Rage On.

• Author: Doherty, Brian

The strange politics of millionaire rock stars

"A good song should make you wanna tap your feet and get with your girl. A great song should destroy cops and set fire to the suburbs. I'm only interested in writing great songs."

So says Tom Morello, guitarist for the Los Angeles-based band Rage Against the Machine. He and his bandmates are not simply against cops and the suburbs, of course. They also stand for the Zapatistas and the Shining Path, for freeing Mumia Abu-Jamal and Leonard Peltier, for giving California back to Mexico, and for destroying stores where rich people like themselves shop.

That's pretty strong stuff coming from work-for-hire employees of one of the great cogs in the global capitalist machine, the megaconglomerate Sony, which wholly owns and distributes Rage's music and even is a co-owner of the group's publishing. Since 1992, Rage has sold nearly 7 million records, and it's safe to say that nobody has benefitted more from that commerce than the band's unabashedly capitalist paymaster.

In the world of high-profile popular music, Rage Against the Machine is far from alone in advocating a radical leftism, even one that shades into old-style, let's nationalize-everything-but-the music-industry communism. Indeed, Rage has plenty of fellow travelers, most of whom are equally unironic about being fabulously wealthy rock stars.

Comrades in the struggle to overthrow "late capitalism" include Chumbawamba, a collective of British anarchists who hit major pop stardom with their rousing 1997 sing-along drinking anthem "Tubthumping." Chumba (as their fans call the group) declares on its Web site that it wants "to destroy the moral code that says you can only have what you can afford to pay for." And it wants a social order where nothing happens without everyone--everyone!--agreeing to it. Folk-rocker Ani DiFranco is best known for refusing to be part of a "corporate" machine, saying that the record business is "dehumanizing and exploitative, not much different from any other big business." Thus, refusing to work on Maggie's Farm no more, she operates her own corporate machine, Righteous Babe Records (and pockets far more per record as a result).

Then there's Patti Smith, the over-the-hill punk poetess who once wowed Madison Square Garden audiences with songs about adolescent alienation and all-night sex. Smith includes a 10-minute-plus tribute to Ho Chi Minh and a snappy pop tune against the World Trade Organization on her latest album, Gung Ho. The members of the British band Primal Scream, who originally gained fame as drug-addled hedonists, have taken a page from Rage Against the Machine's little red playbook, lately recasting themselves as born-again followers of Noam Chomsky, the tenured MIT professor and favorite "dissident" intellectual of politicized rock bands everywhere.

If pop stars' politics aren't hard left, they can at least be counted on to be firmly liberal, as evidenced by the anti-nuke, progreen activism of the likes of Jackson Browne, Bonnie Raitt, Sting, and Bono (who has also met with the pope and Bill Clinton to help forge policy on debt forgiveness for the Third World). Oddly, this even holds true for ostensibly redneck bands. When George magazine, that self-styled arbiter of what's important in politics and popular culture, devoted a 14-page spread to rock and politics in March, it found notable such glorious rockin' moments as the Allman Brothers' endorsement of Jimmy Carter. The Georgeists suffered no mental strain reconciling support for Jimmy Carter with their declaration that "rock is the music of rebellion and freedom of expression. [It] pushes limits and challenges the established order." Jimmy Carter, the ultimate Ramblin' Man.

To be sure, fighting The Man has its rewards: Rage Against the Machine has landed on the covers of both Rolling Stone and Spin to promote its capitalist products. There's no social capital to be lost, and much to be gained, by being a socialist.

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