| THE HANDSTAND | LATE AUTUMN2008 |
Zack de la Rocha talks to Ann Powers
03:30 PM PT, Aug 11 2008
These days, the rock scene is low on mysterious figures. As the music has lost its countercultural edge, many of its champions have transformed into average celebrities, happy to speak into any microphone that wanders by. That’s not true of Zack de la Rocha: the Rage Against the Machine vocalist is the rare rock star who keeps his distance from the hype.
De la Rocha is as famous for his radical politics as for incendiary poetics. Between his retirement from Rage in 2000 and his recent reunion with the band, he’s limited his public appearances to the occasional rally or benefit show. His musical output has been spare too: only a few songs have seen light.
But this summer, the 38-year-old Southland native is back and seemingly unstoppable. He has a new musical project -- One Day as a Lion, which pairs him with drummer Jon Theodore. One Day as a Lion’s self-titled debut EP, on Anti- Records, hit No. 28 on the Billboard charts with minimal media attention, and is gaining traction nationally on rock radio. A full release will come in the fall.
De la Rocha has also found a way to embrace Rage again.
A 2007 Coachella appearance marked the band’s return
as a live unit, and its shows have become major events.
Earlier this month, Rage blazed through a chaos-inspiring
set at Lollapalooza in Chicago, and the band has just
announced a Sept. 3 Minneapolis date, which will serve as
a protest against the Republican National Convention
occurring simultaneously in St. Paul.
This burst of activity has even inspired De la Rocha to
break his media silence. He spoke Monday by phone about
the current state of political music, his creative
process, and the future of One Day as a Lion — and
Rage Against the Machine. A shorter version is running in
Tuesday's paper but Soundboard has the full edited
interview below.
How did One Day as a Lion,
your new project with drummer Jon Theodore, come about?
I’ve
known Jon for several years now, and I saw some of his
first performances as a member of the Mars Volta. He come
from Baltimore and had been in some underground bands
there, so I’d heard of him. When I did see him it
was clear that music in L.A. was never going be the same
now that he was here! I’ve worked with some great
drummers, and have seen people try to execute those kinds
of things before, but never as effortlessly and with as
much feel. He exists in this realm between John Bonham
and Elvin Jones. I haven’t seen drumming like that
in a long time.
So I immediately felt
compelled to get to know the guy and pick his brain and
find out what kind of music he was interested in. We had
a lot in common. We met in jams a couple of summers ago,
without the intention of making an album.
Jon had a friend named
Troy Zeigler, who now plays with Serj Tankian, and Troy
had this very small rehearsal space where he would teach
drum lessons. A couple of summers ago, Jon and I went in
there to talk to Troy. He wasn’t there. Jon sat down
on one of the student’s kits and started playing.
The room was filled with random instruments - there was
percussive stuff, these old 80s metal amps that
hadn’t been used in ages, and a dusty Rhodes
keyboard with some broken keys. I plugged in through a
metal amp and ran it through this messed-up delay pedal
that had a trigger on it and we immediately started
playing. It felt like two people having a conversation
using whatever phrases were at our disposal. We had to
document it.
We’re still using
that keyboard. We had to put an old Number Two pencil and
jam it into the side to keep the top on.
The EP came out without much warning and basically no hype. What was the strategy involved in releasing it that way?
I wish I could say there was a strategy involved! We
felt that the collection of songs we had chosen had
resonated with us and it was really something we wanted
people to discover on their own. That’s been missing
from music, in a way; we’ve been marketed to so much,
rather than people discovering something and picking it
up.
When I heard Public
Enemy for the first time, it was on the soundtrack for
the movie “Less than Zero,” tucked between a
Madonna song and some other ‘80s rehash. I was in a
friend’s car, he put the soundtrack on and I thought,
what is this junk? When it got to “Bring the Noise,”
I had that kind of urgent reaction where you just had to
stop what you’re doing. It sounded like breaking
news.
How did the signing with Anti- come about?
I’ve known Brett [Gurewitz, Bad Religion guitarist and the labels’ founder] for years and we’ve collaborated on a few things in the past, and I appreciate his perspective on making music. He has a genuine respect for artists. I think Anti- can bring in a number of voices that wouldn’t be considered in our rigid radio format-dominated industry still. I found that appealing. And it’s kind of in the neighborhood. But they also have the ability to enable us to grow if that ends up happening. We are working on another album now. And we want to play shows and be a band and go out and start some noise.
The band’s name, One Day as a Lion, hints that this might not be a long-lived project. Am I reading that right?
No! This is not simply a burst of energy. We are going
to be making records and writing songs. We’re still
in the process of forming as a band -- we need a keyboard
player, I’m not good enough to do it all myself --
so that will be rectified soon.
The name speaks about a
generation of people, a kind of development that I feel.
It’s an intuition about people who
aren’t going to be so concerned about elections to
get what they need. And whose politics aren’t going
to revolve around a bourgeois morality. Their interests
are going to be focused on food and housing and justice
and revenge. And without going too far into that,
that’s an intuition that I had.
Why is there no guitar in these new songs?
I’ve always wanted to experiment with sounds that could provide a kind of tension, something you can’t avoid. When I first heard the sirens and high sax squeals of hip hop in the late 80s, I was drawn to creating those textures. With this new music, it’s wasn’t a choice not to use guitars so much as the spontaneity of that moment when Jon and I got together, regardless of the instrumentation. We wanted to produce a sound that was much larger than what you’d think it could be.
You’ve worked with many collaborators since leaving Rage, including Trent Reznor and DJ Shadow. Did what you learned from those experiments factor into ODAAL?
To an extent it did, and it didn’t. When I left Rage… first off, I was very heartbroken, and secondly, I became obsessed with completely reinventing my wheel. In an unhealthy way, to a degree. I kind of forgot that old way of allowing yourself to just be a conduit. When I was working with Trent and Shadow, I felt that I was going through the motions. Not that what was produced wasn’t great, but I feel now that I’ve maybe reinvented the base sounds that emanate from the songs. But I’m still doing what I feel I do well, while looking for a more minimal sound.
The first ODAAL single is called “Wild
International.” That implies a global politics from
the get go. How does your work fit into that scenario?
Before we get into the larger thing, that song is a
response to the way we saw the U.S. government try to
reframe the conflicts of the world. Particularly when the
Soviet Union had collapsed, there was no way to subject
the country to the kind of fear needed to justify what I
consider to be an ill distribution of wealth. After 9/11
you could see that reframing taking place. The specter of
Communism no longer haunted the U.S., justifying its
actions in Latin America and all over the world. What
filled that void were Al Qaeda and the Muslim world in
general. That song is, in an abstract way, addressing the
way the right has distracted people from this huge rush
of wealth from the bottom to the top.
Beyond that, I’m
speaking toward a deeper sentiment that I feel and I know
a lot of people feel. Most of the songs have to do with
redemptive moments that come in the face of some real
indignity. And that’s the current that I’m
trying to tap into, because I think that for a lot of
people -- for the real participants who live in the
shadows and work at car washes and are forced to cross
the border and are struggling and facing the real
economic consequences -- they’re often left out off
the debate because of the language they speak or even the
terminology that they use.
So it stems from my own
frustration. It stems from seeing how things have been
developing politically, and watching so much
dissatisfaction and people very upset about the way the
country is going. And watching all of that frustration
steered back into a more traditional political process.
The problems stem far deeper than anything that Brother
Obama can address, and eventually people are going to
have to respond.
I think maybe like a
conduit for that expression. I have those same feelings
too. I’m a Mexicano growing up in that colonized
Southwest. I’m an artist, but I didn’t grow up
wealthy.
On the surface, some of these new songs seem very anti-religious, including the single.
I don’t see it as an anti-religious song. I see it as the West has been using Christianity as a way to justify its actions when in reality, those figures, Christ and Muhammad, were rebels. These two religious figures have been co-opted to justify power, although they fought against the abuses of power and the expansion of empire. It’s almost like, what would Christ and Muhammad do?
What do you think of the state of political art now? Sometimes it seems to have really died down, what with a mainstream full of teen pop and reality television.
I’m listening to things all the time. There have
been eight years of the Bush administration and the
decline of real wages, and people are responding all the
time. It’s unfortunate that more conscious artists
or political artists in general haven’t been heard
in the mainstream. But I think back to when I was going
to hardcore shows and I saw the Bad Brains, those moments
resonate and are life-altering moments. Those people who
were at those shows have become artists or activists as a
result of having their perspective shifted. During the
1980s when punk was seen as unviable or dangerous, or
threatening to the music industry, those voices went
underground and created their own networks and vehicles
for producing what they produced. It did create a very
politicized generation. So I don’t necessarily feel
that music within the mainstream is always an indication
of the political frustrations that exist beneath the
surface.
I’ve traveled back
and forth between here and Mexico a lot, especially since
the Zapatista uprising in 1994. The Rand Corporation did
this study about how the Zapatistas were able to create
such an international presence and have their experiences
and the objectives of the rebellion outlined for so many
people worldwide, and how that was responsible for
fending off a more direct military action against the
communities. It had a lot to do with the Internet.
Whether you’re interested in change and growing up
in the Lacandon jungle, or whether you’re young here
and watching these horrors unfold in Iraq and Afghanistan,
we now have the tools to provide a countervoice.
One line jumped out at me, from the title track -- “If L.A. were Baghdad, we’d be Iraqi.”
In one sense, that line about one of those redemptive
moments that run through the whole EP. But I’m also
making a comparison between the expansion of U.S. power
into Iraq and Afghanistan and the history of the
Southwest, which has been erased. There’s a very
close relationship between what happened in Fallujah and
what happened at the Alamo.
When settlers fleeing
the South after the Civil War came into San Antonio,
primarily because they wanted to practice slavery, an
altercation took place and James Polk used it as an
excuse to invade, to fulfill Manifest Destiny in the
Southwest, which is really a misnomer -- this is really
Northeastern Mexico.
In Fallujah, there were
Blackwater mercenaries, and U.S. soldiers taking over
schools and using them as a military base in the interest
of Exxon Mobil. And the students and their parents
reacted by staging a protest. Several students were
killed. The U.S. used that as a pretext to go in and
decimate Fallujah. I’m exploring that in the song.
How do those two elements of your own life -- activism and music-making -- intersect or diverge now?
I don’t think the separation is valid, especially
in these times. For me, the only time that that line gets
drawn when you’re producing music and you’re
trying to flush out a certain idea -- that’s very
liberating, in a very abstract way. It’s in those
moments where you feel free, and you can go ahead and
explore why you feel free in those moments. In the past
moments with Shadow and Trent I didn’t feel that.
Participating in the Son
Jarocho work [his activist work with urban farmers in
South Central Los Angeles, which included playing folk
music with the group Son de Madera] felt more community
based, more collective. I was part of a collective voice
and not on my own as an artist, and something about that
attracted me.
It’s so funny;
I’ve read a couple things someone said that there
were bets being placed on who would finish their album
first, Axl Rose or me. One joke was that Axl was calling
his record “Chinese Democracy,” and that there
would be democracy in China by the time he finished! I
laughed when I considered calling this record
“American Democracy.” But I kinda spoke too
soon on that!
It’s an election year here in the U.S. -- did that factor in to your decision to debut new music now?
I’d be lying if I said it was coincidental. I
think that it’s an interesting moment. The lowest
approval rating in the history of any presidency -- and
for Congress. There’s this interesting rupture
developing, and I think it’s a healthy one.
To watch the Democrats,
who were really our only institutional obstruction to
this extremely rightward swing, fall in lockstep behind
this new imperial fantasy that became reality -- that was
a pivotal moment. A lot of people began to question the
whole nature of both parties. Now more than ever,
there’s a more fertile ground for artists to try to
reveal the nature of both parties, who are mainly the
public relations team for transnational corporations.
Barack is clearly the
most viable candidate, the most intelligent, the one with
the most forward-thinking position, but I would hate to
see the flames of discontent be watered down by
rhetorical visions of hope and change, when historically
those things have only come from immigrant workers or
people fighting against segregation, or against the
second class position of women. History has taught us
that when it comes to ending war, it’s always been
the people on the ground who’ve led the movement.
Veterans who have come home and fought against the war.
Iraqi kids. And artists and musicians.
You’ve been touring with Rage again. What is your relationship like with those guys now?
So much has changed. When you get older, you look back on tensions and grievances and have another perspective on it. I think our relationship now is better than it’s ever been. I would even describe it as great. We’re going to keep playing shows -- we have a couple of big ones happening in front of both conventions. As far as us recording music in the future, I don’t know where we all fit with that. We’ve all embraced each other’s projects and support them, and that’s great.
When you look out a crowd like the one you
played in front of at Lollapalooza, what kind of
potential do you see there?
There was this interesting thing that happened during the Clinton administration; people were looking inward and not outward, and not addressing what was going on. Rage set the political foreground for things that would come very shortly thereafter. I think people might see that what we are saying has more relevance now than when the band first came out.
Can we look forward to some live ODAAL gigs in the near future?
Definitely. I’ve always hoped that a project I was involved in could be a little more spontaneous, set up on a block and play. Me and Jon see eye to eye on doing that.
Meanwhile, as you said, Rage is playing in
Minneapolis the same night the
You’re gonna have to come and cover it. I think we both know what we expect. Good shoes would help. And you might wanna dip that bandanna in some vinegar.
Top photo courtesy of Anti-; second photo of De la Rocha playing in Scotland by Ed Jones/AFP/Getty Images