“What better place than here? What better time than now?” Rage Against the Machine couldn’t provide a more urgent thesis statement for their third album, The Battle of Los Angeles, which turns 25-years-old on Saturday, November 2nd.
The album depicts the quartet — vocalist Zack de la Rocha, guitarist Tom Morello, bassist Tim Commerford, and drummer Brad Wilk — at their most viscerally immediate and politically decisive. It’s the sound of four punks from Los Angeles attempting to use their seismic platform to unify their audience in anti-colonial rage. Those two central questions from “Guerrilla Radio” weren’t just rhetorical calls to action; they would eventually signify the band’s political relevance for decades to come, especially as their fight against white supremacy and fascism reaches a new desperate peak over 20 years later. Over and over again, Rage Against the Machine prove that the here and now is worth fighting for.
Though Battle was released an entire year before one of the most consequential presidential elections in US history, the stakes were already high for Rage. As they jumped yet another rung of the ladder with their ruthless second album Evil Empire in 1996, the group’s rap-rock fingerprints started to show up on numerous bands du jour: Korn, Limp Bizkit, and Kid Rock each capitalized on elements of their powder keg formula and found mainstream attention in the process.
Rather than the resistance that RATM had used to their advantage in their punk-addled early days, they were no longer on the fringes of popularity or pioneering their own genre — they were front-and-center fixtures of a rock scene bursting with mainstream potential. Hell, they even opened for U2 on their 1997 “PopMart Tour” (a fascinating endeavor that deserves its own retrospective).