A musician's or artist's responsibility is a simple one, and that is, through your music to tell the truth
music
And I think that on this record, we've accomplished the mission we set out at the beginning of the first rehearsals. And that was, not to just make the best Rage Against the Machine record, but to make the best Rage record by a wide margin. We've made the heaviest record to date and it's our funkiest record to date.
Music is not some stuffy college lecture, ... On a good day, Rage Against the Machine is not able to just rock you like a hurricane, but also to fuel the engine with indignation and the band's activist convictions.
We've been able to have our cake and eat it, too. Every song, every T-shirt, is absolutely a pure expression of what we want to do. And it connects.
The video tells a very simple story and a very real story. It's a story of a woman who loses her husband and a child who loses his father. That's the simple story. The bigger picture is that the culture of violence at home breeds a culture of violence abroad, and there's a price to be paid for that. And that price is the loss of lives and families destroyed and to sum that up in a three-and-a-half-minute video is something that was pretty incredible.
[On the first tour] we wanted to make our own music without using our old bands, mixing the past with our present, ... Now we are drawing on 10, 11, 12 records, which is amazing. It doesn't sound weird, it doesn't sound bad. It just fucking rocks.
It was a terrible natural disaster but an even greater human catastrophe.
We offer a stark contrast to the bland escapism that chokes the charts
We were all against the war from the very beginning, ... But now, I think you're seeing more and more that Middle America is turning against the war for reasons that are described in this video. The real human cost, the human tally of this awful war is shown in a very subtle, very real and very humanistic way. That's why it has such a great weight to it, because it personalizes this tragedy that's happening halfway around the world.
It's not like we just changed a rapper for a singer, ... We happen to have one of the greatest rock singers of all time.
I didn't grow up with my Kenyan family. I grew up in a small, conservative suburb of Chicago.
family
My parents met in Kenya. My father is African, is Kenyan. The Kenyan side of my family was involved in the anti-colonial movement.
The real estate agent had to go door-to-door in the apartment building we wanted to rent, asking if it was OK for this interracial family - my mom is white and I was a 1-year-old half-African kid - to live in the apartment building.
doorfamilymom
I came late to the genre of folk music.
I was a fan of heavy music - first metal, then punk, then hip hop.