Tool and Rage Against The Machine members are uniting for a joint interview, Adam Jones has confirmed. Jones wrote ‘coming soon’ on social media. He added, “Upcoming article/interview about Tom Morello and myself growing up together as wanna be geek rockers.”
Kare11en posted on Reddit recently about RATM’s views on Europe, “What does RAtM/ZdlR have against Europe?
After a bunch of conservative Americans (including some politicians) got strips torn out of them earlier this year for claiming to be big fans of RAtM while clearly not understanding what any of their songs are about, and complaining that they’d “suddenly got political”, I started paying attention to some of the lyrics. I mean, I’d always listened to the lyrics, and I’d read copies of them, and generally understood the meaning and the anger behind their songs. But I started paying closer attention.
One of the things that they bring up a few times in a number of songs is Europe, and not in a positive way. A couple of examples are from Take the Power Back:
The present curriculum / I put my fist in ’em / Eurocentric every last one of ’em
Europe ain’t my rope to swing on / Can’t learn a thing from it / Yet we hang from it
…but there are examples in a bunch of other places too.
As a Western European, I find this a bit confusing. Comparing Europe to America, it looks from over here that we do a lot better in terms of taking care of each other with regards to things like universal healthcare, workers rights, accessible further education, public transport, and general public social safety nets, with a lot less incarceration and outright murder of minorities by the state.
I get that it’s still a capitalist system with a lot of inequality in it, so, yeah, even though it’s not quite the late-stage neoliberal hellscape you’ve got over there, it’s certainly got a lot of institutions of its own that could probably benefit from some radical destabilisation. But, whatever. That’s not my point.
My point is – as a European, I’m not sure I get what RAtM/ZdlR are getting at there. What is the meaning I’m missing? What is the specific beef with Europe? Are all Europeans part of The Machine? Am I as stupidly blind as the American conservatives who didn’t realise they were the target of those songs?”
MaxRebo74 responded, “Look at the llllllllooooooonnnnngggggg history of Europeans going all over the world and enslaving the people they meet, stealing natural resources they find and just straight up killing everything they find moving. RATM are not the only people mad at Europeans and America (as a by product of European conquest of North America).”
