Rage, Rage

I think Nick is right about "Killing in the Name," which I don't think I've heard since I played it by request at a dance at nerd camp and all the little nerdling boys went spazzy-crazy on the coffeeshop dancefloor. So I found it and listened to it and yeah, it's a really great song. When we all first heard it, the thing works so well that it's easy to miss the multiple leaps of faith that make it work, and given Rage's current (or, I guess, pre-Coachella) critical reputation--and by "critical" here I don't mean "just critics" but, like, everybody everywhere--it's easy to revisionistly see the particulars of those leaps/moves as odious, overdone, played-out. Crass. Distasteful. Cheesy. Embarassing. My my my, once bitten, you know.

Hearing it fresh, though, it's a shock to the system, because it's an inventively and masterfully constructed rock song. The structure can be found in other songs but none of those are mosh anthems, as it's like one of those giant pirate ship rides that, at the peak of its second swing, busts a bearing and goes tumbling down a hill, only to find a vacant pirate-swing-ride-chassis at the bottom and latch onto that. A straight intro goes into a syncopated hook, then back into a syncopated version of the intro (the pirate ship gets going), then a straight verse that busts into a chorus and that great "now you do what they told you" stomp-swing that itself busts into a louder, wider part. And then back to the straight verse, repeating the whole process, which can be either seen as verse-chorus-bridge1-bridge2 or just one long build that suddenly resets itself and goes entirely back to the beginning. What it's all building to, of course, is the big bust-out section with the screamy swear words[1], a moment rivaled in its awesomeness in the 90s maybe only by "March of the Pigs," which does its own interesting series of moves that we won't get into now.[2] And then it happens, and then there's that syncopated intro again, just once, and we're out.

It's a hell of a structure, and worth noting, because that repetition, despite being more or less identical to the first runthrough, is so unexpected that it doesn't register as repetition. There've been too many shifts by that point for it to come across as just a end-of-chorus-back-to-verse change, and there's no real dynamic indication at the end of that first repetition that it's going to drop off in volume/intensity, and when it does, it happens instintaneously, almost like an edit (which maybe it was). So that surprise functions as a further tension-builder, the novelty of the structure working as a disruption and, even though it turns out things are going to proceed as before, you're not expecting it to do so, as you would be in a normal verse-chorus-verse structure. There's a dropoff in energy, but not necessarily in tension, with that disruption allowing it to build far further than it would have with just the one repetition, so when the crest hits, it hits really hard, and it's one of the most cathartic releases, as I say, in all of the 90s canon, one filled with nothing if not cathartic releases.

All in all, the structure is far less that of a rock song than it is of a dance track. There's no key shifts and no change in the melody, but there is a lot of changes in texture: whether the guitar's muted or not, how open the hi-hat is, whether there's a crash going, how high the pitch is, etc. The whole thing centers not around the development of a melody or the delivery of a lyric, but the building and release of tension, which it does very effectively, and though screaming "FUCK YOU I WON'T DO WHAT YOU TELL ME" is not as subtle as it could be, it is an effective and wholly accurate translation into language of the musical vocabulary being used at the high point of a DJ set. Which is why, as Nick says, the remix is kinda stupid: it leaves out the best part, and the part that's most dancey! Presumably because it's too embarassing/cheesy/tasteless.

(Of course, from an abstract point of view, the best part of the song is right before the FU section, where they go all Sonic Youth and build tension via free-jazz, or at least free-jazz drums, as everything else is keeping the voice while the drums flail around until they hit the beat hard right before they come back in again full. Awesome!)

This is all especially interesting in light of this Esquire article. If you don't want to click through, it sarcastically congratulates Zach delarocha for not releasing music while Bush was President, which the writer thinks is hypocritical because Rage / Zach were/are "political." Certainly the course RATM took as a band was disappointing, but it's interesting that the writer (Jason Notte, in case he's auto-googling--I see I'm about to join his alma mater) identifies exactly the opposite of why that's so. He complains that '"fuck you, I won't do what you tell me!" has become the mantra of suburban teens who don't want to do homework or leave the mall early.' Thing is, that's exactly what the damn words were always destined to mean, how they were received, and how they work best. As political speech it's fucking worthless, but as teenage enhancement--as rocking (see footnote 4 here) it's the best shit ever. The problem with RATM and Zach is that they took themselves far too seriously. What difference would it have made for good ol' Zach to be yelling about imperialism publicly for the last 6 years? It's not like other people weren't (despite what people would like to retroactively think) and it's not like it would've mattered much anyway. The political stuff was what made Rage, tragically, respectable, at least in the most obvious way, whereas their actual respect derived from their music, and their ability to fuse a bunch of different ideas and sounds in potent ways.

This all raises the question: what if Zach DLR had, instead of taking himself seriously as an ersatz radical gifted by minority birth with unflaggable lefty cred, developed the skill he shows in "Killing in the Name," where he uses his voice not as a vehicle for championing obvious causes, but to shape and enhance the musical arc of a song? What if Rage's ability to construct a song had been emphasized? Well, problem is, that happened. It's called Audioslave and it sucked. So that's that question answered, more or less. So this suggests, at least to me, that maybe we just have to accept that Rage was a band with fantastic but limited ideas, and if that first album (and parts of the second, maybe) are so much better than the rest of their various output, it's not because their course could have been different-better, but because that was the best they could do, and they did it. Maybe one of the problems with the 90s--or, maybe, with rock--is that it did encourage people to develop as artists, even when that was a bad thing for them to do. Or maybe Zach de la Rocha is just a twat. Either way.

[1] Yay!
[2] Skipped beats as thrash!

Labels: aesthetics, blogtalk, pop, ratm, rock, value added

posted by Mike B. @ 5:11 AM 2 Comments