1991: Rage Against the Machine, RATM

By Manuel Aragon

“Burn, burn, yes you’re gonna burn” - Zack de la Rocha, “Bombtrack”

Rage is a sacred act; if you care deeply and passionately about people, a place, or an injustice enacted upon those you deeply care about, you’ll feel it, burning within you. It’s spiritual, it’s a righteous response to a world that so desperately wants to silence you, eradicate you, and want you to be small, to be nonexistent. 

Maybe my generation was angry like all generations before us were angry, just waiting for it to spill out and over and into the streets. We’d been born into the era of Reaganomics and the money certainly did not trickle down to our communities. We did not reap any benefits from government budget cuts. Another generation of men joined the military and was sent off to the Gulf to fight their generation’s group of young men who were sent to protect oil fields. 

Something about the lyrics This time the bullet cold rocked ya, yeah / A yellow ribbon instead of a swastika / Nothin' proper about your propaganda / Fools follow rules when the set command ya rang true as we watched the first televised war, cynically seeing our peers root for an unjust victory while trading Desert Storm trading cards on the playground. We’d been told that compliance and complicity would make us more acceptable, that our tickets to whiteness would be insured. 

No band of my generation captured my social discontent quite like Rage Against the Machine. I was transformed by the bass of Tim Commerford colliding with Brad Wilk’s beats, a mashup, and continuation of the musical lineages of beats and bass as Public Enemy. Zach de la Rocha rocked the mic in the tradition of poets, MCs, and generations of freedom fighters that came before him. Rage was formative in my life, my politics, and my community. It shaped the way I wanted to interact with the world and how I could use my voice.

I didn’t always know that, believe that, feel that. Respectability was preached to us and had stripped us of the power to let our anger manifest itself; we’d been called to assimilate by men in suits throughout the hood speaking a gospel of a better life through being calm, quiet, cool, and acceptable. But the group of model minorities learned that no matter how hard you had assimilated, whiteness didn't want anything to do with you. Where could we put that Rage?

Twelve-year-old me didn’t realize this, but we’d internalized all those messages. I’d suppressed a part of me to be acceptable and presentable to a world that was still hostile to me and my peers; there would only be levels of acceptance for us, not a full-on embrace by the white world, no matter how nice or kind we had been. I hadn’t quite learned that yet. 

I had an anger within me, a fire, a rage. A Latino kid in 1993, a world that didn’t give a shit about us, packed in the Northside of Denver, amidst asphalt and factories, the smells of dog food and cookies fighting for our space. The Northside had been a hotbed for the Chicano movement's political activity and a battleground for Latinos and people of color looking to fight the power. But we’d been stripped of that, told a softer, kinder version of our histories. In these conflicting realities, we tried to shape identities and found ourselves a bit directionless; we’d found ourselves splintered, fighters in a fight that had been solved.

Growing up in Denver, the epicenter of the Chicano movement, we were given the tools to be vocal and to change the world. But the elders had moved into positions of power, leaving a whole generation of us still longing for the world to change, those of us with a vision of a better place that was a liberation for all, a vision beyond a cisgender male-dominated Aztlan, a real sense of community rather than the pseudo community that uplifted the voices of those who were only committed to themselves. 

I had already been radicalized, I was waiting to be set free; I’d been silently waiting for Rage Against the Machine. The bass of “Bombtrack” dropped one afternoon during lunch, the date unknown, in my 7th-grade year on the Discman of one of my middle school-aged peers, hypnotic, exciting, Tim Commerford laying down the groove, joined by Tom Morello’s guitar, the drums of Brad Wilk, and when Tom Morello’s guitar exploded, I could feel it unleash something that had been pent up inside of me, waiting to break free.

I wrote down the band's name in a spiral notebook and convinced my grandma to take me to Sam Goody Music at Lakeside Mall to spend my saved-up allowance to buy a CD. I listened to the CD on my own Discman at home, each consecutive song blowing my 12-year-old brain wide open. If there’s one thing you should know about me, I will play an album I deeply love so much that it becomes deeply embedded in my soul.

Zack de la Rocha’s lyrics resonated with me, Some of those who work forces / are the same who burn crosses, the opening of “Killing in the Name Of” spoke to the realities of the Northside and the hostility we felt from the Denver Police Department. My parents and grandparents had lived a lifetime working hard, adhering to the norms of white culture and respectability, had followed the rules of the land, and had very little to show; they’d been overworked, underpaid, and exploited. The same applied to much of our community; the wheels of capitalism had turned and ground them down, leaving them with health issues like cancer, diabetes, and some on the cusp of death. An epiphany, a formative experience, this album would shape my life, my world, and my identity in ways I didn’t quite know yet. 

Rage quickly became the epicenter of my world; a mix of politics, rock guitars, and lyrical deftness over bass and beats. Their songs spurred a political awakening within me, and the videos also expanded my knowledge of events directly connected and those adjacent to my community. The video for “Freedom” shined light on the work of the American Indian Movement and Leonard Peltier’s unjust imprisonment, calling for his release. There were throughlines to the people, the places, the fights that our community was still trying to rectify. 

While the kids my age eventually moved on to other bands, forging new identities, I tightly held onto Rage. The future should be filled with hope and visions of what a society could be. But to achieve that future, you need to be filled with anger, at the injustice of the world, and the hurt of people suffering. You have to be filled with Rage.

I spent my teens and twenties reciting the lyrics to Rage, their debut and Evil Empire on repeat. I also spent that time cultivating a calmer, more palatable version of myself. We showed up, a new generation of us, calm, cool, collected, and educated. This didn’t stop the world from walking over a generation of us who had clung tightly to the rules of a game that wasn’t made for us. I realized as I got older that our voices, our Rage, were needed to bring about change, that the passion, the anger, and the desire to fight injustice head-on was the only way to make change. 

Throughout my thirties, I shook off the rust of respectability that had held me back, and started to use that voice. In the summer of 2022, I took my sons to see Rage Against the Machine in Chicago, a spiritual rite of passage; it was only right that I could pass the rage onto my oldest sons, and show them a way in which I was taught to see and understand the world, and to give voice to the injustices in our community. 

It was a fitting way to celebrate the almost 30th anniversary of Rage Against the Machine's self-titled, first album, Rage Against the Machine. A whole generation ago, and not much has changed: the United States is still a military powerhouse funding and fueling genocides half a world away; police are still enacting violence on communities of color to protect white lives; superpowers are still using the tools of capitalism to oppress, finding new loopholes and corporations to find genocides. While some of the names and places have changed, we still live in a world where Palestine is not free. We live in a world in desperate need of change; we live in a world asking us to tap into our Rage.

Manuel Aragon is a Latinx writer, director, and filmmaker from Denver, CO. He is currently working on a short story collection, Norteñas. Norteñas is a collection of speculative fiction short stories centered in the Northside, a Mexican and Mexican-American-centered part of Denver, and the people, ghosts, and demons that live there.

His work has appeared in ANMLY and Barrelhouse. His short story, "A Violent Noise," was nominated for the 2020 PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. He is a 2021 Periplus Collective Fellow, a 2021 NYFA IAP Mentor, and a 2023 Tin House Residency winner. He is also a Colorado Book Award finalist as editor of the anthology, All The Lives We Ever Lived: Vol 2. 

Follow him on Twitter, Instagram, or Threads: @spacejunc