Randy Against The Machine
It’s no secret that we live in politically volatile times.
Rampant division. Runaway misinformation. A flood of hyperbole and misunderstanding.
It’s good for ratings. A godsend for engagement. Keeps us glued to our devices, our social media. Politicians on both sides of the aisle seem to bathe in it, savor it, stoke it, feed on it. If religion is the opiate of the masses, then outrage might very well be the cocaine.
I’ve taken the bait more than my share. You may have, too.
The morning after last fall’s election, I needed some quick-acting angst to match my mood. Some over-the-counter fury. A potent dose of flaming indignation.
So, being a white man in his 40s, I turned to the ferocious, fiery political agitators1 of my era: Rage Against The Machine.
“Hey Siri, play Evil Empire by Rage Against The Machine.”
Siri and I kicked the day off with Evil Empire2’s Track 1 “People of the Sun.” It delivered plenty of testosterone-y rage but—with its subject matter hitting on the Zapatista movement and the original inhabitants of Mexico—wasn’t as connected to current American politics as was Track 2 on the same album, “Bulls On Parade”, the chorus of which questions the hypocrisy of saying you’re pro-life/pro-family while also being pro-guns/pro-war. Fury rose. I hit high gear3, my blood sufficiently pumping.
I moved on, seeking additional fuel for the fire.
“Hey Siri, play ‘Testify’ by Rage Against The Machine.”
She did, blasting out a call to arms to stand up to the injustices happening right under our noses. This was a good song for that moment in time, honestly, because it’s a more productive, why-don’t-you-do-something-about-it song. A song of action. Not just angry; motivated. Then Siri and I skipped to Track 5 of the same album, the incendiary “Sleep Now In The Fire.” At that point, I was just a well-pointed radar gun away from getting a speeding ticket, with all those feelings coursing through my foot and weighing heavily into the gas pedal.
One thing stood out on this particular listen through “Sleep Now In The Fire” that I’d kinda missed in previous listens, when I’d just been focusing on the furious feeling and not the furious meaning. It dawned on me that the point of view in the lyrics was not that of frontman/lyricist Zach de la Rocha. Or anyone in the band, for that matter.
No, the lyrics are from the point of view of the powers-that-be, giving voice to the worst of (in this case American) imperialism, colonialism, interventionism, and greed. Rather than protest and rail on the institutions (government, military, religion, capitalism) with a flaming righteous pointed finger, on this song, singer Zach de la Rocha adopts the persona of those institutions, sings from their point of view to get his own point across.
The world is my expense / the cost of my desire / Jesus blessed me with its future / And I protect it with fire
I am the Nina, the Pinta, the Santa Maria / the noose and the rapist / the fields’ overseer / the agents of orange, the priests of Hiroshima / the cost of my desire / sleep now in the fire
It’s powerful, vivid language. Compelling. It infuriates. By adopting a different narrator, the song accomplishes more than indignant name-calling4 would. You see the whole story through a different lens And that aspect reminded me of another songwriter I love:
Randy Newman.
“Randy Newman?” you scoff. “The guy who wrote all those songs5 for the kids’ movies?”
Or
"You’re pairing Rage Against The Machine with….Randy Newman?” you wince. “The guy who wrote ‘Short People’?”
Yes. And “Short People” is actually a perfect entrance to the point I’m trying to make. Here are a few snippets of the lyrics.
They got little hands / And little eyes
And they walk around / Tellin' great big lies
They got little noses / And tiny little teeth
They wear platform shoes / On their nasty little feet
I don’t want no short people ‘round here.
They got little baby legs / And they stand so low /
You got to pick 'em up / Just to say hello
They got little cars / That got beep, beep, beep
They got little voices / Goin' peep, peep, peep
They got grubby little fingers /And dirty little minds
They're gonna get you every time
You would think the absurdity of it—being fundamentally opposed to people based on their height—would stand out immediately. And, for some people, that’s true; they get the satire of it all. But other people don’t. In fact, a lot of people got really quite upset by this song. Like, REALLY QUITE upset. One politician in Maryland6 tried to make it illegal to play “Short People” on the radio in his home state. The non-profit Little People of America released a statement condemning the song, calling it “crass.” Some loon in Memphis phoned in a death threat if Newman played the song during his tour through town7.
It should be pretty obvious that the song is using irony and an unreliable narrator—crazy, not to be believed—to make a point about bigotry and prejudice. Notice how he starts with pointing out physical differences then segues quickly into fear- and hate-driven stuff—nasty little feet, dirty little minds, gonna get you every time. The idea is that the ridiculousness tips you off and maybe gets you thinking about the ridiculousness of other forms of bigotry and prejudice.
“That’s so stupid. Why would anyone talk that way? Why would anyone judge someone based on their….height?”
Exactly!
So back to Randy and Rage Against The Machine.
Rage Against The Machine’s “Sleep Now In The Fire” with its unreliable imperialist colonialist narrator is essentially just a music-tonally-fits-the-topic version of many Newman tunes. Sure, it’s got distortion and yell-rapping and Tom Morello’s guitar hijinks and ultra-high-octane angst. But is it really saying anything all that different from, say, the title track of Newman’s 1972 album Sail Away?
”Sail Away” presents a version of the American Dream in the form of ample food, no scuffed-up feet, singing about Jesus8, drinking wine all day. “It’s great to be an American,” this narrator announces.
But it’s all coming out of the mouth of a slick pitchman, a slave trader actually, trying to fill his ship with Africans in the slave-running days. Turns out “it’s great to be an American” might be true, but not for these people about to be enslaved. Randy’s character says “it’s great to be an American” while Rage’s says, “the world is my expense.” Two paths to the same place.
Then you really see the racism and colonialism come out as the pitchman drops a stereotypical racist trope about watermelon and as he tries to seem like he understand Africa and Africans, jabbering on about lions and mamba snakes and an animal that doesn’t even live in Africa (tigers). His mask falls a little more when, in the chorus, he addresses his African audience with derogatory slurs (little wog, monkey).
And, if you’re like me, you start to feel gross inside. Uncomfortable9. You’re not so sure you wanna keep talking to this guy, spending time with him. And such is the secret weapon of protest songs written—whether they’re Randy Newman or Rage Against the Machine— from the point of view of the oppressor. They make you wear the clothes for a minute.
If you can grapple with the n-word, Newman’s 1974 song “Rednecks” is a powerful anti-racism song that really gets down into the voice of the oppressor. The craftiest trick, though, is that the song doesn’t just fire off cheap shots at the South (though he does take some potshots in the first couple verses); it also drags the Northerners, looking down their noses at the South and pretending that they’ve moved past racism. Newman pulls no punches in the latter verses—”free to be put in cage in Harlem in New York City…free to be put in a cage in East St. Louis”—when it comes to the black ghettos created in the “enlightened” big cities10, via a combination of discriminatory policies like redlining and racial covenants/zoning as well as just flat-out violence and intimidation. It works because Newman doesn’t let anyone off the hook—not the South, not the North, not himself.
Got sidetracked there, trying to make the point of “songs from the POV of the oppressor.” Let’s go back to “Sail Away.”
One strong piece of evidence of the power of “Sail Away” is that some of the greatest black artists11 of all time cover it—Ray Charles, Gladys Knight, Etta James, Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee, among others. They get it. They feel it. Randy nailed it or they wouldn’t go near it.
It was never a hit. It didn’t even sniff the charts. It doesn’t have the modern-standard ubiquity of covers of The Beatles’ “Yesterday” or even a less-complicated, widely-covered protest song like Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ In The Wind.” Still, “Sail Away” sunk in enough that some of the greatest black singers EVER wanted in on it.
They didn’t cover “Short People”, did they?
Or at least the most commercially viable ones. I’m sure there are some punk bands—Bikini Kill or Bad Religion, for instance—or hip hop—Public Enemy, Ice-T, NWA—from the 90s who were far more aggressive and angry and political, but I wasn’t listening to them. And Radiohead was still about one album away from their Political Era.
Their 1996 sophomore album.
I have gotten a ticket this way once before. A music-induced speeding violation. I was driving home from a Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers concert when my phone rang and my two friends Amy & Kristin were on speaker, excited and asking me why I hadn’t picked up my phone for the last hour.
”I was in a concert. I didn’t even hear it.” (Honestly, though, in my history of mobile phones, I have very rarely NOT had my phone on silent.)
”We’re going to NEW YORK!” they shouted into their phone.
”What?”
”We all got in! We’re all going!”
We had all applied for BYU’s New York internship program, in which BYU places advertising students with different big-name ad agencies throughout Manhattan. The advertising program was interesting in that you made friends with the people in your cohort but were also kind of perpetually in competition with them. It seemed unlikely that ALL of us would be selected. But there we were.
”NO WAY!”
We hung up. Already buzzing from the Tom Petty show, I had an extra shot of adrenaline now and found myself racing along I-215 to “Running’ Down A Dream”, not even thinking about the speed. “I had the pedal down,” like Tom sings, “ I was flying.”
And then the sirens.
I’ve written about it before, but the worst protest song I ever heard came from John Mellencamp (whose music I actually like and whose album Human Wheels I consider an underrated gem) during the George W Bush years. It was like a dumb pep rally song written in haste about your rival to amuse a bunch of high schoolers. Low hanging fruit. Sophomoric insults. Name-calling.
”Whoa-oh, the Texas Bandits” was the chorus. And it was, as the kids say, CRINGE. You know a protest song is bad when you agree with it and it still turns you all the way off.
Here’s Newman’s top 10 most-streamed songs on Spotify. Eight of the top 10 are from the Toy Story series, Monsters Inc, and Cars.
The guy is a wildly successful soundtrack composer, absolutely. He’s made all kinds of movies better, from all the Pixar movies to stuff like The Natural (if you like that movie, you can hear the score when the stadium lights burst in your head right now) and Awakenings and Marriage Story. But it’s not his only skill. Not even close.
I already wrote a bit about this when I released my cover of Newman’s “Every Time It Rains”:
Newman still played it and lived to tell the tale.
See also: Rage Against The Machine’s “Jesus blessed with (the world’s) future” in which the unreliable narrator uses Christianity as a justification, as a shield and a sword at the same time.
In an interview, Randy once said, “One thing with my music, you can’t sit and eat potato chips and have it on in the background at a party.”
today they’re referred to angstfully as “the coastal elites”
(You can also hear several great white artists cover it, like Linda Rondstadt or Harry Nilsson, not to mention Bobby Darin’s cover which, as Newman remarked, “he did it like it was a happy song about coming to America” and may have missed the point entirely.)