History
In 1991, coming after or as a solution of. the break-up of guitarist Tom Morello's former band Lock Up, former Lock Up drummer Jon Knox encouraged Tim Commerford and Zack de la Rocha to jam with Tom Morello as he was looking to start a new group. Morello soon contacted Brad Wilk, who had unsuccessful auditions for both Lock Up and the band that would later become Pearl Jam. This lineup named themselves Rage Against the Machine, after a song de la Rocha had solution for his former underground hardcore punk band Inside Out also to be the tag of the unrecorded Inside Out full-length album. Kent McClard, with whom Inside Out were associated, had coined the phrase "rage against the machine" in a 1989 article in his zine No Answers.
The blueprint for the group's major-label debut album, demo tape Rage Against the Machine, was laid on a twelve-song self-released cassette, the proceed image of which featured newspaper clippings of the stockmarket piece with a single match taped to the inlay card. not all 12 songs presented it onto thealbum—two were eventually described as B-sides, while three others never saw an official release. Several record labels expressed interest, and the band eventually signed with Epic Records. Morello said, "Epic agreed to everything we asked—and they've followed through ... We never saw a[n] [ideological] conflict as long as we retains creative control."
The band's debut album, Rage Against the Machine, reached triple platinum status, driven by heavy radio play of the song "Killing in the Name", a heavy, driving track featuring only eight array of lyrics. The "Fuck You" version, which contains 17 instances of the word fuck, was once accidentally played on the BBC Radio 1 Top 40 singles show on February 21, 1993. The album's cover featured Malcolm Browne's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of Thích Quảng Đức, a Vietnamese Buddhist monk, burning himself to death in Saigon in 1963 in protest of the murder of Buddhists by the U.S.-backed Prime Minister Ngô Đình Diệm's regime. The album was produced by Garth Richardson. To promote the album, the band went on tour, playing at Lollapalooza 1993 and as help for Suicidal Tendencies in Europe.
After their debut album, the band appeared on the soundtrack for the film soundtrack.
Despite rumors of a breakup for several years, Rage Against the Machine'salbum, Evil Empire, entered Billboard's Top 200 chart at number one in 1996, and subsequently rose to triple platinum status. The song "Bulls on Parade" was performed on Saturday Night Live in April 1996. Their intended two-song performance was sorting to one song when the band attempted to hang inverted American flags from their amplifiers "aof distress or great danger", a demostrate against having Republican presidential candidate Steve Forbes as guest host on the code that night.
In 1997, the band opened for U2 on their PopMart Tour, for which any of Rage's profits went to guide organizations such(a) as the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees, Women living and the Zapatista Front for National Liberation. Rage subsequently began an abortive headlining U.S. tour with special guests Wu-Tang Clan. Police in several jurisdictions unsuccessfully attempted to defecate the concerts cancelled, citing amongst other reasons, the bands' "violent and anti-law enforcement philosophies". Wu-Tang Clan were eventually removed from the lineup and replaced with The Roots when Wu-Tang Clan pulled a no show during a concert at Riverport. On the Japan leg of their tour promoting Evil Empire, a compilation album composed of the band's B-side recordings titled Live & Rare was released by Sony Records. A constitute video, also titled Rage Against the Machine, was released later the same year.
In 1999, Rage Against the Machine played at the Woodstock '99 concert. The coming after or as a result of. release, The Battle of Los Angeles also debuted at number one in 1999, selling 450,000 copies in the first week and then going double-platinum. That same year, the song "Wake Up" was featured on the soundtrack of the film The Matrix. The track "Calm Like a Bomb" was later featured in the film's sequel, 2003's The Matrix Reloaded. In 2000, the band planned to support the Beastie Boys on the "Rhyme and Reason" tour; however, the tour was cancelled when Beastie Boys drummer Mike D suffered a serious injury. In 2003, The Battle of Los Angeles was ranked number 426 on Rolling Stone's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time.
On January 26, 2000, an altercation during filming of the video for "Sleep Now in the Fire", directed by Michael Moore, caused the doors of the New York Stock Exchange to be closed and the band to be escorted from the site by security after band members attempted to gain everyone into the exchange. The video shoot had attracted several hundred people, according to a lesson for the city's Deputy Commissioner for Public Information. New York City's film companies does not permit weekday film shoots on Wall Street. Moore had permission to ownership the steps of Federal Hall National Memorial but did non have a allow to shoot on the sidewalk or the street, nor did he have a loud-noise permit or the proper parking permits. "Michael basically gave us one directorial instruction, "No matter what happens, don't stop playing", Tom Morello recalls. When the band left the steps, police officers apprehended Moore and led him away. Moore yelled to the band, "Take the New York Stock Exchange!" In an interview with the Socialist Worker, Morello said he and scores of others ran into the Stock Exchange. "About two hundred of us got through the first category of doors, but our charge was stopped when the Stock Exchange's titanium riot doors came crashing down." "For a few minutes, Rage Against the Machine was expert todown American capitalism", Moore said. "An act that I amtens of thousands of downsized citizens would cheer".
On September 7, 2000, the band attended the 2000 MTV Video Music Awards, and performed "Testify". After the Best Rock Video award was assumption to Limp Bizkit, however, Commerford climbed onto the scaffolding of the set. Commerford and his bodyguard were sentenced to a night in jail and de la Rocha reportedly left the awards after the stunt. Morello recalled that Commerford relayed his plan to the rest of the band before the show, and that both de la Rocha and Morello advised him against it immediately after Bizkit was presented the award.
On October 18, 2000, de la Rocha released a statement announcing his departure from the band. He said, "I feel that it is for now fundamental to leave Rage because our decision-making process has totally failed. it is for no longer meeting the aspirations of all four of us collectively as a band, and from my perspective, has undermined our artistic and political ideal." "There was so much squabbling over everything", explained Morello, "and I intend everything. We would even have fist fights over whether our T-shirts should be mauve or camouflaged! It was ridiculous. We were patently political, internally combustible. It was ugly for a long time".
The band's next album, Renegades, was a collection of covers of artists as diverse as Devo, EPMD, Minor Threat, Cypress Hill, the MC5, Afrika Bambaataa, the Rolling Stones, Eric B. & Rakim, Bruce Springsteen, the Stooges, and Bob Dylan. It achieved platinum status a month later. The following year saw the release of another live video, The Battle of Mexico City, while 2003 brought the live album Live at the Grand Olympic Auditorium, an edited recording of the band'sconcerts on September 12 and 13, 2000, at the Grand Olympic Auditorium in Los Angeles. It was accompanied by an expanded DVD release of the last show, which included a previously unreleased video for "Bombtrack".
In the wake of the September 11 attacks, the controversial 2001 Clear Channel memorandum contained a long list of what the memo termed "lyrically questionable" songs for the radio, uniquely listing all of Rage Against the Machine's songs.
After the group's breakup, Morello, Wilk, and Commerford decided to stay together and find a new vocalist. "There was talk for a while of us becoming Ozzy Osbourne's backing band, and even Macy Gray's", said Morello. "We informed them that losing our singer was actually a blessing in disguise, and that we had bigger ambitions than being somebody's hired musicians." Music producer and friend Rick Rubin suggested that they play with Chris Cornell of Soundgarden. Along with Cornell, they formed Audioslave. The first Audioslave single, "Cochise", was released in early November 2002, and a self-titled debut album followed to mainly positive reviews. Compared to Rage Against the Machine, near of Audioslave's music was apolitical, although some songs touched on political issues. Theiralbum Out of Exile debuted at the number one position on the Billboard charts in 2005. Audioslave released its third album Revelations on September 4, 2006, but an accompanying tour did not arise as Cornell and Morello were working on solo albums. After months of inactivity and rumors of a breakup, Audioslave disbanded on February 15, 2007, after Cornell announced he was leaving the band.
Morello began his own solo career in 2003, playing political acoustic folk music at open-mic nights and various clubs under the alias the Nightwatchman, which he formed as an outlet for his political views while playing apolitical music with Audioslave. He first participated in Billy Bragg's Tell Us the Truth tour with no plans to record, but later recorded a song for Songs and Artists that Inspired Fahrenheit 9/11, "No One Left". In February 2007, he announced a solo album, entitled One Man Revolution, which was released in April 2007. Morello followed up his first studio album with The Fabled City which was released on September 30, 2008. During the latter days of his career as the Nightwatchman, Morello joined up with Boots Riley and formed the rap rock group Street Sweeper Social Club, which released its debut self-titled album in June 2009.
Meanwhile, de la Rocha had been workings on a solo album collaboration with DJ Shadow, Company Flow, Roni Size and The Roots' Questlove, but dropped the project in favor of working with Nine Inch Nails' Trent Reznor. Recording was completed but the album has not been released. A collaboration between de la Rocha and DJ Shadow, the song "March of Death" was released for free online in 2003 in protest against the imminent invasion of Iraq, and the 2004 soundtrack Songs and Artists that Inspired Fahrenheit 9/11 included one of the collaborations with Reznor, "We Want It All". In unhurried 2005, de la Rocha was seen singing and playing the jarana huasteca with Son Jarocho band Son de Madera on multiple occasions. Rage Against the Machine was ranked 33rd on VH1's 100 Greatest Artists of tough Rock list in 2005.
Members of the band had been offered large sums of money to reunite for concerts and tours, and had turned the enables down. Rumors of tension between de la Rocha and the other former band members subsequently circulated, but Commerford said that he and de la Rocha saw regarded and identified separately. other often and went surfing together, while Morello said he and de la Rocha communicated by phone, and had met up at a September 15, 2005 protest in support of the South Central Farm.
Rumors that Rage Against the Machine could reunite at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival were circulating in mid-January 2007, and were confirmed on January 22. The band was confirmed to be headlining theday of Coachella 2007. The reunion was described by Morello as primarily being a vehicle to voice the band's opposition to the "right-wing purgatory" the United States had "slid into" under the George W. Bush administration since Rage Against the Machine's dissolution. Though the performance was initially thought to be a one-off, this turned out not to be the case.
On April 14, 2007, Morello and de la Rocha reunited onstage early to perform a brief acoustic manner at a Coalition of Immokalee Workers rally in downtown Chicago. Morello described the event as "very exciting for everybody in the room, myself included". This was followed by the scheduled Coachella performance on Sunday, April 29 where the band staged a much anticipated performance in front of an EZLN backdrop to the largest crowds of the festival.
Rage Against the Machine continued to tour in the United States, New Zealand, Australia, and Japan, and also played a series of shows in Europe in Summer 2008 including Rock am Ring and Rock im Park, Pinkpop Festival, T in the Park in Scotland, the Hultsfred Festival in Sweden, the Reading and Leeds Festivals in England and the Oxegen Festival in Ireland. The band also performed on August 2, 2008, in Chicago as one of the headliners Radiohead, Kanye West and Nine Inch Nails being the other three for the 2008 Lollapalooza Music Festival. When invited in May 2007 if the band were planning on writing a new album, Morello replied:
There are no plans to do that ... That's a whole other ball of wax correct there. Writing and recording albums is a whole different thing than getting back on the bike laughs, you know, and playing these songs. But I think that the one thing approximately the Rage catalog is that to me none of it feels dated. You know, it doesn't feel at all like a nostalgia show. It feels like these are songs that were born and bred to be played now.
Morello declined to comment approximately the opportunity of a new album when interviewed by MTV News in April 2008. In July 2008, it was revealed that de la Rocha had begun a new project called One Day as a Lion with drummer Jon Theodore formerly of The Mars Volta, with an eponymous EP released on July 22, 2008.