i've actually never heard this before...

....and, wow, is it bad. i mean, on the one hand, it's obviously aged terribly. but, it's not the problem. i don't have memories attached to it other than thinking it was boneheaded and noticing that the people that liked it were the kinds of douchey thugs that threatened to hurt me (and tried a few times) and repeated grades because they'd rather do drugs and flail aimlessly against an authority they couldn't define than do homework, so i can't say much about what it was like to be a 14 year-old dealing with puberty by projecting an exaggerated sense of douchey manliness or what it's like to look back and scratch your head about it. i can't talk about that. but the way it's aged really exposes it as remarkably simplistic and just....bad. i mean, it makes skrillex sound like a fucking musical genius in comparison. no wonder all the bullies loved it.

you're better off checking out tool, kids.

i specifically remember this one kid that used to try and throw me into the locker every day between classes. his tshirts included rage, slayer and megadeth - and his walkman (at volumes that people across the room could hear, while the teacher was lecturing) jumped back and forth pretty regularly between the "rap rock" and the "speed metal". i couldn't identify much of it. any of it, really. rumour had it that he was on his third try at grade ten.

so, he'd wait until i left the class, follow me around the hall, take a run at me and knock me into the locker. i was the kind of kid that had a knapsack full of textbooks and binders, so it kind of hurt.

i've long guessed that he probably had a crush on me....

now, i could take a hit or two, so long as it didn't become regular. but it did become regular. so, i waited around the corner for him to take a run at me, tripped him and pushed him head first down about 20 flights of stairs. result: broken arm. he got off easy, really.

now, here's the most remarkable part of the story: rather than explain what actually happened (and i was a punk kid myself, although i focused more on what could have been called 'direct action' - vandalizing mascots, that kind of thing), he told the principal he fell down the stairs. why? well, he came up to me in the quad a few days later and promised he'd leave me alone so long as i never told anybody that i pushed him down the stairs. apparently, the story of me - me, specifically, the skinny little faggy punk kid - managing to break his arm was too embarrassing for him to handle. his ego and ability to project himself as a dominant male was the most important thing.

so, that's what i remember about rage against the machine, going to high school in the 90s.

KGB Ill
rage againt the machine told those kids to bully you

deathtokoalas
of course, it's more that it was the other way around. but, i think the attitudes expressed were reinforcing.

Levi
As an avid Tool fan whom was also one of these generalized youth you seem to have some pent up hostility towards I can say your probably lucky they didn't listen to Tool during that period of their lives. They obviously didn't have the mental fortitude or cognitive grace to understand the messages in their music. Pairing that with Tool would be a deadly combination, considering the anger and sexual violence found throughout Opiate and Undertow.

We all grow up with a different kind of fire. Some of us get forged strong as steel while the rest get caught up in an ego they can't control and burn up into nothing. The thing that binds us together is the rage. We can feel it on the inside that something is wrong and we want to fight it, too correct it. We look inside and see it's us. We are the problem. In our short sighted youthful ignorance we disbelieved the nature of change and became the hate and authority we so passionately fought against. We lashed out at this and hurt people around us. But while we tore down others we were tearing down ourselves, silently screaming for a helping hand. All we ever wanted was to feel like we belonged. RATM showed a generation of youth to take these feelings and try to produce a positive change by giving us a target other than ourselves. We took the weapon of our rage and all together we let the angst rain down against an unjust, hypocritical system. In that glory we found our purpose, our oneness, ourselves.

I can't apologize for the things others have been done to you. But I will spend a lifetime paying penance for my own ignorance. People like you weren't the enemy. It was our own insidious insecurities. But connecting this music to the unbridled actions of teenagers is a bit short sighted. I can only guess to their motives, but I would have to say that probably more than one of those people that hurt you either had a crush on you, or maybe at least one was gay and stuck in the delicate ballet of self loathing and denial. This isn't a justification, merely an explanation. You don't have to forgive them. But it seems your harboring a feeling that is best let go, a feeling that restricts the way you view this music and tints ever so slightly the way you view the world.

deathtokoalas
i want to be clear that i'm not blaming the band, so much as i'm pointing out what i actually saw around me.

see, it's one thing to say what you're saying. but i think a moment's reflection - as adults - should make it clear that nobody is going to attract the kind of fan base they wanted to attract with the music rage was making. i think that refused experienced the same basic point of failure a few years later. i mean, in hindsight, it's not hard to extrapolate the kind of teenager that is going to be attracted to fuck you, i won't do what you tell me - which is a very different teenager than is going to be attracted to learn to swim. you don't get the smart kids with that kind of messaging. they're going to roll their eyes at it.

the tool fans were markedly different. they were a type of hippie, really.

i got into tool a little after aenima, undertow didn't really hook me, and enjoyed both aenima and lateralus but was never really a diehard fan. really, i just respected and enjoyed the songwriting and musicianship. a passive fan. the type of music i really related to and identified with was more along the lines of nine inch nails or the smashing pumpkins. but i had a friend that was a diehard tool fan and did connect to it on an identifying level; in fact, it was largely the basis of the friendship, as i was the only person around that he knew that was into tool, at least a little. the way he explained it to me was that tool was about abolishing aggression, which set it apart from stuff like rage or korn which was about releasing it. rage makes you want to break stuff. tool makes you want to break the cycle that makes you want to break stuff.

based on what i saw around me, i'd say he was on to something.

again: i don't want to finger rage as the cause of anything. but, i think they acted as a catalyst to a set of problems they didn't foresee, and that future political-minded rock bands ought to learn something from it.

Levi
I'm sorry if I indeed came off as shunning you for targeting the band, as this was not my intention. I just feel that your selling their message short due to your experiences with a small demographic of people. Saying RATM was a "lowbrow" instigator of nothing more than anti-authoritarian behavior is like saying Aenima is about the west coast and Hollywood, or Pushit is about an abusive relationship; it's a generalization that harms the inherent message these artists were trying to convey.

Where Tool succeeded and RATM failed was the ability to show growth beyond their original message. Tool started out exactly like RATM, railing against what they perceived as an unjust authority and an over compromising, slowly homogenizing world. But while Tool was tempered through their endeavors, showing personal growth as artists and moving from one experience to the next, RATM embraced the very passionate fire that eventually consumed them. I think its important to remember RATM was about personal strength, and the ability and responsibility to change what may seem like an impossibility. After all "Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me..." isn't so different from "Think for yourself, question authority."

In the closing of this I would like to thank you for choosing to have an enlightened, civilized conversation in this bastion of childish name calling and music minded sycophant elitists. I hope you'll remember that you just had this with a RATM fan ;P

RR racer
I'm sorry you had to deal with pieces of shit like that when you were growing up. Those people are pathetic, especially since they would rather fail than succeed just because they have a warped idea of what it means to rage against the machine. It's all about EDUCATING oneself so as to NOT be taken advantage of by the powers that be, and of course... KNOW YOUR ENEMY! This music is especially powerful for those who understand the nuances of government corruption. Put those memories you have of douchebags from your past aside and give this music another chance. If you think that our government has gotten too big, too corrupt and too manipulative, then you will like it!

GANASHER
jesus never have i met someone who has talked down so hard on a band before XD

deathtokoalas
the point i'm trying to make is that this approach was unsuccessful, and people looking to raise awareness in the future should be aware of this and tweak their approach..

funny that embryonic isn't up in full...

i'm not exactly a flaming lips fan. i think the inconsistency of the discography is a pretty widely held view. even the records that are nearly universally acclaimed tend to hit me the wrong way; i'll acknowledge that most of the discs are well produced, even if the writing often veers into bad taste, but even the best of it just doesn't really push my "excite" buttons. embryonic, though, is a different story. i'd argue that it really towers above the rest of the discography, and even that it's one of the best records released so far this century.

i suppose that, musically, it's significantly darker than anything else they've done, which intersects with the often dire subject matter. it really hit me at exactly the right point, as i was coming to a set of conclusions regarding what i now refer to as "the futility of existence". i've more or less been an atheist since i was born, and have never really wavered in it. but it's a step in abstraction and maturity to actually come to terms with it, with the finiteness of existence and what the best way to approach it is.

unfortunately, the dominant philosophical approach to this over the last century or two has been to try and neutralize it. to make up stories in order to find ways to hold to a set of ideals that are more or less delusions. the left and right take different approaches, but they agree on this fundamental point: the masses cannot understand that existence is meaningless. they must be convinced otherwise, or society will collapse.

but, this is not sustainable. the truth cannot be unlearned. we need revolutionary politics that break through this line of abstraction and come out to a maturation point on the other side of it. the world we live in must fall; it's a question of understanding how to get beyond this. the longer we lie to ourselves in pretending that we can uphold the delusions, the more disastrous the fall will be in the end.