Rage Against The Machine

Rage Against The Machine was a California-based rap-metal band that consists of vocals (Zack de la Rocha), electric guitar (Tom Morello), bass (Tim Commerford), and drums (Brad Wilk). They were active from 1991 to 2000, during which time the band recorded three albums of original material with Epic Records, a subsidiary of Sony, followed by a hiatus beginning in 2000.Footnote ² While in 2007 the band reunited with a performance at the Coachella Festival in Indio, California, and continued to perform until 2011, no new material emerged in this period. Between 1991 and 2000, however, RATM amassed a considerable fan base and performed at massive festivals across the world. Three of their albums recorded during this period went double-platinum or above. The band's sound was widely recognised to be highly original, and influenced the emergence of a number of rap-metal bands in the late 1990s and early 2000s, such as Linkin Park and Limp Bizkit (Stenning Reference Stenning2008; Lynskey Reference Lynskey2011).

Political references are almost ubiquitous in RATM's music. Their lyrics address conflict and violence, often that perpetrated by the US government and its allies in the 20th century; US political prisoners, such as Mumia Abu-Jamal or Leonard Peltier; and leftist movements of resistance to the US government and its allies, such as that of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) in Mexico, or that of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. ‘Wake Up’, the seventh track on the band's eponymous 1992 debut album, talks about the US government's role in the repression of the 1960s civil rights movement, alleging government involvement in the assassination of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X (‘they murdered X / and tried to blame it on Islam’, ‘they went after King / When he spoke out on Vietnam’). ‘Killing In The Name’, the second track from the same album, was written in response to the 1991 beating of Rodney King by members of the Los Angeles Police Department which provoked the 1992 Los Angeles riots, and alleges racism and white supremacist beliefs among the police (‘some of those that work forces /are the same that burnt crosses’). Many of their songs contain far greater historical and geographical scope: for instance, they reference the Holocaust in ‘Year Of The Boomerang’, the final track from their 1996 album Evil Empire, alongside Frantz Fanon's call-to-arms for those resisting colonial domination.

To listen to RATM is to be immersed in a world of perpetual global injustice, in which barely a crumb of comfort exists for the conscientious. It is a world of moral certainty in which people are either duped and complicit with unjust power, conscious perpetrators of it (usually denoted by the word ‘they’), or resisting it. Further, the existence of the first category affirms the band's own self-positioning in the latter one, as evinced in ‘Wake Up’, where De La Rocha sings, ‘vocals never lacking that finesse / what I got to, what I got to do to wake you up?’. This tripartite global division is reinforced in RATM's encounters with the press. For instance, in an interview with Danish magazine Propaganda, frontman Zack De La Rocha spends much time talking about the limitations of the US mainstream media (‘the press is pretty extreme to say the least, in the sense that it's the commercial interests that control the US, isn't interested in letting the kids know what's going on in the country and the world outside’). The role of RATM, then, is to ‘tell people what's going on in the US and Europe’. It is where De La Rocha is questioned about the ethics of plying his trade for a subsidiary of Sony that his response becomes self-vindicating: he aims, he says,

For De La Rocha, then, participation in corporate capitalism need not mean co-optation or complicity. RATM can challenge power by mass dissemination of information that runs counter to dominant regimes, even if this implies working through channels with close ties to the same.

This communicative role is referred to with such frequency in interviews with the band that music sometimes comes across as no more than a vehicle for political messages. As one might expect, the band's performing style is mentioned far less often in these interviews. Nonetheless, it is immediately clear, upon viewing a performance by the band, that RATM's live performance is intimately connected to the political discourses that appear in their lyrics. Onstage, in various ways, they physically perform struggle and resistance, dramatically and musically enacting the discourses found in their music.

I want to start, then, by describing in detail some aspects of an RATM performance. In 1993, the band performed in front of a crowd of thousands at the Pinkpop music festival held at Landgraaf, in the Netherlands, televised footage of which can be seen on YouTube.Footnote ⁴ In this performance, we witness Zack De La Rocha's hyper-demonstrative delivery, at different points enacting fury, confrontation, weariness or downtrodden-ness, terror, and a sense of inner peace. One can see, in close-up shots, De La Rocha's facial expressions, which are dominated by fearful anger and disgust. This is an emotive performance that plays out according to the structure of the music, which is organised around a soft–loud paradigm. During the comparatively quiet, subdued verses, De La Rocha manages to force his voice down to an intense, heavy-breathed whisper. At the climactic choruses, however, rage seems to overwhelm him, as the frontman loses control of his actions, trembling violently and throwing himself about the stage. During these loud sections, he screams into the microphone, putting so much stress onto his voice that it begins, at some points, to crack and involuntarily switch to falsetto. The physical effort made by the singer is clearly on show, most notably after two of the songs played at this concert (‘Bullet in the Head’ and ‘Fistful of Steel’), when De La Rocha has to support himself on the drummer's platform, panting heavily. He frequently seems out of breath, but accompanies this appearance with a look of steely determination. In the course of this performance, there is no ostensible attempt to engage the audience in co-operative response to the music; rather, during a section in the song ‘Killing in the Name’ based around the confrontational line ‘fuck you, I won't do what you tell me’, De La Rocha gives the audience a middle-finger gesture, implicitly encouraging them to do the same to him and each other.

The performance of ‘Killing in the Name’ in particular merits description in slightly greater detail. It starts with quiet intensity: breathing heavily into the microphone, as if even speaking is a struggle, De La Rocha recites three times and with increasing intensity a line from a poem by former member of the Black Panthers, Eldridge Cleaver: ‘They use force to make you do what the deciders have decided you must do.’ One of the most striking moments of this performance occurs during the breakdown, towards the end of the song, in which De La Rocha, starting with a whisper and climaxing with a shout, utters the line ‘fuck you, I won't do what you tell me’ 12 times in a row.Footnote ⁵ As this section begins, with his eyes closed, his face a picture of calm and his body motionless, the frontman starts to murmur the line almost inaudibly, like an incantation or a prayer. After six recitations of the line, De La Rocha opens his eyes widely, his voice increases in volume and intensity, and by the ninth he is jumping around the stage, screaming at the top of his voice, and throwing a middle-finger gesture at everyone he sees. Seemingly spontaneously, the crowd responds, singing the same line and moving their bodies against each other, marking a tension between what Goodman labels ‘centripetal’ and ‘centrifugal’ audiosocial forces: these bodies are brought together by sound, and simultaneously enjoined by it to repel one another (Goodman Reference Goodman2010, p. 11). This musical structure – a long crescendo repeating the same riff and lyrics, culminating in the climax of a given song – appears several times on the band's eponymous 1992 debut album, such as in the tracks ‘Freedom’ and ‘Township Rebellion’. Indeed, in the band's 1994 set at Pinkpop, both of these songs were played. At the climax of their performance of ‘Township Rebellion’, the camera tracks De La Rocha's facial expressions closely – thus we can see that at the point that his body starts to shake with anger and his voice peaks in volume, his facial expression is one of fearful anger. During these moments, De La Rocha's rage becomes most demonstrative, most visceral, and it is no coincidence that the vocals that accompany such points of drama mostly consist of the same short phrases repeated over and over: this rage fosters incoherence, making one incapable of articulating complex thoughts, at least at the point at which it is felt.

Commenting on the concept of authenticity in rock, Auslander points out that most rock recordings ‘are made to sound like performances that could have taken place, even if they really didn't (and couldn't)’ (Auslander Reference Auslander1999, p. 64). Similarly, RATM is a band for which physicality and the sight of sound being produced are highly valued, proudly stating in their album notes: ‘No samples, keyboards or synthesizers used in the making of this recording’ (cf. Stenning Reference Stenning2008, pp. 80–1). At Pinkpop 1993, the three musicians accompanying De La Rocha – Wilk on drums, Commerford on bass and Morello on guitar – play in a demonstrative manner that emphasises the physical aspect of their performance. Wilk plays the drums with gestural force, especially the snare, for which he often lifts his left arm up past his head and strikes the drum from a great height, nodding his head forcefully down with the movement. Morello (with the slogan ‘Arm the Homeless’ drawn by hand onto his guitar) opens the song ‘Fistful of Steel’ with a guitar solo, followed by the main riff – an aggressive, technically challenging phrase made up of power chords in D and E followed by harmonic clusters, and played in drop-D tuning – which he performs with wide, forceful strokes of his strumming right arm. The sound of the bass and the guitar, meanwhile, echo the sound of De La Rocha's voice; often working in tandem, both are extremely distorted – in other words, they sound at the limit of the capacity of the amplification equipment used.

RATM's live performances ventriloquate (cf. Cooren Reference Cooren2012) into existence – through lyrics and actions – an enemy which their performances are supposed to resist. What the band defines as ‘the machine’, however, is a slippery, moving target, and something that RATM have defined somewhat loosely in interviews and in their lyrics. As Morello put it in an interview, ‘the machine can be anything, from the police on the streets of Los Angeles who can pull motorists from their cars and beat them to a pulp and get away with it, to the international state capitalist machinery that tries to make you just a mindless cog’.Footnote ⁶ The band's lyrics decry ‘landlords’, ‘power whores’ and ‘the suits’ (‘Bombtrack’), ‘the power dons’ (‘Bulls on Parade’), ‘the feds’, ‘corporations’ (‘Bullet in the Head’). Mostly, however, ‘the machine’ is denoted by the word ‘they’ (on the band's song ‘Freedom’, ‘they're sending us to early graves’; on ‘Killing in the Name’, ‘Some of those that work forces are the same that burnt crosses’), bringing another, silent faction into the exchange between performer and audience (as De La Rocha raps on ‘Fistful of Steel’, ‘silence can be violent’). ‘The machine’ is that which De La Rocha both fears and fearfully defies in his performance, against which he directs his onstage physical exertions. It is performed as powerful, malevolent silence as the band's rage is performed as vulnerable noise. When, at the same festival in 1994, De La Rocha ends a rendition of the song ‘Freedom’ curled into a ball with his forehead touching the floor, one can almost sense the boot of ‘the machine’ on his face. Equally, this resistance takes place on a physical level, against the very instruments used in performance – the guitar, drums and bass and, finally, the body itself. During the music's climactic loud sections, De La Rocha throws himself around the stage, as if trying to shake himself out of his own body. His rage overcomes his body such that he becomes exhausted (performatively, puffing out his cheeks and resting on the drummer's platform) and can only continue through a tremendous force of will. It also overcomes his voice, which becomes hoarse and spills over into an apparently unintentional falsetto. What distinguishes De La Rocha from most metal singers, then, is not necessarily the technique he employs, but the sheer quality of vulnerability that his voice possesses. The drums, guitar and bass are all pushing at physical limits in various ways, but this is probably most notable with Morello, whose highly original playing frequently makes use of the guitar in ways that transcend the intention of its design – producing a rhythmic sound from the part of the string above the headstock, for instance.

These performances were taken seriously enough, by certain political actors, for various attempts at censorship to have been made against RATM. On one occasion, law enforcement officers in the USA brought a case to court asking for an injunction to prevent the band from performing, citing its ‘violent and anti-law enforcement themes’ and the difficulty of maintaining order at their concerts;Footnote ⁷ on another, in 1999, the Fraternal Order of Police ‘orchestrated picket lines outside concerts and called for a boycott’ in response to the band's politics, particularly over their campaign to free Black Panther Mumia Abu-Jamal (Lynskey Reference Lynskey2011, p. 637). Further, after the attacks in New York on 11 September 2001, a now-infamous memo by the radio conglomerate Clear Channel advised DJs to avoid playing any RATM songs on their stations (Lynskey Reference Lynskey2011, p. 647). Attempts to censor music, of course, often signal an implicit recognition of that music's power, inverting a well-rehearsed formula: freedom of expression is permitted insofar as ‘expression’ is considered to exert little or no power (cf. Butler Reference Butler1996, pp. 23, 40; Street Reference Street2012, pp. 21–3).

It is especially in the public discourse of the band, however, that the significance of these performances is emphasised; I include two interview excerpts here. First, the following is part of a transcript from an interview, conducted with RATM guitarist Tom Morello at the Pinkpop festival in 1993:

Secondly, as Lynskey (Reference Lynskey2011, pp. 64–3) describes, Morello's reaction to the band splitting up in 2001 was one of disappointment at what could have been – politically, not just musically. For Morello, RATM posed a genuine threat to the status quo and a hope for real social change (Lynskey Reference Lynskey2011, pp. 642–3):

In the first interview excerpt, Morello's notion of ‘performance’ (somewhat different from the sense of the word as used thus far in this article) is allied with ‘entertainment’ and opposed to the ‘real’ phenomenon of RATM. ‘Real-ness’ here resembles ‘authenticity’, a term often used to distinguish rock from pop (Frith Reference Frith1998, Reference Frith2007, pp. 31–40), but it also aligns with the band's tendency to (performatively) emphasise the physicality of their playing. Further, in underlining that De La Rocha is ‘exactly the same way he is on stage in rehearsal’, Morello creates an association between ‘real-ness’ and ‘intimacy’. On some level, then, we get to know De La Rocha onstage: the anger he expresses in music is a part of his identity, not fleeting, ephemeral catharsis that disappears with the band after a concert. Rage becomes here a way of being in the world, and a powerful one, since it is accompanied by a discursive rationale.

It is from this standpoint that we can start to interpret the second excerpt, in which Morello expresses disappointment about the failure of RATM to cause lasting social change to occur. In ‘Take the Power Back’, De La Rocha sings ‘It's the beats and the lyrics they fear / The rage is relentless / We need a movement with a quickness’, making a direct link between the band's performance, emotion, and political change. Just like early 20th century industrial psychology, or 19th century Victorian morality tales, one may understand RATM as a politico-emotional project. The band's performances simultaneously position rage as part of a geosystem of emotion, and enjoin – entrain – the audience into physical resistance within it.

Rage and the 1994 Zapatista uprising

A few months after RATM's performance at Pinkpop in 1993, there was an uprising in Chiapas, Mexico whose protagonists – almost all Tzotzil, Tzeltal, Tojolabal, Zoque, Chol and Mam Indians – called themselves the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN). Their actions were carried out in protest at the passing of the North American Free Trade Agreement and a series of free trade reforms implemented by the Mexican government that had made life in agrarian communities increasingly difficult (Harvey Reference Harvey1998; Bob Reference Bob2005; Estrada Saavedra Reference Estrada Saavedra2007; Conant Reference Conant2010). This rebellion captured the imagination of De La Rocha, the son of a Mexican artist, and RATM began to make frequent references to it in their music, particularly in the albums Evil Empire (1996) and The Battle of Los Angeles (1999).

The events on and after 1 January 1994 have passed into the folklore of the radical political left: the EZLN took five major towns in Chiapas, followed by 12 days of fighting, after which a ceasefire was declared (Harvey Reference Harvey1998, pp. 6–8; Bob Reference Bob2005, pp. 117–19). During this ceasefire, which officially continues in the present day, the rebels laid down their weapons and organised as a civil, peaceful movement, in 1996 creating a number of Zapatista autonomous municipal governments independent from the Mexican State (Díaz-Polanco Reference Díaz-Polanco1997). Working with NGOs and solidarity groups, Zapatista organisations have since pushed forward many projects of alternative development whose key pillars are the construction and equipping of schools and hospitals (Barmeyer Reference Barmeyer2009). Meanwhile, the government's counterinsurgency strategy in Chiapas in the wake of the Zapatista uprising evolved into ‘low-intensity warfare’, one of the most tragic effects of which was a paramilitary massacre, on 22 December 1997, of 45 men, women and children who were members of Las Abejas, a pacifist organisation sympathetic to the Zapatistas, in Acteal, Chenalhó (Harvey Reference Harvey1998, p. 5).

The Zapatistas stood out, from the beginning, for their distinctive rhetoric, and the way they used it to cultivate and reflect solidarity ties with supporters worldwide. This rhetoric tended to be divisive and combative, often making use of a number of set binary divisions, such as ‘us’ versus ‘the bad government’. Héau Lambert and Gímenez (Reference Héau-Lambert and Giménez1997, p. 227, author's translation) provide a list of these divisions:

The ‘them’ by which the ‘us’ came to be defined, then, was difficult to pin down, and broad in scope. The emergent ideology of ‘Zapatismo’ opposed ‘neoliberalism’, ‘capitalism’ and ‘the bad government’, and supported ‘justice’, ‘democracy’ and ‘liberty’. Both the common enemy and the common ground that the Zapatistas articulate are extremely broadly constructed and charged with moral judgement, leaving no middle ground. It is on the basis of such rhetoric that the Zapatistas have been able to cultivate a transnational movement of support for their movement. On one hand, they are inclusive, appealing to atheists, Christians, anarchists, socialists, communists, environmentalists, cyber-activists, syndicalists and libertarians (Rovira Reference Rovira2009, p. 55). On the other hand, on the basis of clear, binary divisions, they have managed to preserve a sense of ‘what is Zapatista’ and what is not.Footnote ¹⁰

The notion of resistance became fundamental to Zapatista life after the uprising, inscribed in the semi-official denomination of Zapatista villages as ‘communities in resistance’. Nevertheless, the word ‘resistance’, in Zapatista communities, refers to a broad range of activities: from the cultivation of land to the construction of buildings, the decision to use dress considered traditional, the preservation of indigenous languages, or the performance of music. The front cover of a CD made by Zapatista music group ‘Grupo Liberación’, for instance, foregrounds the phrase ‘the fight against the enemy is also carried out through singing’;Footnote ¹¹ meanwhile, one of the textbooks for the 2013 Zapatista EscuelitaFootnote ¹² discusses the theme ‘cultural resistance’, in which it is stated that ‘the bad government is attacking us in the cultural and social realms’. Even as a constructive political project, resistance works here on the basis of the oppositional logic described above.

If RATM was an outfit involved in symbolic production the realness of which they continuously asserted, the Zapatistas formed a real guerrilla organisation while repeatedly emphasising the symbolic nature of their struggle (cf. Conant Reference Conant2010). Symbolism began to adhere to the way that Zapatista soldiers dressed; after 1994, they started to wear a balaclava, which is what Zapatista spokesperson Subcomandante Marcos is referring to when he says that ‘we covered our faces, so that they might see us’ (Stallabrass Reference Stallabrass1997, p. 59; Conant Reference Conant2010, pp. 120–36; Hijar Reference Hijar2012). Their weaponry itself became a symbol; the wooden rifles some Zapatista soldiers used in combat began to represent the desperation with which this war was initiated,Footnote ¹³ and cast the Zapatistas as the type of underequipped, brave hero underdog celebrated in Mexican corrido folklore (Stallabrass Reference Stallabrass1997, pp. 61–4; Conant Reference Conant2010, pp. 157–8).Footnote ¹⁴ When Zapatista leader Comandante Felipe is interviewed at the start of the documentary film Construyendo Dignidad – which shows the construction and defence of an ‘Aguascalientes’ (cultural centre) in Oventik, Chiapas by the Zapatistas – he seems intent on emphasising the symbolic nature of the enterprise, which

While it is mostly full of footage of the hands-on construction of this Aguascalientes, Construyendo Dignidad does contain two scenes of visceral tension, both of which were later used by RATM in a short film.Footnote ¹⁶ The first of these scenes comes at about the halfway point of the documentary: the date, 23 December 1995, appears onscreen, and we see hundreds of Zapatista men, women and children lining the dirt road above Oventik, holding hands. They are present en masse, we soon discover, to protest the passage of a number of Mexican military armed vehicles (including several tanks), something that was the cause of much tension at the time. We can see the soldiers’ faces in the vehicles as they pass: they appear confident, calm, unmoved; one even assuredly pats his machine gun on camera. Some soldiers have hand-held cameras, which they use to film the crowd. Meanwhile, the unarmed Zapatistas chant slogans such as ‘el pueblo unido jamás será vencido’ (‘the people united shall never be defeated’) and shout the word ‘fuera’ (‘go away!’) repeatedly at the passing soldiers.

The film cuts to four days later, on 27 December 1995, and we are with a small group standing on a road near Oventik which overlooks a valley. A military vehicle appears on the road below; the group sees it, and starts to whistle for backup. In the next shot, taken from the camera's vantage point on the hill, we see over a hundred Zapatista men, women and children running towards the vehicle, shouting. It is in the following shot that we get to view this confrontation in closer proximity: one soldier, standing by a tank, is surrounded at a distance of about a metre by a group of Zapatista men whose faces are each covered by a paliacate (a patterned handkerchief), shouting together (‘we don't want the army here, we want peace here in this municipality’; ‘you are damn traitors’; ‘the people here are peaceful on their own, they don't need the army’) and jabbing their finger angrily in his direction. This soldier refuses to engage with their expression of rage, maintaining an appearance of nonchalance, looking into the middle distance, and staying silent. The shot continues for about a minute. Later, during the same scene, we see the same group shouting at a soldier sitting in the pilot's position in a tank (‘here we don't need tanks, go away now!’ ‘go away, assholes!’), who also refuses to look at the Zapatista protesters or respond in any way. (It is at this moment that we see one of the most chilling images of the entire film: these protesters, who are unarmed, standing underneath the tank's cannon.) The protesters’ shouts, after a time, become screams: that is, they start to arrive at the physical limit of the voice, and their anger returns into the body, damaging it. A group of young women, later on standing by a military transport, start to shout ‘fuera pinche ejército!’ ‘fuera pinches soldados!’ (‘damn army get out!’ ‘damn soldiers get out!’) repeatedly, as if the rage that they feel at this moment, as in De La Rocha's performances, leads them to compulsively repeat the same phrase and overwhelms their capacity to communicate anything more complex. When they start to shriek, theirs is an expression of pain that the listener feels as well; their voice spills over into falsetto, their body unable to contain such intensity of feeling.

The tension in this scene briefly dissipates when one of the soldiers agrees to dialogue with the protesters, whose voices are momentarily becalmed. Then, for a while, the previous dynamics of rage return, before the soldiers agree to leave. Silence is neither inherently empowering nor disempowering – indeed, it is a strategy that the EZLN itself has made use of at various points during its existence (cf. Rajchenberg and Héau-Lambert Reference Rajchenberg and Héau-Lambert2004; Ross Reference Ross2006, p. 134) – and the soldiers’ strategy of maintaining silence here elides these two categories, switching from an empowered silence backed up with force to a ‘silence of the defeated’ (Rajchenberg and Héau-Lambert Reference Rajchenberg and Héau-Lambert2004, pp. 55–7). Overall, these are 11 minutes of film full of a palpable tension, as unarmed Zapatistas confront with rage a heavily armed adversary. We can perceive in this video, I argue, many of the same dynamics of resistance as in the performances of RATM: a silent, powerful, threatening enemy that is denounced; a rage whose emotional power is rooted in its potential to reveal the physical vulnerability and limitations of the enunciating subject, and which is performed through a lack of articulation – through non-articulate, repetitive shouts.

If the story ended here, one could write off this similarity as a coincidence of emotional geography. As it happens, however, after 1994, Zack De La Rocha became a staunch supporter of the Zapatistas (a position most clearly expressed in the Battle of Mexico City VHS). As mentioned, De La Rocha started to insert frequent references to the Zapatistas into his lyrics: on ‘Calm Like a Bomb’ he declares himself a ‘native son, born of Zapata's guns’; on ‘War Within a Breath’ he starts ‘Southern fist, rising through the jungle mist’ before arriving at the bridge with the repeated line ‘everything can change on a New Year's Day’, both references to the Zapatista uprising. Further, De La Rocha became a prominent figure in the community of Chicano supporters of the Zapatistas, and was involved in organising the 1997 ‘Encuentro Chican@-Zapatista’ in Chiapas (Flores Reference Flores2008). Cited in Flores (Reference Flores2008, p. 73), De La Rocha emphasises the importance of the sense of rootedness and authenticity that, he felt, adhered to Zapatista discourse:

One response to the Zapatista uprising appears in the video to ‘People of the Sun’, the first single from the band's second album, Evil Empire (1996). Some aspects of the song are perplexing; while the band has linked it to the Zapatistas, a sketch version was first performed prior to 1994. The final studio version of ‘People of the Sun’ traces the descendants of the pre-Colombian Mexica and Maya peoples as they inhabit the lowest positions (‘with their borders and boots on top of us’) in an imperialist capitalist metropolis that suspiciously resembles Los Angeles, a city located in Mexico until the US–Mexico War of 1848. Arguably, it is Los Angeles – where huge swathes of the eastern part of the city are inhabited by communities of so-called ‘Latinos’ – into which the song's racially charged narrative best fits. Indeed, perhaps the song's implicit elision of the categories ‘Mexica’ and ‘Maya’ is best perceived in the context of the Chicano struggle in California, in which ‘Raza’ and ‘Brown Unity’ are such prominent terms (see Chávez Reference Chávez2002). Notably, the phrase ‘People of the Sun’, which is used here to represent the descendants of the first indigenous victims of Spanish colonialism, has little to do with the Mayan ethnic groups represented by the EZLN, whose identities are more often discursively linked to ‘the corn’ rather than ‘the sun’ (Ross Reference Ross2006, p. 11).Footnote ¹⁷

In the video to ‘People of the Sun’ made by director Peter Christopherson,Footnote ¹⁸ however, the Zapatista uprising and the anti-neoliberal, anti-NAFTA discourses surrounding it emerge as the main theme (Stenning Reference Stenning2008, pp. 109–10). At the beginning of the video, the phrase ‘in 1994 the Zapatista army rose up demanding an end to the US-backed PRI dictatorship’ appears onscreen for a few seconds followed by several black-and-white images of Zapatista soldiers; at the end, the declaration ‘THERE MUST NOT BE A NEW VIETNAM IN MEXICO’ is flashed onscreen in bold letters, followed by the address, telephone number and fax of the National Commission for Democracy in Mexico, an organisation through which support for the Zapatistas could be channelled. The video itself features clips from Eisenstein's abortive 1932 film ¡Que viva México! that show a Mexican man being humiliated and tortured by gringos on horseback, indigenous corpses lying in a morgue (one of which is suffering a bleeding wound with the phrase ‘trickle-down’ cut into it), and images of revolutionary leader Emiliano Zapata. Words and slogans associated with the Zapatista uprising, as well as phrases that narrate an opposition to the Mexican and US government in general (‘We have the right to fight for our lives and dignity’, ‘Since 1980, 280 members of the largest opposition party in Mexico have been murdered’, ‘Zapatistas … the reform of Article 27 of the Mexican Constitution’Footnote ¹⁹ ) flash up onscreen throughout the video. Fast-moving bursts of similar phrases are at many points made to accompany the appearance of the song's foundational guitar riff. The intention is more symbolic than communicative, since the words flash by so fast that they are impossible to read: rather, musical performance is equated with the subliminal communication of political discourse. To perform music, the video tells us, is to construct and communicate ideology; music-making therefore has political value.

The video for ‘People of the Sun’ was made with an accompanying three-and-a-half minute short film entitled ‘Memory of the Dead’, which features a poem written and read by De La Rocha (extract: ‘The prophets of profit, extending the scourge of Columbus and Pizarro; the freedom to buy things you can never afford; the freedom for Indians to buy corn that once flourished overgrown in their back yards’)Footnote ²⁰ and images of Zapatista fighters also edited together with footage from ¡Que viva México!. Particularly important, this short film uses slowed-down, black-and-white clips of the same footage of Zapatistas confronting the army in Construyendo Dignidad that I have described in some detail above. Thus we see: Zapatista men, confronting an unblinking, unresponsive soldier beside a tank with an assertive, physical demonstration of rage; Zapatista crowds lining up to denounce with anger the passage of an enormous tank through their territory; a young Zapatista woman pulling down her paliacate to shout at a military vehicle from a distance; a soldier sitting impassive inside a stationary military transport being denounced by a group of Zapatista women whose shouts are at points accompanied by an angry hurl (not just a jab) of their arms towards the target of their rage. The question I wish to ask is this: what drew RATM to use this particular footage in ‘Memory of the Dead’? One answer seems to stand out: not only do the perceptible features of the Zapatistas’ performance of resistance in Construyendo Dignidad resemble those seen in RATM's live performances, but the oppositional ideological surroundings in which it occurs also resonate with the latter. To identify the band's onstage resistance with another expression of resistance that obeys the same logic and that takes place as part of a context of violent struggle is to validate this former, onstage resistance by association; to create, even, what Ellison (Reference Ellison1964, p. 263) labels an ‘identity of passions’. It is to provide substance to the band's assertion that their onstage anger is real, authentic, not ‘a performance’. Furthermore, it supports the discourse of an all-encompassing ‘Rage Against The Machine’, depicting rage – performed, bodily resistance – as universal experience.

Questioning rage

During a short research trip to Los Angeles in 2013, I interviewed a Chicana activist who made an intriguing remark about musical performances of rage:

Here, anger, just as in the early 20th century industrial USA, is painted as destructive, serving no useful, positive purpose. This statement recalls the time-honoured rationalist question: what is the point of anger? The phrase ‘fighting fire with fire’ has, in fact, a more positive history than its contemporary usage might suggest, carrying a 19th century association with the forestry practice of creating ‘backfires’ to burn off flammable material in order to halt the advance of larger fires (Hayes Reference Hayes2012, p. 30).Footnote ²¹ In present-day ecology, meanwhile, many recognise that fires can be useful, constructive and necessary for ecosystems to flourish. The history of fire has striking similarities with that of anger: it too was historically repressed in the latter half of the last millennium, perceived as a savage threat to civilisational order (Pyne Reference Pyne and Balée1998). After centuries of such physical and ideological repression, then, distinguishing between the ‘constructive’ and ‘destructive’ properties of fire presents a challenge, in spite of the increasing recognition of the practical importance of doing so. Perhaps something similar could be said of anger.

The late 1990s saw a proliferation of rap-metal bands with a style similar to that of RATM, for whom anger was also a central feature of live performance. These bands often shared audiences, especially at large-scale festivals such as Pinkpop. This is significant because live rock performance often masks disjunctions between the experiences of its various participants – among musicians, and between musician and audience. So far, this article has followed the performance-centred methodology taken by Auslander (Reference Auslander2006). An important part of this scene, however, is the pleasure that many rock fans derive from participation in moshpits, which ‘provide gratifying opportunities for experiencing violence as both giver and receiver’ (Johnson and Cloonan Reference Johnson and Cloonan2008, p. 29). While such transgressive pleasure is notably absent from RATM's own discourse, other rap-metal bands – whose audiences often overlapped with that of RATM – emphasised the importance of catharsis and violence to their particular onstage performances of anger, in turn eliciting similar responses from their audiences.

As Johnson and Cloonan (Reference Johnson and Cloonan2008, pp. 84–94) document, at the Woodstock 1999 festival RATM were booked to play a set on the festival's East Stage to follow another rap-metal band that was gaining popularity at the time, Limp Bizkit. Fronted by singer Fred Durst, Limp Bizkit's style has much in common with that of RATM: it makes use of heavy, distorted guitar and bass sounds, and Durst's rapping becomes self-abusive screaming in the climactic loud sections of the band's performance. Unlike RATM, however, this band makes very few overt references to politics. Instead, Limp Bizkit's rage is contextualised and embodied as disenfranchised masculine swagger, epitomised by the song ‘Break Stuff’, in which the protagonist narrates a futile aggression in which he threatens physical violence as retribution for gossip or negative talk (‘I think you better quit lettin’ shit slip / Or you'll be leavin’ with a fat lip’; ‘First one to complain leaves with a blood stain’).

What happened at Woodstock 1999 is well known: as well as outbreaks of violence at different performances throughout the weekend, multiple incidents of sexual assault were committed in the audience by the stage during Limp Bizkit's set (Johnson and Cloonan Reference Johnson and Cloonan2008, p. 85). It is worth drawing particular attention to the way that the band's performance of ‘Break Stuff’, which Johnson and Cloonan (Reference Johnson and Cloonan2008, p. 88) pinpoint as a catalyst for some of the set's worst violence, was framed. Durst introduced this song by asking the audience the question, ‘How many people here ever woke up one morning and just decided it wasn't one of those days, and you're gonna break some shit? Well this is one of them days, y'all’. Then, during a breakdown in the performance of the song, Durst addressed the crowd:

Such anger-as-catharsis appears a long way from RATM's performance of righteous anger; indeed, it also appears distant from RATM's own brief experience of the Woodstock 1999 festival, at which the band claimed to have witnessed no such violence (Johnson and Cloonan Reference Johnson and Cloonan2008, p. 93). However, if we take seriously the implications of Grossberg's theorisation of affect, such violent occurrences at Limp Bizkit's concerts might also matter for RATM's political project of anger. For Grossberg, the power of affect is limited by the fact that it ‘can never define, by itself, why things should matter. That is, unlike ideology and pleasure, it can never provide its own justification’ (Grossberg Reference Grossberg1992, p. 86). Although RATM's performances are the site of much work to frame discursively, and thus control and direct, the powerful affective force of anger, it is the overlap between anger and pleasure that marks the point at which this control becomes impossible. One might infer, following Grossberg, that there is (a physical) pleasure in rebellion that can threaten to overwhelm the discursively enunciated purposes of rebellious acts. The way that RATM enacts (and thus calls into being in others) the body as a site of rebellion attracts an audience interested enough in such pleasure to respond in a similar way to live performances of anger given by bands espousing quite distinct brands of politics. Further, although Durst leads his audience on with an explicit declaration of the importance of catharsis, collective musical performances of anger can always serve a cathartic purpose – ‘releasing’ emotion in an intense moment of pleasure – however they are framed. As much as we might, in writing, wish to distinguish between different ‘types’ of anger (outrage, catharsis, fury, righteous anger, self-destructive rage), these distinctions may be of little significance to the audiences participating in their collective enactment. Paradoxically, however, perhaps it is during events that dramatically reveal the importance of such distinctions that the limitations and contradictions of anger as political project become apparent.