Super Fury Animals

Having ignited the world and its brother with their heady mix of rap, metal and politics three years ago, RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE promptly vanished off the face of the earth. Did they split up, or were they just too bloody angry to make another record? Er, neither, ZACK DE LA ROCHA tells VOX, as he unveils the band’s latest aural assault, ‘Evil Empire’...

By Amy Raphael

Convincing Zack to talk is as difficult as making Courtney Love shut up. He is a highly strung individual whose past is shrouded in mystery and who refuses to discuss his lyrics. He will talk vaguely about growing up in the rich white suburb of Irvine, California as an outsider (he was the only Chicano on the street) and he will say he’s proud of ‘Evil Empire’, but that’s as far as it goes. Zack’s main concern is being involved in his local community-talk about the center he works at and he stops sounding defensive. He may claim to have “been chosen” to pursue a career in music, but he sounds far more excited when discussing politics. Which makes you wonder whether this is the last album RATM will make, and the last tour they will survive. . .

Why are you so elusive?

“Am I? I don’t mean to be. Today I’ve just been cleaning my pitiful house. It’s a fucking joke. I got back from doing the Big Day Out in Australia three weeks ago and I haven’t unpacked yet. I’ve been working on a lot of different things here, so I’ve kinda put it off. It finally became unbearable, so I had to deal with it.”

What are you working on?

“A combination of music and non-music stuff. I am a member of a collective composed of musicians, artists and students, and which, since 1992, has been trying to create a space for direct action among the people of east Los Angeles. We’re trying to create a center for popular resource and resistance and trying to maintain a community dialogue about some of the US policies currently affecting our community. We hold political education forums which have really provided space for young artists and people who are excluded from the economic agenda. Just lately, we’ve been trying to acquire a non-profit status for our center. It’s a bureaucratic nightmare.”

Does your public profile help?

“I think so. It helps a little bit, although I’ve tried to de-emphasize it because I want this thing to grow on its own.”

Is the center and all it stands for more important to you than RATM?

“Personally, I don’t recognize the boundaries between music and political action. But as an artist, I can’t sit around talking shit and collecting royalty checks. I don’t see that as my role in this band. I don’t feel comfortable with that. Or having our presence grace everyone at a benefit; that isn’t something I see as a way to create change during my lifetime.”

Do pop and politics mix? Bands who are public about their political/charity involvement often seem to think it enhances their public image.

“Wouldn’t it just be so terrible if all of a sudden bands had a lot to say? Haha. I think that Rage, to an extent, has become an alternative media for young people-or people who the corporately owned media has a very vested interest in alienating, in ensuring that they don’t become politically active. If Rage can somehow directly inform these people, I don’t see anyting wrong with that. In terms of increasing my image, I haven’t even been in the public forum in terms of press. My role in promoting the band is very limited. I don’t really worry myself with it for the most part. I want to see my concerns put into action in the community. I don’t think our message and the music that we play will have any real effect in terms of educating people, unless it’s done...unless we integrate ideas with the working poor of the communities that we come from.”

So do you reckon you’re 100 percent free of a rock star ego?

“Hahaha. Well, I try to keep myself grounded. I really do. I have a very difficult time with my position as a result of the band’s popularity. I’m at constant war with it. A person who has that much attention placed on them is destined to come into conflict with themselves at some point and I try my best to alleviate it entirely, although I’m sure I’ve been affected by it some way.”

But surely you can’t get on stage without an ego?

“One of the things I’ve come to understand is that it wasn’t a choice for me. Creating music and expressing myself in the way that I do was just a way of surviving. I had no other direction at the time. I had been completely alinated by the education system. I had no place there, due to a lot of circumstances. One: my father was an artist and an activist in the ‘70s who formed an art collective. It was the first Chicano art group to ever have an exhibit at LA County Museum of Art. It was pretty significant in reaffirming the Chicano identity. But he was a pretty troubled guy and as a result of his problems he mentally abused me for most of my life. Which made it virtually impossible for me to acclimatise to the rigidity of the education system.”

Because you were having problems at home?

“That was one factor. Two: I was in a community where the rule of thumb for a Chicano in an all-white suburban environment was because I constantly had a broom or a mop or a hammer in my hand. It was very tough for me. Three: being bombarded with the military history of rich white men-we live in an era where history is told solely by the conquerors-was very difficult to swallow. I felt in fear and lost in that environment. It made it exceptionally difficult for me to exceed in an academic environment.”

Did you feel able to speak out in class, to put your views across?

“I was a virtual mute until I began to listen to Sex Pistols, Government Issue, Minor Threat and Bad Brains and a lot of East Coast hardcore. It struck a nerve in me when I was 16.”

As a virtual mute, did you communicate with anyone?

“I had a very close relationship with my mother. That helped. I had very few friends. I didn’t speak that much to people. I rarely found myself in the classroom for more than half a semester. I thought, well, I’m not doing anything in school...”

And then?

“Oh man. I started playing music. Hahaha. I started venting in some way all of the fear and alienation and confusion I felt. I just kind of exploded. It became the only thing I could put any of myself into.”

So you weren’t interested in, or able to talk to girls?

“Hahaha. Of course I was interested.”

If you were a virtual mute, it must have been hard to get a date.

“It was, and believe me I had very few. Very few. I think my high school experience pushed me through a crisis of identity, it enabled me to be more of a critical individual. It made me question the institution I was forced to adjust to and my relationship with society. Those four years or so during high school were what eventually politicised me, cause the experience made me step back and take a look at how I was being indoctrinated. Once I’d left, I became engaged in reading and since then, I’ve gone through my own self-education.”

When you became ‘politicised’, did you stop being a virtual mute?

“No. It had a lot more to do with forcing me to recognize who I was and precisely where I stood in relation to the American economic system. I just began to identify with the poorest people in my community.”

Even though you were brought up in a middle-class community.

“Yeah, but I didn’t have that kind of wealth. I lived in a very poor student housing project with my mom. It was an ugly, roach-infested community. I never experienced any kind of privilege in my life.”

Until you became a rock star.

“Hahaha. The most money I’d ever seen at one time was the first check from Epic: $5,000 to go buy equipment with.”

Did you feel guilty about that?

“No. Absolutely not.”

People who don’t have money when they’re growing up feel some sense of guilt if they suddenly start earning big bucks.

“I admit to a little bit of guilt now, but certainly not then, not at all.”

How does a self-confessed right-on, Marxist band deal with massive record companies? Would you have been as happy in RATM if you’d continued making demo tapes and selling them at gigs?

“That was what I was used to doing before Rage. My first band, Inside Out, was signed to a small indie label and we were very happy touring the West and East coasts. At that point-I was 19,20-I began to be really influenced by Bob Marley and Public Enemy and The Clash. I saw them as being able to use music as a way of opening up the spectrum of ideas. I was curious as to the massive communicative network a corporation like Sony could provide. Ultimately, although a lot of people have criticised us for being in bed with our enemies, I disagree. I think that it’s a mutually exploitative situation. The kind of information that people can get as a result of using Sony is much more important than what some people would consider an endorsement.”

Of course, the band exercises total control over everything it does. You could spend a decade making a record if you felt like it.

“Hahaha. Obviously the four years it took us to put out 11 songs is a testament to that. And we were very fortunate to have several record companies bidding over us. I think that helped in getting total control.”

Do you feel pessimistic about the future? Do you care who wins the next election?

“I see very little difference between the two parties. They eat from the same trough; they serve the same purpose...there is very little difference between a liberal and conservative capitalist. I have no faith, nor do I align myself with, nor do I recognize the legitimacy of the current political system. What I have seen, by being involved with the communities, is a much more empowered and enraged student movement, one which aligns itself with the struggles of janitors and of indigenous communities in south-east Mexico. I’m very happy to see this. Particularly about the Zapatistas, because they represent something completely new. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, they have challenged the entire global economic system as it stands. I’ve spent time with the people there and tried to learn as much as I can about that movement and I feel very encouraged. Although the future is dim because there’s going to be a lot of blood shed and a lot of struggle.”

There’s a game on RATM’s website on the net where you go inside Zack’s head and try to eat all the burning monk pictures before time runs out. Included in the pictures are Hitler, Clinton, Che Guevara, Il Duce....

“Hahaha. I haven’t seen that I’m only just beginning to learn about computers. That’s excellent. Il Duce is on there? Wow! I’m gonna check that out! At least people are beginning to identify them. But ultimately, the Internet prevents people from getting out and being involved on the street at a grass roots level.”

RATM have contributed songs to several film soundtracks- ‘Bombtrack’ and ‘Take the Power Back’ in Natural Born Killers. Do you monitor each film for its PC levels?

“Hmmm. We think movies are great. We’ll send our music out to anyone. No, we always read the treatments. I saw JFK and Platoon and some other Oliver Stone films-they are all very interesting movies. Nixon is excellent. Can you believe the reaction against this film? When I was in Australia doing the Big Day Out, papers were running cover stories about Oliver Stone’s ‘misrepresentation of history’. Before people had even seen the movie. Here you have this international campaign to protect the image of a dead murderer. If that film came out again, I’d put another song on it.”

Rumour has it that RATM split up during 1995.

“No, we never broke up.”

Can you put your hand on your heart and swear that you all love one another?

“Hahaha. I think we have a genuine respect for one another. You get four people who have this much attention placed on them and there are going to be major differences. We are very opinionated people, especially me and Tom. We have different ideas of how to approach things, how to have Rage reach its political potential. These things always cause problems. We went through a period of ego explosions, but we’ve found our way through them. We’ve ended up making a much better record. I think we’ve fused elements of punk and hip-hop in a much more tasteful way-in a way that I don’tthink has been done before. I’m really pretty proud of what eventually came out.”

Would you like to explain why the album is called ‘Evil Empire’?

“It’s a title I though was a bit thetorical. Hahaha. Toward the end of the Cold War, the Reagan administration constantly tried to breed this fear in the American public by referring to the Soviet Union as the Evil Empire. We’ve kind of come to understand that youcan pretty much flip that on its head to see that the US has been responsible for many of the atrocities in the late 21st century.”

In “Tire Me” you sing “I wanna be Jackie Onassis/I want to wear a pair of dark sunglasses.” Why?

“Oh come on, can’t you hear the sarcasm in that? And you know I won’t discuss my lyrics. Hahaha. And time’s running out. I got things to do. I gotta go.”

Okay. One last question. If the Sex Pistols helped change your life, what do you think of them reforming?

“Oh man, I don’t know. I think that it’s pathetic, actually. I think these boys have cashed in enough. The music was great when they were younger; now it’s kind of passed and these guys are just old gits.” Vox (UK) June 1996