of the huge DK Gorbunova cultural center where Rage Against the Machine will play tonight in Moscow, black-leather-jacketed teens are pounding each other on the shoulders, mouthing Rage lyrics like they're memorizing English-language tapes. Outside, truly scary skinheads are robbing grunge kids. Beer cans dot the sidewalk, and the kids are scalping tickets at black- market prices for the sold-out show. We have defeated the Evil Empire!
Backstage, in halls twisty and windowless, you can smell about seven decades of damp funk. A Russian interviewer quizzes Rage guitarist Tom Morello: "Can you explain your attitude toward modern social reality?" Yes, he can. Because while the USSR invented agitprop, the 31-year-old Morello's making sure the term at least survives. The interviewer asks him about his political mentors, and you can practically see Morello, good left-leaner, trying to come up with an answer that will be both pro-revolution, yet not seem, well, defcon-four bonkers in a country not really in the market for a revolution right this very moment.
He smoothly offfers the names of Emma Goldman and Rosa Luxemburg -- revolutionaries who thrived outside of Russia, and thus without the taint of the gulag. Asked what he thinks of the Russian Revolution today, Morello deftly notes that today is the Fourth of July, and ties the original hopes of the Russian Revolution to those of America's Revolutionary War. He brings it up to the present, observing "There's a permanent culture of resistance here in Russia, and I feel pretty comfortable with that," before cautioning Russians fleeing the authoritarian past to not adopt the modern excesses of the West. "I would warn all your listeners to closely watch Boris Yeltsin and his masters on Wall Street," he finishes.
As the interviewer pads away, Morello looks quite pleased with himself. "Doing interviews is a lot like freestyling," he says. I dare you to ask Nas about modern social reality.
Elsewhere, the members of Rage are suiting up for battle. Tim Bob, 27, tall bassist with a shaved head, has a good scowl on. Drummer Brad Wilk, 27, is chatting with friends, scoping out the boxer shorts the band has put on the contract rider; sometimes, free underwear is easier than doing laundry.
Mostly the room is filled with relaxed banter, but in one chair sits 26-year- old singer Zack de la Rocha, staring a hole through his sneakers. He's got his show T-shirt on, with two comic-book eyes staring out at you intensely from behind a mask. But you can't read de la Rocha's eyes: He looks far-away possessed, zoned way low...until he starts hopping like mad.
The band meets up in the hallway behind the stage, nobody making eye contact. "We're going to teach these kids some iron discipline," says Morello.
He means it. "People of the Sun," the latest single from their second album, Evil Empire, starts the show. De la Rocha cannonballs from bass-drum level high into the air as he raps a fast-forward history of cowboys and Indians, this time with the Indians returning for blood. Dreadlocks shooting out like sunbeams, he's railing about gut-eaters, and suddenly 2,000 Russians are also hopping...well, not as one, but as 2,000 individuals. Many are literally figuring this rock stuff out for the first time; they are slamming, twirling, hair-whipping, pogoing -- pogoing! -- doing everything but the Patty Duke. Rage follows with "Bullet in the Head," a rant against blindly accepting your gang or your nation. "They say jump, you say how high" de la Rocha shouts mockingly -- to Russians! After which the crowd shouts back "Inside Out," the name of de la Rocha's first group. Nobody back in Orange County even remembers them. This is love. This is a little bit crazy.
And when "Vietnow" begins, everybody elevates. Morello's deck of guitar effects is out of control; he's part Fripp and part Flipper, Robin Trower sent to reeducation camp. Wilk seems to backshade the beat a touch more live; you wait for his bass drum like you wait for that bead of sweat to roll down your neck. And Bob, stripped to the waist and jumping up and down, he's a Stakhanovite dream, an unfaltering man-machine. "Fear is your only God!" screams de la Rocha, but it ain't fear the Russkies are registering.
"The main thing with Rage Against the Machine is that when it comes to rocking a crowd, no way can you beat them," says Morello's friend, Beastie Boy Mike D, when the Russian trip is over. He knows, because weeks before Moscow, Rage played at Adam Yauch's Tibetan Freedom Concert in San Francisco, and promptly made everybody forget that the Dalai Lama is a man of peace. How undeniable were they? Standing at the edge of the stage between Dave Grohl and Krist Novoselic as Rage rocked 50,000 people, San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown looked like he'd found Buddha. "I love them!" Brown beamed. "I love the spirit, and I love the energy -- I think it's just beautiful." As he shouted this, Rage was blasting "Killing in the Name," a James Brown groove with fused vertebrae.
"I mean," the mayor said incredulously, gesturing to the sea of slammers, the cloud of dust hanging over the crowd, "do you see that scene out there?"
If Rage are a band of many ideas, live they are a juggernaut. And if the juggernaut has any ideas, it has only one: knock it down. They will rock revolution's children, machine politicians, and everyone in between.
Since the fall of Communism in 1991, much has been learned about the former Soviet Union. One small thing we now know is that hundreds of feet beneath Lenin's Tomb, a decades-old chamber equipped with bar and buffet was kept for the needs of visiting Communist Party dignitaries. Red banquets might be too much to hope for, but surely there was wine -- perhaps the sweet Georgian reds that Stalin so prized -- and even song.
The time has come to take the party above ground.
Today, Russia wants to rock. Its political candidates camp it up with pop groups in Red Square. That should make musicians visiting from the West very, very happy. But several hundred feet above the Politburo's private martini lounge and currently eye to eye with Lenin, Rage Against the Machine seem only very, very confused.
"I want to put my hand on him and see him spin," de la Rocha says half- jokingly. He's wearing a T-shirt with pictures of Malcolm X and Emiliano Zapata, which says ÁRevolución X y Z! Lenin, on the other hand, sports a traditional dark suit and a bold print tie, set off by his bright yellow fingers.
After exiting the mausoleum, Morello blinks in the bright sun and readjusts his Harvard baseball cap, merchandise from his alma mater. He's momentarily lost in thought. Finally, he utters a regret that seems to sum up the bittersweetness of the band's whole trip to Russia. "I ate soggy McDonald's french fries in the very shadow of the monument to the 1905 uprising," he laments. "A double scoop of shame."
"Hey buddy, the party's over," de la Rocha taunts.
The band preaching "the party's over" to millions of teenage capitalists has come to a place where it's barely gotten started, and the contradictions are piling up in drifts at our feet. After Tim Bob departs Lenin's Tomb, he does his Alanis Morissette impression, singing "isn't it ironic?"
"I don't know, I didn't read a lot of books about it, I haven't studied Marxism," he says. "But a lot of people died, and a lot of people killed them. And I don't think anything improved after Communism.
"It's the Morello Irony. I know he's down with Communism and stuff, but Rage wouldn't be playing here if Communism was still kicking." Just days ago, the band's Russian promoter nervously faxed Rage's manager in Los Angeles to say it might not be a good idea for Morello to wear one of his favorite baseball caps, the one that says Commie, because, well, kids in Moscow don't like Communists these days.
At a time when critics justly bemoan the disappearance of politics not just from the pop charts but even from the fringes, here is a platinum act brazenly craving paybacks from all kinds of worthy villains -- Ollie North, violent West Bank settlers, mainstream radio, Pete Wilson, agribusiness. Here are lyrics that plead for class war: on "Bulls on Parade," de la Rocha tells the Pentagon that "tha triggers cold empty ya purse." It's Independence Day, and the aliens have come to free Leonard Peltier. Arm the homeless, it says on one of Tom Morello's guitars. Another reads Sendero Luminoso (the Shining Path).
Plenty of populist acts have made great popular music (the Clash, Merle Haggard, Ruben Blades), and radicals have long tied their ideas to radical sounds (Linton Kwesi Johnson, Gang of Four, Boogie Down Productions). But Rage's music and politics cross at right angles, they work in very different ways. And while Rage's words are aimed through a laser scope, their hybrid of hip-hop and metal strikes like a paintball -- splat -- right between the clavicles. It's fun as hell, a head rush you walk away from.
It's happened fast as a head rush, too. In 1991, they played their first public show. A year later they had signed with Epic. They released Rage Against the Machine that year, and industry approval was instant. Billboard editor-in-chief Timothy White and Los Angeles Times pop-music critic Robert Hilburn, critical biz barometers, wrote paeans. They landed a Lollapalooza slot. If the Black Panthers, to cite one of their heroes, had packed this much industry heat, today we'd all be eating free lunches.
As it is, Rage have an amazing way of having their free lunch and eating it too. In 1993 they appeared naked at a Lollapalooza stop in Philly, standing motionless for 15 very long minutes with their mouths duct-taped, a silent protest of the PMRC. They blasted an important Los Angeles radio station from stage because the station was editing a four-letter word out of a Rage song. And then there was this year's Saturday Night Live debacle, when the band got the boot for disrespecting the American flag. Nobody regrets taping flags upside down to their amps, which outraged SNL brass.
"It would have been another thing if that show had been really funny," says Wilk. "But I could eat a bowl of alphabet soup with orange juice and shit out better skits than I saw that night." Ironically, Rage got more publicity for their eviction than if they'd just played the damn show.
Give 'em enough rope and they'll hang who?
It was three years since Rage's 1992 debut, and a rumor was circulating in Los Angeles. De la Rocha had been interested in the Zapatistas, a.k.a the EZLN, from the moment the indigenous group rose up against the Mexican government in the southern state of Chiapas on New Year's Day, 1994. It seemed that de la Rocha had been visiting Chiapas so often, and the label was so desperate for a sequel, that Epic executives flew down to the south of Mexico with a suitcase full of money to entice de la Rocha to return home.
De la Rocha laughs and dismisses the story, but even as a fable it reveals a pair of truths.
One is how badly Epic hungered for a follow-up. They'd already talked the band into renting a house in the neutral territory of Atlanta, provided them with a single car (the better to tie them down), and requested that they stay put until a record emerged. It didn't. Instead, Atlanta put a whole lot of disagreements, musical and personal, on the living room couch.
"I wish I could say there were a lot of positive things that came out of it, but there weren't," says de la Rocha. "Look, I don't particularly care for [Black] Sabbath, and Tom doesn't particularly care for a lot of the hip-hop riffs that I come up with. But the two, when fused together, makes something unique."
Beyond their jazzbo tendencies -- de la Rocha touts Wayne Shorter's The All Seeing Eye, Wilk admires drummer Elvin Jones, and Bob, who owns three stand-up basses, wants to be Christian McBride -- there may be few bands with members who have so little in common. This is not a crew that hangs out when they're off the road. The differences among them are fixed most clearly by comparing de la Rocha and Morello, the two most responsible for the songs; de la Rocha writes most of the lyrics, and together they hammer out the basics of the sound.
De la Rocha is explosive and evasive, capable of disappearing for days. Ask him the question Morello swatted over the fences, the one about the fate of the Revolution, and he's endearingly self-conscious. "Because I had such difficulty getting through high school, Marx is difficult for me to understand. I've got the basic principals down, but...."
Morello talks about issues with self-confident detachment, enjoys turning political talk into collegiate talkathons. He's the Rage member most concerned with the band's image and its business. Buttoned-down about much of his personal life, Morello's far more comfortable answering questions about Mumia Abu-Jamal than about the last book he read for pleasure (Watership Down). On the subject of band tensions he sounds like Warren Christopher trying to smother a flare-up, but impolitic de la Rocha comes clean.
"I think throughout the last few years we've all gone through a series of ego explosions, and it's been very difficult to resolve them," de la Rocha admits. "The band has gotten very big. It's often really difficult for me. I haven't fared very well with the band's popularity, with the position that I've found myself in. I'm at constant odds with it."
One more thing about the suitcase story: it also hints at de la Rocha's sense of divided obligations. He'd rather talk about the Zapatistas than about himself or the band. And sometimes it seems like Rage matters most to him as a vehicle for aiding and promoting the Zapatistas, whom he's visited four times. He's just returned from his most recent trip, where he shot some footage he's hoping MTV will air.
Once while he was down there, de la Rocha, who speaks only English, was asked to teach school so that the teachers could work in the fields.
"I couldn't really call it a classroom, it was more like a boarded tomb. It had a dirt floor, and was very poorly constructed out of wood, very desolate in there," he says.
"The classroom was stuffed with 40 children, all the way from kindergarten to sixth grade. We taught basic math to these kids. The supplies we had were minimal; we had to break pencils several times and sharpen them so everybody had something to write with." The lesson began, but de la Rocha had to step out of the shack and steady himself.
"I realized that the Mexican government had been spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a week just to keep the military force in those communities, while there was nothing these kids had to write with. That shook me. It was a haunting reminder."
De la Rocha traces his interest in Chiapas, as well as his entire political sensitivity, back to his father. Beto de la Rocha was part of Los Four, an artist collective who in 1974 became the first Chicanos to exhibit in the L.A. County Museum of Art. Their art, full of Mexican folk icons and references to the Chicano political movement, was crucial to a thriving East Side cultural scene.
"At home, my father often reminded me about who we were as a people, that we were indigenous," says de la Rocha. "My father helped me understand....the devastation that the Mexica people felt under the Spanish conquest in the early 1500s. I began to draw a sense of how that particular struggle and resistance affected my life. The slaughter of it is just so amazing and hidden. Seeing it through my father, in his art work, had a profound effect on me.
"So when the uprising happened in Chiapas and unmasked the conditions down there, I was drawn to it in a way that I can't fully explain."
De la Rocha's parents divorced when he was 13, and he lived mostly with his mother, an Irish-German-Chicana studying anthropology in Orange County. But on weekends, Zack stayed with Beto in East L.A. About that time, Beto began a downward slide, triggered by a severe nervous breakdown in 1981. Zack's father drew the drapes, put huge locks on the door, and spent day after day reading a dog-eared Bible. He'd go on 40-day fasts, and when Zack came to stay, Beto forced his son to take part in his delusions. Beto would deprive his son of food, and keep him under close guard while wandering the house interpreting the Bible.
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