The Battle of Rage Against the Machine
Zack de la Rocha clearly recalls how the hurt, anger and cruel surprise – the compound whack of ignorant racism – literally knocked the speech out of him. The singer and lyricist of Rage Against the Machine was in high school: a solitary Mexican-American teenager in a classroom of bone-white faces, a self-conscious exception to the privileged homogeneity of the Los Angeles suburb of Irvine, California. A teacher was leading a discussion about rock formations on the state’s Pacific coast.
“He was describing one of the areas between San Diego and Oceanside,” de la Rocha says, “and as a reference to this particular area of the coastline, he said, ‘You know, that wetback station there.’ And everyone around me laughed. They thought it was the funniest thing that they ever heard.”
De la Rocha’s voice – usually a rapid-fire thing, a formidable weapon of debate in conversation and on the three Rage albums he has made with guitarist Tom Morello, bassist Tim Commerford and drummer Brad Wilk – drops to a measured snarl: “I remember sitting there, about to explode. I realized that I was not of these people. They were not my friends. And I remember internalizing it, how silent I was. I remember how afraid I was to say anything.”
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He later told his mother, Olivia, what had happened. “She was disgusted by it,” de la Rocha says. “She was well aware of the ignorance that permeated the whole town. But she was tied to finishing her dissertation there” – Olivia de la Rocha was completing work toward her Ph.D. in anthropology at the Irvine campus of the University of California –”and she saw the pain that I had internalized as a result of living there.”
Yet Zack – short for Zacarias – made a pivotal, empowering decision in class that day. “I told myself,” he says, “that I would never be silent again. I would never allow myself to not respond to that type of situation – in any form, anywhere.”
De la Rocha, 29, now externalizes his indignation – at large and at high volume. “He’s unafraid to call people out on things, ill racist shit, things that are just not right,” says Commerford, who has known the singer since grade school. During Rage’s mighty Saturday-night set at Woodstock ’99, de la Rocha tried to sober up the mosh pit with a call for justice for the jailed American Indian activist Leonard Peltier. Two weeks later, at a Rage show in Honolulu, de la Rocha cut the music to scold male goons in the pit who were harassing female crowd surfers. And last spring, he donned a suit and tie for an unusual solo gig: an appearance in Geneva before the United Nations’ Commission on Human Rights, where he called for a new trial for Mumia Abu-Jamal, the journalist and former Black Panther whose conviction and death sentence for the 1981 killing of a Philadelphia police officer have already been questioned by Amnesty International and the European Parliament. (Abu-Jamal is scheduled to be executed by lethal injection on December 2nd.)
De la Rocha is also a habitue of the northeast corner of MacArthur Park in downtown L.A., where he is perched on a sunny park bench and talking at high speed between drags on a parade of cigarettes. He jerks a thumb over his shoulder at a square white building across the street: the office of the Consulate General of Mexico. On Thursdays and Fridays at 6 P.M., demonstrators gather there to protest Mexican army actions in the state of Chiapas against farms and villages allied with the Zapatista Army of National Liberation. De la Rocha, who has traveled to Chiapas and worked with campesinos in Zapatista communities, is often among the marchers.
“It’s been hard for me to create that balance between writing music and also being a part of the solidarity movement in L.A.,” he says with the weariness of someone trying to live two lives at once. But de la Rocha’s militant labors are indivisibly tangled with his eight bumpy, triumphant years with Rage: more than 7 million copies sold worldwide of the band’s first two albums, 1992’s Rage Against the Machine and 1996’s Evil Empire, visionary packages of war-cry rap and politicized Zeppelin; the incandescent stage shows and newsmaking benefits for Abu-Jamal, Rock for Choice and Britain’s Anti-Nazi League; the personal tensions that have bedeviled the band since its inception and prolonged the genesis of Rage’s third album, The Battle of Los Angeles, which took more than a year to finish.
Morello, 35 – himself a rarity in modern rock, an African-American socialist with a Harvard degree who plays guitar like a Marxist Jimmy Page – characterizes the troubles and glories of being Rage this way: “If we were just singing about driving with the top down, this band would have broken up a long time ago.”
Indeed, de la Rocha will not rock without mission: “That’s why I’m in this band – to give space and volume to various struggles throughout the country and the world. To me, the tension that exists in this band, and its effect on me, is a minimal sacrifice.”
Without the politics, he contends, “I would not be in this band. And that’s the honest truth.”
The Battle of Rage Against the Machine, Page 1 of 5