As guitarist for both Rage Against The Machine and Audioslave, Harvard-educated Tom Morello has trafficked in a fiery brand of electrified thrash pitched somewhere between metal’s repetitive riffing, punk’s angry noise and hip hop’s improvised beatboxing. On One Man Revolution (a solo album under the name the Nightwatchman, recently issued on Epic), Morello has exchanged his inner Jimmy Page for Springsteen’s Nebraska-era Woody Guthrie, singing Marxist-leaning protest songs. We pass the mic to Tom:
Up until the morning after the 2004 elections, the Nightwatchman had only been a side project. But at that point, I said, “This music is going to be an important part of what I do from now on.” And I started to record the songs and began playing hundreds of shows, whether they were for thousands at a pro-union rally or at an anarchist bicycle shop in front of 20 people. One Man Revolution is definitely not designed for the moderate left. This is shaking the tree to find zealots, martyrs, rebels, revolutionaries and pure souls who are willing to live their commitment to fight for change.
Even though I believe that the Bush administration is the worst in the history of the republic, it’s been very successful in achieving its aims. It’s not at all ironic when you see Bush in some flyboy suit standing on the deck of an aircraft carrier with a sign behind him saying “Mission Accomplished.” I think that, for him, his mission very much was accomplished: A couple of very rich corporations grew that much richer over his illicit and immoral war. So we can laugh all we want at what a buffoon we think he is, but he and Cheney and the war-criminal cabal are all high-fiving one another.
One of the reasons you haven’t seen widespread societal upheaval over the Iraq or Afghanistan military actions is because there’s no draft. Middle-class white kids aren’t being forced to die for someone’s stupid ideology. Our volunteer army includes a bunch of urban kids from the lower or working classes, and yet the music coming out on urban radio doesn’t have anything to do with Edwin Starr’s “War” or songs like that. Which is a shame, because there’s a great, untapped wellspring of power in the art that comes out of the urban community, and that just isn’t happening now.
One Man Revolution is part of the long, historical thread of American protest music, from Joe Hill to Woody Guthrie to the MC5 to Rage Against The Machine, through Public Enemy, System Of A Down, Steve Earle and Bob Dylan. This healthy counter-trend helps to galvanize the troops against the oncoming darkness. Sometimes the darkest, heaviest music isn’t necessarily played through Marshall stacks or with electric guitars, but rather nylon strings and harmonica. If you look at Springsteen’s Nebraska—or some of the latter-day Johnny Cash tracks—they’re deeper and darker than any Metallica song. And there’s certainly a corner of my artistic soul that is black as pitch. These songs came out of those recesses.
—interview by Corey duBrowa
