Lance Armstrong Talks Trash in RATM Offshoot Future User’s ‘Mountain Lion’ Video
If nothing else, Future User, the new project from Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave bassist Tim Commerford, has the support of a few professional athletes. In the band’s first video, tennis great John McEnroe subjected himself to waterboarding, and in their latest (premiered above), Lance Armstrong delivers a harsh message while a skateboarder injects himself with what appears to be some sort of steroid.
Appropriately, the accompanying track, the hard-rocking “Mountain Lion,” concerns the misplaced outrage over performance-enhancing drugs. “The amount of attention given to PEDs is incredible,” says Commerford, “especially when you consider the amount of drugs – recreational, illegal and pharmaceutical – that America supports and profits from.”
Commerford (who believes that Barry Bonds should be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame) tells Rolling Stone that Armstrong is a great competitor. He knows this from personal experience. “Lance is a friend, an awesome person and, as far as I’m concerned, a punk rocker,” he says. “We’re ‘cycling buddies’ and kind of go after each other in a trash-talking ”
The song’s spoken-word interlude is pulled straight from this real-life rivalry: “We’ll jokingly leave each other voice messages like, ‘Dude, I’m gonna crush you the next time I see you. I’m gonna take you down.’ I thought it’d be cool to put one of his voice messages in the song.” For the clip, the pair built off what they had already recorded. “When it came time to make the video, I asked him to recreate the voicemail and he was totally cool with it,” says Commerford.
The bassist adds that there is a direct link between Future User’s politics and those of his most famous band: “The fearlessness of Rage will forever be a part of me and that daring attitude has been the inspiration for all the things I’m trying to say with the Future User.”
Purchase the track here.