By forging lasting relationships between the United States and Mexico, between Mexican-Americans and indigenous Mexicans, RATM left behind a legacy beyond their discography.
Sitting in a barren office hallway at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology at the turn of the millennium, Zack De La Rocha nervously stroked his face as he introduced himself to his idol. Clad in a white t-shirt and sporting his trademark scraggly beard, the man known for his commanding performances as the frontman of Los Angeles rock band Rage Against The Machine squirmed like a starstruck teenager as he fumbled his way through questions for…renowned professor Noam Chomsky. With Chomsky slouched back, a crisp button-down tucked into his slacks, the interview resembled a nervous college student approaching a professor during office hours. Any traces of De La Rocha’s explosive lyrical delivery and manic stage presence melted away as he glanced sheepishly at Chomsky between sentences and clutched tightly to the paper bearing his list of prepared discussion topics. De La Rocha and Chomsky were meeting to discuss the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and its impact on Mexico, a dense issue of political economy rarely broached by armchair philosophers—let alone American rockstars.
But if any music group were to have the credentials to discuss the global machinery of capitalism, it would be Zack De La Rocha and Rage Against The Machine (RATM)—the band, after all, named itself after and positioned itself against that machinery. When the band released their second album Evil Empire in 1996, the liner notes included a list of seventy-five books representing the breadth and depth of the band’s political program, ranging from Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent to George Chauncey’s Gay New York to Che Guevara’s Guerilla Warfare. Chomsky’s name appeared on the list five times, so it’s fitting that De La Rocha’s interview with him was included on the DVD commemorating RATM’s landmark 1999 concert in Mexico City. That show was organized in solidarity with Chiapas’s indigenous Zapatista movement and its militant vanguard, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN). The Zapatistas had protested NAFTA’s official day of implementation on January 1, 1994 by claiming territory throughout southeastern Mexico, an action that elicited a violent response from the U.S.–backed Mexican regime. By persevering through the onslaught, the Zapatistas emerged as anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist heroes as they reclaimed their ancestral land.
By the time the EZLN had announced themselves to the world, RATM were already international icons in their own right. During their asteroidal eight-year blaze through the music scene, the band became known as one of the most politically motivated rock groups of all time; De La Rocha went so far as to say that his political beliefs were the only reason he made music at all. RATM used their musical platform to promote anarchist views that fused anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist critiques of the American state with calls for direct action against power structures worldwide.
They described their political approach as a “hijacking” of the mainstream: co-opting the mass media to spread radical, disruptive messages. That strategy successfully forged both a musical and political legacy for the band, one that arguably remains unparalleled in its scale and scope today. As others have written, it is impossible to force the adoption of a political anthem: in order to trap time in its web, art must interweave organically, simultaneously with its native political and cultural moment. And while RATM’s protest music was built solidly on leftist texts and imbued with the fervor of politically radical upbringings, it did not become a dynamic, resilient political project until the band began its unique relationship with the EZLN. RATM’s project—and its fusion of music with the torrent of anger flowing through early 90s American punk culture—became both transnational and concrete when Zack De La Rocha and the Zapatistas began to brew a symbiotic project of exchange and education. That unique relationship stands as a keystone of the band’s profound yet complicated political legacy.
As a Mexican-American artist, De La Rocha saw his own quest for self-discovery reflected in the struggle in Chiapas, often remarking how his interest in the Zapatistas arose from his identity and heritage. Between 1995 and 1996, he visited Chiapas four times, each time living amongst the campesinos (farmers) and immersing himself in the teachings and culture of the movement. In 1996, he organized a trip for students, activists, and artists from East Los Angeles, and returned in 1997 on a scholarly excursion alongside eight other Chican@ artists and academics from his hometown. These trips inspired several songs on Evil Empire, including “People of the Sun,” “Wind Below,” and “Without a Face,” each track expounding on aspects of the exchange the band had initiated between California and Chiapas. Just as the Mexican insurgents shaped the band’s political and musical project, there is no doubt that RATM’s platform elevated the Zapatistas’ name and spread awareness of their values in the United States and beyond.
Very few revolutionary groups have encountered an opportunity to practice self-governance like the one the Zapatistas seized in the late 1990s. During the three-year truce they struck with the Mexican government, they put their transformative vision into action, cultivating autonomy in all sectors of society. Built on a radical commitment to participatory decision-making, they shaped their swath of southeastern Mexico as a land where resources were owned and managed collectively, where children were educated in indigenous languages, and where gender equality stood as a core pillar of social organization. By taking direct action to seize land and sovereignty from what they viewed as an illegitimate capitalist regime, the EZLN embodied in practice the kinds of revolutionary leftist politics RATM both were inspired by and expressed through their art. The spirit and praxis of Zapatismo represented what was possible after the Machine had been dismantled.
Despite the band’s close relationship to the Zapatistas and to Mexico, RATM went almost their entire career without playing shows in Mexico City, the nation’s capital and the largest city in North America. That would change in October 1999, when they organized a benefit concert for the EZLN at Mexico City’s Palacio de Deportes. Their arrival was met with hostility from the Mexican government, lending a clue as to why this would be their first show south of the border. According to the band, the ruling P.R.I. political party represented by President Ernesto Zedillo, warned them that if they made any comments on the “Mexican political situation,” they would be expelled from the country. The Mexican government was especially concerned that they would re-ignite political discourse around the turmoil in Chiapas, where the tenuous truce between the Zapatistas and the state still held. The threat would not be heeded.
Actively seeking to unsettle and challenge the Mexican political establishment, the band went so far as to open a roundtable event the day before the concert with a pre-recorded message from Subcomandante Marcos, the exiled and hidden leader of the EZLN. Marcos used his message to draw a direct connection between his militant vanguard and the band, claiming that any resemblance between RATM’s music and the Zapatistas’ politics was the result of genuine political overlap between the two groups. Marcos stated:
If there are songs from these groups that could easily appear to be communiques, and if there are communiques that could be lines to songs, it is not by virtue of who is writing them, no, it is because they are saying the same thing, they are reflecting the same thing, that underground ‘other,’ which, by being ‘different,’ organizes itself in order to resist, in order to exist.
The show in Mexico City is arguably the band’s most dynamic performance captured on video, with the fervor around their performance of “People of the Sun” serving as a pulsing example of symbiosis between performer and audience. As soon as the opening guitar riff blasted out from the speakers, the Chilango crowd erupted with their loudest and most exuberant cheers of the night. Written as a biographical anthem for the Zapatistas, that night’s performance of “People of the Sun” served as the musical apex of the band’s relationship with their revolutionary collaborators. As RATM electrified thousands in the Mexican capital, leading a moshing frenzy around lyrics built to elevate the Zapatistas’ mission, they also raised monetary support for the EZLN and shouted both groups’ values defiantly in the face of the Mexican government.
The concert’s impact rippled throughout the city. Student protestors from the National Autonomous University of Mexico—who had rallied around RATM lyrics in their contemporaneous demonstrations against cuts in education funding—showed up at the concert to add to the coursing flow of people, protest, and ideas. Months after the show had concluded, the total proceeds of the benefit concert were announced in the local Mexico City news. La Jornada reported that the event had raised 245,472 pesos for the Zapatistas and that dozens of kilos of grain had been donated by fans who had attended the concert and its complementary rallies, forums, and political workshops.
This moment of artistic and political triumph, one that coalesced just months before the end of RATM’s creative tenure, spoke back against years of criticism levied against the band’s values and praxis. Critics often cited that the band limited their political vision to the confines of their name: they stood against a lot of things, but what was their constructive vision for an alternative world? One journalist compared a RATM performance to an “angry grad student rant,” and others cited the hypocrisy of being an anti-capitalist band signed to a deal with a major record label. How could Zack De La Rocha lambast capitalism from a comfortable position of privilege from within the very structure of capital accumulation? According to that critique, even those who practice what the Frankfurt School calls “realistic dissidence” from within the culture industry are ultimately doomed for absorption by the monopolistic, profiteering mass media.
That line of thinking certainly poses real questions about RATM’s political project. Their prolific record sales cannot be waved away as an accidental by-product of their struggle: executives knew from the start that no matter how radical the band’s songs were, their innovative musical style was a recipe for profit. By mainstreaming the anti-establishment message, had they taken away its power—made it available for capture by the Machine itself?
But, as Stuart Hall reminds us, popular culture is not only a vehicle of capitalist hegemony. Rather, it is a theater of popular fantasy and desire, an “arena of consent and resistance,” a terrain of struggle. According to Hall, the culture industry could not be ceded an automatic victory despite its structural advantage. More than just absorption, mass media is also a site of “distortion,” “resistance,” and “negotiation.”
In Hall’s assertion that meaning is negotiated within the sphere of popular culture, we hear echoes of De La Rocha’s hopes of “hijacking” the mainstream—and visions of a theory of power in which there is a degree of agency and potentiality (however delimited) for the underclass. Journalist Ann Powers once described RATM’s work as “culture jamming”: an effort to infiltrate the mechanisms of mass media to satirize and critique that same system. And while this theoretical framework punches back quite effectively against the band’s skeptics, De La Rocha’s relationship with the Zapatistas provides a more comprehensive answer to any questions about the band’s political project.
Culminating in their Mexico City concert, RATM chose constant evolution, a journey on which their politics and values were contoured by their engagement with other thinkers and tempered by first-hand testimonies of anarchism in action. While they began their career as an uncompromising protest act, their involvement in the Chiapas struggle expanded the band’s musical and political horizons exponentially. By forging lasting relationships between the United States and Mexico, between Mexican-Americans and indigenous Mexicans, RATM left behind a legacy beyond their discography. While the songs still transport contemporary listeners to a particular historical moment, the band’s most powerful bequest was their effort to see how comprehensively an anti-capitalist cultural project could be diffused into the mainstream. Their deliberate, lasting bond with political insurgents is a model for future artists seeking to push the boundaries of revolutionary art.
Whether or not their political-artistic model is replicable, even imitable, remains to be seen. Despite a growing leftist resurgence in American youth culture, no mainstream music group has come close to reaching the bar Rage Against The Machine set by putting their radical politics into action. Perhaps the 1990s—those years during which neoliberalism tightened its lasting grip on American politics and culture—were the perfect crucible for the fiery arrival and rapid molding of a singular mainstream, counter-cultural protest act. The ageless resonance and persistent relevance of the band’s politics, however, beg to differ. It seems more likely that the precise conditions under which the next Rage will thrive are yet to fully coalesce. Under the constant pressure of rampant inequality and exacting economic persecution, the circumstances for such an emergence are steeping, fermenting by the day.
Jordan Baldridge is a scholar-in-limbo based in New York City. Originally from Los Angeles, he most recently completed his MA in History at Rutgers-Newark, where his research explored transnational music, the cultural politics of sport, and conflict over the built environment in American cities.
Featured image by Garrett Ziegler via flickr.