Down Rodeo: Rage Against the Machine’s Evil Empire Turns 30

Hey, have things Rage Against the Machine raged against the machine about improved in 30 years?

Let’s check on how they’re going. …jesus fucking Christ, right? In defense of those of us who’ve failed Rage and the American left, it’s mostly happenstance that they themselves have aged so well. They’re all-male, militant, humorless, they traffic in the ultimate macho rock-caricature music (rap-rock), they couldn’t keep an active creative agreement going for longer than three albums of original material and one of pointed covers. Their audience during their ‘90s heyday included more kids excited to don shirts with those provocative images like the “nuns with guns” classic than geopolitics majors. They’re generally assumed to be the class of the rap-rock set even compared to the fun-loving Beastie Boys (who had to course-correct early on to ditch their frat appeal).

And yet these are still some bros whose rhetoric is mostly contained within “fuck you / I won’t do what you tell me” and usually, variations of the same brass-knuckle F# chords their heroes Gang of Four pumped on “What We All Want.” There are aspects of RATM that sometimes feel like they’re clearing a very low bar for mainstream radio rock to impress, but they’re mostly one of the great rock success stories. I mean, they’re the most commercially successful leftists to ever happen in Western pop, no? (What a paradox to consider.) That’s good for something even without Tom Morello’s heroic innovations on his axe. The militance is good for something, too: RATM proudly proclaims in all their album booklets that every sound is made by voice, guitar, bass, and drums.

Walling themselves into those parameters forces a different kind of creativity from the boundless, anything-goes studio layering of the Beasties or Public Enemy, Rage’s two closest analogues more than any other rock outfit. Zack De La Rocha doesn’t sing, just chants and raps in a clipped growl familiar to fans of medium-spicy DMV hardcore from Minor Threat to Turnstile. Brad Wilk and Tim Commerford are as funky a rhythm unit as this equation requires but not an inch more. Sometimes less. Not on Evil Empire, though, the middle child of Rage’s legacy, which is their most abrasive, mold-breaking, and best album almost in spite of itself. It feels less like a grand statement than their self-titled debut or The Battle of Los Angeles where every title had an ad copy feel: “Voice of the Voiceless,” “War Within a Breath,” “Calm Like a Bomb.” Not bad tracks. Just really risking familiarity and formula.

Rage’s sophomore album was their first No. 1 record after four years of simmering beneath the popularity of grunge and it contains their biggest hit, “Bulls on Parade.” But Evil Empire is a tad more abstract, a little Fugazi. “Revolver” might as well be these testosterone merchants’ “Suggestion,” a rare acknowledgment of how testosterone culture fails women: “don’t mothers make good fathers?” is one of De La Rocha’s angriest choruses. Even rings personal — good. This band needs it. “Tire Me,” one of their only true punk songs, lives up to their name, too, with De La Rocha announcing between spit-takes that he’d like to be Jackie O. The way Tom Morello hyperpicks “Without a Face” or flirts with Guy Piccioto ghost notes on “Tire Me” has a lot more to do with Fugazi’s Repeater than Limp Bizkit. The ear-bleeding screech of Morello’s settings on “Year of Tha Boomerang” flirt with downright Sonic Youth. With a couple early exceptions (“they rally round the family with a pocket full of shells,” “fear is your only god”), Evil Empire managed to capture the zeitgeist of this band via high-octane noise rather than the right slogan at the right time. The inside photo of tomes from The Anarchist Cookbook to Marx’s Capital, Volume I gave their adolescent fanbase a summer reading list if they really wanted to dig below a very surface-y surface.

Their auspicious debut leaned too vaguely on those platitudes. “Some of those that work forces are the same that burn crosses” might come from a classic song, but “work forces” is a flimsy name for cops from revolutionaries. Did “bosses” not work somehow? Elvis Costello already have dibs on “armed forces?” “Fuck you / I won’t do they tell me” is better, though at this point it can be misadopted by anti-vaxxers. So there’s a ceiling to how great an album with Maynard James Keenan — a guy who recently denounced the extreme right, left, and center — on the highlight can be, even if “Know Your Enemy” is one of the most dazzling pyrotechnic displays of chops the ‘90s ever saw. On Evil Empire, the close-miked production was a brick to the listener’s head, letting Commerford’s bass especially pop and weave through the environment at his most agile on a talky opener like “People of the Sun.” I’d love to hear the P.E. squeals of “Bullet in the Head” recorded this way. This is the album where the harmolodic dysfunction of the Bomb Squad meets Dischord Records’ discord.

Tom Morello is truly the axis on which this band spins, everything complacent and novel about them at once. His solos and previously-unheard sounds belong in any rock pantheon, daredevil dealings with his Whammy pedal and killswitch and pickup witchcraft no one before or since has ever taken such colorful advantage of. The solos from “Know Your Enemy” and “Wake Up” sounded more like a guitar being remixed by a clever DJ on the debut, and “Bulls on Parade” stunted even harder by turning the instrument itself into a turntable-miming scratchpad. It would be great to hear more of this or when he mimicked a harmonica on “Guerilla Radio” or unplugged the cable entirely to tap it along the body for the sparks-flying squeals of “Testify.” I’m grateful for these moments, I swear. But I listed close to all of them in this paragraph. Meanwhile there’s a truckload of those samey F# riffs from one Rage song to another, from their opening salvo “Bombtrack” to the rest of “Guerrilla Radio” (which at least got “What We All Want” on the radio, kind of).

 

VIDEO: Rage Against the Machine “Bulls on Parade”

So if Morello should show off more, Evil Empire is as close as he gets, with the spring-loaded release of “People of the Sun” and “Vietnow” intensifying in their choruses, or the dexterous blare of “Roll Right,” or the different flavors of tonal character juggled on “Year of tha Boomerang.” Less Zeppelin-worship readymades here, more playful constructions like “Down Rodeo” that help you see where At the Drive-In’s Relationship of Command originated from. As for the lyrics, Zack doesn’t really miss, but he rarely scores a slam dunk that upstages the grooves. Let’s face it, this isn’t a band where you’ll hear a song and go, “oh, this is obviously about the Zapatistas’ revolution.” That stuff is all quite dependent on the context of how they marketed themselves, the images they projected behind them performing onstage. They’re a little more useful than the musical equivalent of a Che Guevara T-shirt, but just a little. Almost never singing about women insulates them from a worse reputation in 2026. But that sentence also reads like a problem. They never whined, you can say that much for rap-rock’s premier stalwarts.

For better and worse, they earned their Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction, too, which of course only 25% of them showed up for. And more bulls are on parade than ever, not necessarily for a unit like this to solve. Getting a dope song out of it was their mission accomplished.