A true anomaly in the music business, Rage Against the Machine has achieved multiplatinum success while building a rabid fanbase, all without serious radio play or heavy rotation on MTV. Why? "You have to be obedient in many different ways in order to get your music played on the radio, in order to get your videos played on TV," said guitarist Tom Morello. "And one of those ways is the language." When Morello speaks of language, though, it's more than the "fuck you, I won't do what you tell me" chorus of "Killing in the Name Of," from the band's self-titled 1992 debut. The band, who fuse liberal politics and a bombastic rap/rock attack into a sonic maelstrom of Morello's otherworldly guitar riffs and singer Zack de la Rocha's impassioned vocals, has developed a reputation as one of America's most galvanizing live performers, both musically and poltically (they've taken strong stances on a number of human rights and workers' rights issues). In a wide- ranging interview -- ostensibly about the band's first-ever video compilation, Rage Against the Machine, which compiles rare live performance footage, uncensored versions of the band's videos, a bonus CD of their cover of Bruce Springsteen's "The Ghost of Tom Joad," and a previously-unavailable spoken word poem from singer Zack de la Rocha -- Morello touches on the power of seeing 100,000 fans shake the earth during a Rage set, his guitar technique, censorship, sampling, and the intelligence of rock audiences. Also, for the first time he speaks frankly about what really happened on the (half) aborted Rage-Wu-Tang Clan summer tour.

ATN: Without sounding too Barbara Walters, why the video, why now?

Tom Morello: Well, I think that it's actually long overdue. We've had vaults filled with great live footage and it's only taken us five and a half years to release it.

ATN: It only took four years to release your second record, so this is right on time.

Morello: Exactly. Of all the many things that bands do, what we do best is play live. And these are some of our best live shows ever. It also gives us the opportunity to release uncensored versions of our five videos, several of which have never been played in the United States at all, in any form -- like "Killing in the Name Of," which is from our club days, and [others] which, due to language content, have never been seen in this country. And lastly, but not least, is the opportunity to release the one new studio-recorded song we've got, "The Ghost of Tom Joad," which is sort of a freebie thrown in for the video. We played it on the U2 tour, played it all summer long and, rather than waiting for the next record for that, we wanted to get it out now.

ATN: Why that particular Bruce Springsteen song? What's the significance?

Morello: When I got that record and first put it on, it was the most compelling since Jane's Addiction's Nothing's Shocking. The lyrical message of that song of redemption through struggle fits very comfortably with the Rage Against the Machine catalog. We gave it a brand new musical base. It's been sort of a staple of our set, and I'm sure will continue to be. It's something we're really proud of.

ATN: Your version adds a heavier edge to that song. Have you gotten any feedback from Springsteen's camp?

Morello: Yeah, I actually heard through his manager that he loved it. We had to get his approval to release it and all, and he got back to us in, like, 20 minutes and said, yeah, it's great.

ATN: Had he heard you playing it?

Morello: No, we sent him a cassette of the studio version of it.

ATN: You talked about getting these uncensored videos out. Why do you think this band, well known for a lot of strong messages both musically and lyrically, has had such difficulty getting some of these videos played? Aside from language.

Morello: Aside from language, I wouldn't use that as an aside. I think it's an important part of the screening process for artists. You have to be obedient in many different ways in order to get your music played on the radio, in order to get your videos played on TV. And one of those ways is the language. You know bands that tend to unapologetically use strong language are excluded from the mainstream. Often, or occasionally, those bands have a subversive political message as well, which is then also excluded from the mainstream. I think that the language is very important. The political content is also kind of key, and in the case of like the "People of the Sun" video ... There was footage from an old Eisenstein film in Mexico, and Zapatista footage which Viacom, the company which owns MTV, just found objectionable.

ATN: Did they ever tell you why?

Morello: Well, they give you a list -- you send them the video and they give you a list back with 60 different things that they find objectionable. Not to sound like too much of a conspiracy theorist, I think they don't like the politics of the band and they look for excuses to not play the video.

ATN: But let's suppose -- in this case it's true -- that it's a band as hugely popular as Rage. Don't they sometimes make exceptions?

Morello: Well, yeah, obviously. For example, [an exception was] the Leonard Peltier video, "Freedom," which is a six-and-a-half minute long song with no chorus that they just had to play. There was no denying that this was a band their viewers wanted to see. And so, even though it was probably not the video of their choosing, it was one that they put in heavy rotation nonetheless. Buzz [Bin] or whatever it's called.

ATN: Some of the live scenes in this video -- specifically some of the festival scenes -- are amazing. You look, and there are 100,000 people jumping up and down. How did it feel when you played some of those shows? What's it like to look out and see that kind of response?

Morello: [There were amazing scenes from] the Holland show, the ones of "Freedom" and "Killing in the Name Of" from the Pink Pop festival. The lead story from theHolland Daily News the next day was that the crowd, during our set, literally registered on the Richter scale at 1.1. [There was] a little graph and the time frames. Like, Rage's set starts and then it kinda spikes up. It was pretty amazing.

ATN: How does it feel to have created a force of nature? For that three minutes you were literally a force of nature.

Morello: I never looked at it that way but I guess that's ... It was very interesting for us. It was almost surreal because at that time, when we played that concert, I don't think we had sold, you know, like 50,000 records in the United States. So there were more people jumping up and down on a field in Holland during "Killing in the Name" than even knew about the band in the United States. We were living the clich�. We're bigger in Europe! We're huge in Holland! I think this video proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that this is a band that can communicate to an audience in a pretty large venue, [and that can create the] kind of intimacy that some bands can approximate only in a smaller setting. That's something we felt from the first. We certainly didn't know that it was going to be the case, but the first time we played the Reading Festival we got a clue, just a feel. All day long they had these big rock stars, superstar bands, you know and we went on and the field just exploded. And so with the videos that we've been able to share with our friends, we're like: 'Check this out!' I mean, at the time we were doing, you know, club tours out here.

ATN: For a band that wasn't that huge in the U.S., that must have been pretty amazing.

Morello: Like I said, it was surreal. You know, you come home to much humbler shows. And, like, we'd be saying, 'I swear to you, man.'

ATN: The video really drives home how, from day one, this band has merged politics and music. Do you think you have been successful in communicating to your audience these topics you're concerned with? Can you tell if the audience has picked up on the different topics you've brought up, both lyrically and in the album booklets?

Morello: I think that rock audiences are not given the credit they deserve when it comes to how smart they are. The impressions that are given to the country at large are always filtered through a rock journalist or something, who may have an agenda, an elitist agenda. But anyways, I think the proof is in the pudding. Some people get the message, some people don't get the message. Talk to the people at the United Garment Workers Union and the Leonard Peltier Defense Committee and the Solidarity Network. Their ranks have swelled by the thousands because we've been able to facilitate getting news or information about these very righteous causes into the hands of people who care and are smart enough to act.

ATN: Have you met fans who have told you that?

Morello: Oh yeah, yeah. At every show. You know, bags, baskets full of mail. Yeah and there's obviously some people that come to us because they like the rock, capital R-O-C-K. And there's nothing wrong with that. It's not some sort of, Noam Chomsky lecture -- a Noam Chomsky lecture doesn't register on the Richter scale.

ATN: But what's more important to you, though? Is it more important to you to ...

Morello: I think they're inseparable. I chose the guitar because I love the visceral feeling of playing rock music. With that as a vocation, you try your best to find likeminded souls and to be able to explore the political side, you know, the revolutionary side of your outlook. We're very lucky.

ATN: Is the band going to continue to mix both the message and the music? Is there a long-term goal to keep using this as a forum to get some of the information about causes you've learned about out to audiences?

Morello: I'm not sure that it's, well ... Using it as a forum sounds a little too calculated. It's when you're sort of true to yourself, when you're expressing what you feel -- whether it's Zack and his lyrics, or us through our work, or me in an interview or something -- it doesn't feel like it's calculated like that. I've been very fortunate to sell a lot of records and to be able to play concerts for many people, but ultimately the band�s success is not measured by that. It's measured by the concrete impact we can have on an activist level. For example, this holiday season we've got two things going on. One is we've got a home video out. Great, enjoy. The other thing is that we're trying to get people to not buy Guess? products. We're against it because they use sweatshop labor in Calcutta or whatever, and in the United States -- in Los Angeles, New York City, and the Bay Area. They have, like, slave labor conditions. And they're counting on the people that are reading this not to care. And they think that fashion is more important and whatever, and so that brutal exploitation of those workers isn't going to matter to them. We're betting that they're wrong.

ATN: You talk about these corporations and exploitation, but on a slightly different note, how do you react to these Senate hearings on violent lyrics and to the city council effort to try and stop that free Metallica show? And, of course, there's always the Manson stuff that's going on. What's happening, it seems, is that there are so many more people, high profile people, that want to shut down rock and hip-hop.

Morello: That means that it's threatening. In a way, I think we should be worried if, you know, the C. Delores Tuckers [Tucker is a conservative pundit who has spoken out frequently in opposition to gangsta rap. - ed.] and the William Bennetts were content with the music being made. That would mean that artists were not pushing the envelope, and not pushing their buttons.

ATN: But do you think that this is the most high profile it's been in a long time, maybe since the fifties?

Morello: Well, it comes in waves. It's obviously the most since the heyday of the PMRC (Parents Music Resource Center) hearings. Normally, the kinds of music that are always attacked are black music, hip-hop, hard rock, and, like, working class white music, like heavy metal or whatever. Because those things, I think not coincidentally, speak to the American underclass. And some, obviously your Metallica songs, don't have an anti-sweatshop message. Still, there's something in the form that they find threatening -- maybe the way in which young people express their independence. They don't like extreme music and they want to shut that down. And they want you to be obedient and they want you to not veer from the mainstream.

ATN: Do you ever feel that pressure on your band? I mean, you must, since your videos have not all been seen.

Morello: Yeah, we felt it. We felt it in the not-so-subtle way of the censorship of the videos. Simply not being able to have those songs played on the radio in their unedited version is a kind of censorship that people tend to live with and accept. Based on some sort of weird Puritanical code that says if you hear the f-word on the radio there's going to be some kind of moral volcano that's going to go crazy.

ATN: It seemed like the band originally had a stance -- and a lot of it sounded like it was based on the fact that you were able to do stuff with your guitar that a lot of people weren't able to do -- that you wouldn't use samples or that samples weren't something you wanted to use, but then you sort of opened up a little bit. You collaborated with Prodigy. Anything's possible now. Maybe you'll be a little bit more open to using technology?

Morello: Well, let me clarify, the reason why we did the "we don't use samples" etc., etc., on the first record was not out of some militant anti-sampling stance -- it was because we, through our band's unique chemistry, were able to generate a lot of really off-the-wall sounds and textures using a punk rock line-up. And we wanted you to know that what you were hearing, we were just kind of making it, standing in a room plugged-in. When I did that song with Prodigy, everything you hear on that is still guitar, bass and drums. It's cut up in Liam Howlett's unique and wonderful vision, but I would hope that we can continue to expand our sonic boundaries without falling back on the crutch of samplers and sequencers, things like that. Where I'm coming from, I've got tapes full of the craziest guitar shit you've ever heard. I mean, we're going to have to put two stickers [disclaimers] on the next record.

ATN: How did you get to the point where you were able to play like that?

Morello: It's not, well ... I hate to overintellectualize it and get philosophical about it, but the stuff, none of it, not a single thing, is hard to play. It's all a matter of perspective. It's all a matter of how you, how I, look at the instrument. When I was in Lockup, I started sort of finding my own voice on the instrument, and kind of disregarding more traditional guitar playing and concentrating on the eccentricities of my playing. And once you do, it's just kind of deconstructing the instrument as opposed to looking at it, as opposed to saying, 'ah, what scale would fit well with this chord progression?' It's saying 'okay, this is a piece of wood and some metal and a plug and some wires and knobs and stuff, and you can manipulate it in thousands of different ways,' which folks just don't do because they think of it as just a guitar.

ATN: So, do you think that this next record might have some different elements on it? Have you started working on the next record yet?

Morello: No, no, heavens no.

ATN: You haven't started. Will it come faster than four years?

Morello: I, dude, I don't know.

Have you got ideas together?

ATN: Have you started writing songs at all?

Morello: No.

ATN: What's the band doing now?

Morello: We finished the U.S. tour, we got this video thing coming out, and now we're just taking time off.

ATN: Are you working on any other stuff outside of that?

Morello: Yeah, yeah, the only thing is, I don't want to tell you stuff, because otherwise in six months I'll have kids coming up to me saying, "hey, where's your collaboration with Ozzy?"

ATN: Any stuff you can talk about?

Morello: Yeah, I'm going to do another song with Prodigy. I love them.

ATN: What's that going to be for?

Morello: I don't even know. We're just going to do it because it feels good. We'll find some place for it when it's done.

Do you know what song it is yet?

Morello: No. I just got a bunch of -- basically how we did the first one -- I just came up with a bunch of grooves and noises and sent them over to Liam, and had him cut them up, and then he sent them back to me, and we talked. We arranged a song over the phone while we were both on tour. We're just going to do the same thing.

ATN: Obviously the other big story of this year for you guys was that tour this summer with the Wu-Tang Clan. In light of how the whole thing went down, do you think it was successful? You've talked about some of the ideas behind it, which were to get these two disparate bands on the road, and to get people who hadn't been exposed to Wu-Tang before to see them. So do you think it was successful on that score?

Morello: I would say it was half-successful, because they came to half the shows. Yeah, I mean it was. They were a great band to tour with until they just stopped coming. And I completely understand -- it's hard enough when you've got a band with four people. Imagine one with nine plus, or however many in it. But we got along great on the road. We had the opportunity to jam four or five nights at the end of shows, songs with RZA, Method Man, and Raekwon. It was really cool, it was great being on tour with them, and I would have loved to have done the whole tour.

ATN: Did you feel the audience was getting what you wanted them to get?

Morello: You know, there's a spectrum, there's a curve. Some people yeah, some people less so. But I'll tell you why it was successful -- because it got under people's skin. We've never had the kind of problems with police that we had on this tour. We were in Kansas City, or something like that, and the promoter intercepted this police memorandum that some sheriff in Colorado was sending out. We weren't even playing in Colorado yet, and he was sending out this memorandum to the promoters and the venues to, like, beware. You know, here's this tour coming to town, with these two, you know, volatile and 'violent' acts. And it was highlighted in the police memorandum that it was our band -- it was Rage's anti-police, anti-authority position that they were fearing was going to incite kids, and that they had witnessed this behavior at a number of different shows, which means that there is a de facto police monitoring of music in this country. And that there is a network to inform police departments and, you know, venues around the country when a rock tour is found to have objectionable lyrics.

ATN: Maybe you should give Scully a call. That sounds like a job for The X-Files.

Morello: Exactly. And they tried to shut down the show in Washington, all that. It was so ridiculous. That was just symptomatic of what was going on during the whole tour.

ATN: Were you disappointed when Wu-Tang decided they had to drop off?

Morello: Oh yeah. We wanted to be on tour with them. They were our first choice. But I would hesitate to say it's a shame, because it was a big rock tour for a rap group. But that happens all the time. Oasis does that. Guns'N'Roses. It was, like, rock bands do that all the time and nobody goes, 'ah, rock can't be played.' And so whenever attacks like that are made against hip-hop groups, there's a racist element to it. Which is hard to get out of the media

ATN: Well, how did you find out about what went down in Tinley Park, with the alleged rough handling by the Clan of one of their promotion men?

Morello: Well, I was at Tinley Park and, I don't know, I didn't see anything going on. The dressing rooms are kind of in different corners. I have no idea. I think that it's pretty clear that whatever may have happened at Tinley Park had nothing to do with them dropping off the tour. I think it was that they had internal differences that they had to sort out and they couldn't do it on tour.

ATN: Was there any point where you sort of knew that it wouldn't work out?

Morello: No, no, none whatsoever. I think all nine members of the Wu-Tang Clan were at one or two of the shows. I think they played 16 altogether.

ATN: Was there any point when you thought maybe this was a little too ambitious?

Morello: No, not at all. Unlike some rock bands, I don't want to point any fingers. They would come late sometimes. Some of them seemed to come earlier than others. And Ol' Dirty Bastard seemed to come rarely. When he does come it's spectacular, though.

ATN: Would you try that type of thing again?

Morello: Absolutely. Without batting an eye.

ATN: Do you have any other plans, touring-wise?

Morello: The video is the tour. You can enjoy us on tour while I sit at home.

ATN: Another one of the amazing things in the video is this version of "Freedom" where Zack is just absolutely livid. He's down on the ground, he's got his head down, it's amazing to see. Obviously this is a question for him too, but since we won't likely get him on the phone, do you have a sense for how he can summon this sort of righteous indignation every night?

Morello: All I can tell you is that's how it's been since our first rehearsal together. I mean he was doing that in rehearsal. Like, when we were just writing these songs. I remember there was a fateful day where I think we were writing the song "Township Rebellion" and, up to that point, Zack had just been rapping. There had been none of the sort of hollering parts. In his previous band, Inside Out, he did that more often, and [bassist] Tim [Bob] made the suggestion that he do some of that on that song. "Township Rebellion" kinda goes into this end part, it kind of breaks down, there's a big riff in D, and then it goes off again. I'm probably thinking of where it goes off again. He did this just terrifyingly beautiful yell. It hit me in that same way as the Who's -- what's that song? -- "Won't Get Fooled Again," where he does that thing, where you just go, 'oh my gosh, it just couldn't be better.' And since then, that became an integral part of expression during the songs.

ATN: So he's just always been like that? Is it hard to get keyed-up like that every night? Because in the video, there are quite a few scenes where you're thrashing about night after night.

Morello: My answer to that is no, it is not hard -- when there's a combination of the band's chemistry, which makes this kind of rocket-fueled killing machine, when we're hitting it, and when you�re looking out at this crowd of 60 or 100,000, or whatever, bouncing in the air -- it's not so hard to get enthusiastic about the performance. It's also fueled by this righteous indignation. We're not playing Spice Girls songs. I feel the same kind of passion -- passion's not the right word -- the same kind of fury that you might feel in a confrontation, at a demonstration with the cops. In our best moments.