Three days ago Tom Morello accept the award alone on behalf of Rage Against the Machine. Controversy? Of course. But fuck the haters let’s kick out the jams!
Seeing the news I knew I had to put my nostalgia glasses on and jumpstart my album review series. What better time than now to dust off RATM’s “Evil Empire,” and get this ball rolling. This album goes way back, I remember getting picked up from my friend’s cabin in northern *redacted* along the coast where my parents had planned to kidnap my sister and I for some summer hiking after two weeks of friend hangs. It was an activity we loathed at the time but such was any activity endorsed by your parents when you are a 6th grader with bleached blonde hair. Being a music junkie and an avid collector of pinup posters from Circus magazine, Hit Parader the like, I bugged my parents to stop at a record shop on the long car trip. Or maybe it was bribery for making my sis and I go hiking?
Like many tweens in the 90s and 00s, I was already a huge RATM fan and had made cassette tape recordings of their tracks from the radio, taking care to queue right after the track was announced by local rock radio DJs. My older cousins were skaters and I had first heard RATM in the 90s escaping family events to take refuge in their Metallica-postered rooms where they blasted “Bomb Track.” They wouldn’t play” Killing in the Name Of”, because the “Fuck you I won’t do what you tell me” refrain was too much for my young, virgin ears. The coolest thing my cousin, added was “All the music is bass, drums, and guitar, there’s no DJ scratching – all that stuff is Tom’s guitar. The music was loud, angry and made you want to jump.
Listening to “Bulls on Parade” or “People of the Sun” from the radio cassette was nothing like having a full disc at your fingertips. I saw Evil Empire on the CD rack and knew I had to have it. I remember having to win an argument with my dad over the “parental advisory” sticker, to which he insisted he needed to read the album insert to approve if I got it. Sitting in the back of the station wagon I slit open the cover with a pocket knife and tugged out the album sleeve. The back art was a cornucopia of revolutionary art, from memory I saw the likes of Hugo Chavez, The Zapatistas, Malcolm X, and images of Che Guevara but what worried me was an image of the Anarchist Cookbook. Little did he know I had already pirated copy of (The Jolly Roger edition) on Limewire on the home G3 Apple tower.
That art made my heart sink- there’s no way he would let me listen to a band that referenced a book that instructed how to build explosives and other tools of criminal mischief. I didn’t want to hand over the album insert, and naturally, the more I didn’t want to hand it over the more suspicious he and my mother became. I couldn’t have been more surprised by their reaction when I finally let them read it. As children of the 60’s my parents actually praised the revolutionary titles and were glad to see I was listening to music with a message rather than the sexually explicit nu-metal lyrics from the likes of Korn or Limp Bizkit. The joke’s on them, they didn’t even catch the Anarchist Cookbook cover art!
The album opened up with the hit singles referenced above, songs that made me clench my fists and dance around in a make-believe mosh pit in my rural bedroom. Many such CDs in those days were garnished with skips and scratches from pogoing around in the bedroom with friends in those days. You’d be hard pressed to find someone who couldn’t head bang the trebly guitar riff and haunting bassline of “People of the Sun,” or the crash and attack of “Bulls on Parade”– these were songs of revolutionary war. But the tone changed with “Revolver,” the verse lacked the bounce I needed as a twelve-year-old. There’s always that song you wanted to skip back then music was simpler, you could listen to a track on repeat.
The purpose of these “Nostalbum” reviews is to revisit these albums as a thirty-something (bass player since the age of 12) with an ear for all kinds of deep cuts spanning from Charles Mingus to pumping techno German of the likes of Ben Klock. Listening to the album before a gym sesh it was now tracks like “Revolver” that spoke to me the most the lyrics “Hey revolver, don’t mothers make good fathers? The track condemns gun violence which has only gotten worse as the years pass on. “Snakecharmer” was also a skip for the younger me and not the top track, but the album pace picked back up with “Tire Me” a song that made you want to put the pedal to the metal in your hoop-d and take the punches of life to the chin. “Down Rodeo” was memorable for that hip-hop swagger and chaotic machine sound of Morello’s guitar. I knew nothing of the lyrics then, but references to Sly and the Family Stone made me smile some twenty-odd years later. “Without a Face,” echoes the challenges immigrants still face today, “Walk unseen past the graves an the gates..” as the countless death toll of those trying to cross the US-Mexico border. As a teen, I never knew that I’d later be an anthropology major who studied how US (and neoliberal economic policies) indebted the global south and decimated indigenous cultures.
“Flooded the trench, he couldn’t take the toxic shock
Maize was all we needed to sustain
Now her golden skin burns, insecticide rain
Down with DDT, yeah you know me
I’m raped for the grapes, profit for the bourgeoise…”
Such lyrics reference the means the Mexican farmers lost their ability to grow maize and were forced to either join the ranks of the maquiladoras (sweatshop factories) or try to cross the border for a new way of life. As you guessed, these maquiladoras later closed as US companies opened up shop in Vietnam in China furthering the push to migrate north.
I wanted to pause and go deep there as such struggles are often something I reference on whiskey-fueled rants of often getting too political on a date conversation. In some ways of matured, but my politics swing between a dichotomy of anarchism and libertarian capitalist. Back to the music, “Roll Right” had a funky bassline that unbeknownst to me actually inspired my playing in later bands despite it being a song I rarely listened to. That repetitive gritty drive lock step with the drum is all you need to drive the groove forward regardless of genre The album closing with “Year of the Boomerang” is a powerful saga on racism with esoteric lyrics and references to Huey Newton (Free HUEY! Pins come to mind) and Maoism. Plus it’s danceable.
Unfortunately, I don’t have the album anymore as a senior high schooler in the back of the bus “borrowed” it from me when I was a blue-haired punk in 2001. The jokes on him, as he’s probably a felon now. I had the pleasure of seeing RATM in Harlem in 2008 and will never forget Zach kicking off the set with, “We are gonna’ hang George Bush for war crimes! Killing in the name of!!!” to which the crowd, erupted in the largest circle pits I’ve slam danced in to date.
Evil Empire still gets 9/10 in my book with the middle of the album trying out a few experimental ideas that don’t always hit the mark of RATM’s top tracks. Ultimately they put in hella’ more effort than the filler that bookended radio singles of so many albums we heard in the 90s.
Nostalbum reviews will be a regular feature on andersoksarwrites. What are your thoughts on Evil Empire nearly 27 years later? What nostalbums do you want me to review next? Leave a comment below.