Rage Against the Machine |
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Released: November 3, 1992 Peak: 45 US, 17 UK, 86 CN, 12 AU Click for codes to charts. Sales (in millions): 3.0 US, 0.9 UK, 5.37 world (includes US and UK) Genre: rap metal |
Tracks:Song Title (Writers) [time] (date of single release, chart peaks)
All songs written by Commerford, de la Rocha, Morello, and Wilk. Total Running Time: 52:55 The Players:
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Rating: 3.626 out of 5.00 (average of 17 ratings)
Quotable:“There’s still no other album that is as successful at validating our own rage.” – ConsequenceAwards:(Click on award to learn more).
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Setting the Stage for a Game Changer“The ’90s were a decade in which rock and hip-hop became not just ubiquitous, but mediums that allowed for collective catharsis and railed against the status quo. No album was more in service to these ideas than Rage Against the Machine’s self-titled debut, which combined both genres in a furious and poignant cocktail.” CQ “Four Los Angeles-dwelling punks had met with a clear mission in mind: Take full-throttle rock music with notes of heavy metal, funk, and blues.” CQ and you get what “is arguably the best debut album of the ’90s and possibly the best debut album of all time.” OHThe Band“Frontman Zack de la Rocha spit fierce, politically charged bars above it.” CQ He gave the group meaningful rhymes and emotionally charged delivery that white-boy metal could never hope to achieve.” AM His “prescient meditations on police brutality, the caustic nature of capitalism, and global unrest as a result of deep power imbalances were thought-provoking and, of course, rage-inducing.” CQHis “radical politics found sympathetic muscle in Tom Morello’s howling one-guitar army, making a furor unheard since the MC5 and Clash.” 500 Morello “fuses his roots in ‘80s metal-style shredding with an unprecedented array of six-string acrobatics and rhythmic special effects, most of which no one has even tried to imitate.” AM He “added interludes of buzz-saw scratching to searing solos and Sabbath-style blood-pumping riffs.” RD His “work was alien to nearly every other rock band on the planet, as he constantly searched for the most unconventional ways to solo and reinvent the idea of a rock guitarist.” CQ “Only Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood could claim to have coaxes so many otherworldly sounds of the guitar in the 1990s.” TB “The interlocking grooves of bassist Tim Commerford, drummer Brad Wilk, and Morello created a full-bodied instrumental sound, making the simplest blues riffs come across as powerful, awe-inducing hooks.” CQ A Genre Breakthrough“Little did they know, their experiment would take them to the highest pantheon of rock music, and it would speak urgently to audiences all around the world for decades to come.” CQ Rage Against the Machine was “the first album to successfully merge the amazingly disparate sounds of rap and heavy metal.” AM “The group’s sound prefigured that of Korn, Limp Bizkit, and other so-called rap-metal acts.” TBThis was an album “so powerful that it shook apathetic teenagers into an awareness of the injustices of capitalism.” RD The songs “are doggedly polemical, a sequence of revolutionary tracts about the state of the U.S.A. in the late 20th century.” TB It has been called “a ferocious fusion of rap, rock, and political anger.” OH “If Rage was trying to change the way that people looked at the world, they succeeded.” OH “Rage created a sound unique to themselves and got people really researching the histories we didn’t learn in school.” OH De la Rocha said, “I believe in this band’s ability to bridge the gap between entertainment and activism.” 500 “There’s still no other album that is as successful at validating our own rage.” CQ It “was groundbreaking enough when it was released, and many would argue that its importance and influence remains unchallenged and unsurpassed to this day.” AM “In the overall landscape of political music in the last 50 years: There was nothing like it before, and nothing would be the same afterwards.” CQ The SongsThe band became best known for “their signature track,” AM “the incendiary Killing in the Name.” 500 It “took on historical racism within U.S. policing, a message that remains sadly prescient.” 500 “With its relentlessly rebellious mantra of, ‘Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me,’ the song is a rallying cry of frightening proportions and the unequivocal climax of their vision. A stunning debut that remains absolutely essential.” AMOn Know Your Enemy, Morello “parades four successive licks ranging from funky to frenetic, plays a few bars of speed metal, and throws in some crunch noise.” RD “Zach de la Rocha meanwhile belts out raised-fist rhymes with relentless energy…rapping the streetwise self-props of Bombtrack, reciting the staccato history lesson of ‘Wake Up’ ( a paean to Martin Luther King, Malcom X, and Cassius Clay).” RD Songs like those and Take the Power Back “are immediately memorable, surprisingly straightforward slabs of hard rock.” AM Township Rebellion, “a tale of anti-imperialist struggle from South Central to South Africa,” RD finds the band “riding the radical groove.” RD “One need not look further than the main riff of the venomous Wake Up — lifted straight out of Zeppelin’s ‘Kashmir’ – for conclusive proof of Morello’s influences.” AM That song and “the rebellious ‘Bombtrack’” OH “were funky fusillades that proved rap rock could change minds as well as roil arena mosh pits.” 500 “Even more impressive is the group’s talent for injecting slowly mounting tension into such highlights as Settle for Nothing and Bullet in the Head, both of which finally explode with awesome power and rage.” AM The latter is “an anti-corporate media manifesto [that] climaxes in a wall of Brad Wilk’s furious double-time drumming set against a devastating rapid-fire Morello lick, with de la Rocha bawling the brutal chorus until his voices gives out.” RD “In contrast, the band manages to convey their message with even more urgency through stubborn repetition, as seen on Freedom.” AM Notes:In 2012, a 20th anniversary box set was released in several variations, including one which was a 2-CD and 2-DVD set. The first CD consisted of the original album plus three live tracks which had originally been B-sides of singles. The second CD was comprised of demos. The DVDs consisted of a live show from 2010 and videos from 1992-2000. A second DVD was made up of live performances from 1991-97. |
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First posted 3/28/2011; last updated 10/7/2026. |
