An Homage to my Favourite Musical Act

The year 1999 AD was a significant year of my life for quite a few reasons. Among them, two reasons stand out for having left a lasting impression on my mind.

The first reason: it was the year the movie The Matrix was released, which is considered to be among the best science fiction films of all time. The movie inspired change in my long-held perceptions on life, movies, technology, philosophy, computers, religion, and almost everything in between.

The second reason was introduced to me by the soundtrack of the same movie, the first song I ever listened to by the band Rage Against The Machine. Out of all the songs on the soundtrack album, the song Wake Up stood out to me. I confess that I didn’t completely understand the lyrical significance of the song back then. But the music and the performance and some of the lyrics that I could pick up had me spellbound on the first listen.

I then started to look for other music from the band. I got all the albums that had been released by them till then and got to listening to all of them. It was the first time I had listened to music like theirs. I was amazed, impressed, shocked and moved by their lyrics and music. But above all, I was a changed person.

Listening to their songs, I began to realize that all the songs in their albums had something in common. Their songs were about the common folk everywhere who were forgotton by the one’s they had selected to govern them, once the elections were over. They sang about the problems and hardships the common people had to face everyday due to their governments neglecting them, and only caring about riches and power. They talked about the need for the common man to stand up to authority to get themselves heard, to demand for their rights and to hold the elected officials accountable. The lyrics urged the downtrodden to unite and rise up to fight for their rights if necessary. Their songs also talked about the different problems in society like racism, discrimination, poverty, etc. Although they were singing about the problems in the United States and the Americas, I realized that the songs applied to problems in the place I was from as well.

Everything I wasn’t aware of till then, because of my apathy, started becoming visible to me. It was like their music had introduced me to a world I hadn’t cared to look for and which was right in front of me the whole time. It was the world I had been living in, but for some reason I wasn’t aware of. It did take me some time to get the meaning of all their songs. But when I did, I wasn’t the person I was before I first listened to their song.

I have watched the recordings of the band’s live performances and I can feel the energy of the crowds reacting to thier music just by watching the videos. I’ve wanted to watch them live once in my life. But the band broke up in the autumn of 2000. The band memebers went their own separate ways after the break-up. They starting making their own music. But I couldn’t connect to the new music they were making. It did not impact me in the way the music they had created as a unit had.

After nearly two decades of the break-up, the band got back together in the autumn of 2019. My hopes of watching them live in concert have come back again. They’ll be performing live shows together and maybe work on another album. I have continued to follow their journey since the time I first listened to their song and I believe that in these uncertain times everywhere, we need a band like Rage Against The Machine to inspire us and nudge us forward to create our own futures ourselves.