Riding a steady surge of popularity generated by last year's American tour, Rage Against the Machine's recently released, self titled video of recent live performances brings 70 minutes of their hard-edged, politically-charged rock to the television set.
Packaged as a video and compact disc combination, the product features footage of international concerts since 1994, capturing the raw power of their music visible in the vast and turbulent audiences.
Whether the crowds understand the weighty messages singer Zach De La Rocha screams into the microphone is not important. A great unspoken irony lies in the existence of a band so idealistic that they can sign a record deal with one of the worlds largest electronics and entertainment companies, Sony Corporation, and unabashedly print directions for ordering T-shirts on all their releases.
Among video collections, this one is particularly entertaining and powerful, with a good balance of cinematic form and musical content.
The CD single included is a recording of "The Ghost of Tom Joad," a previously unreleased song which is characteristically fierce and addictive, although it sometimes sounds like a fragile composite of several carefully chosen catch phrases.
Harvard graduate and RATM guitarist Tom Morello continues the musical innovation for which he is renowned: squeezing bizarre and surreal sounds from his instrument -- an essential part of RATM's uniqueness and appeal.
The fabric of their musical fury is woven by the interacting threads of bassist Tim Bob, guitarist Tom Morello and drummer Brad Wilk, who dance around each other creating the audible soap box from which singer Zach De La Rocha screams his didactic rap.
De La Rocha's stage presence is awesome, his face contorted with rage, dreadlocks swinging in the air around him as he prances wildly back and forth across the stage.
The video contains clips of some obscure songs, such as "The Ghost of Tom Joad," "Zapata's Blood" and a spoken word jam entitled "Memory of the Dead," however their most successful tunes are amply represented.
Viewers can find two different versions of "People of the Sun," "Killing in the Name," "Bullet in the Head" and "Bulls on Parade." Most songs are taken from their second and most recent studio release, "Evil Empire."
The video editing ensures that the songs suffer minimally from their repetition, making the tape remarkably watchable.
The tape contains many styles of video, from straight-up footage and computer enhanced film to studio shots and compilations of video clips from television media.
The styles back up the mood and subject matter of the songs being played.
Film of a performance of "Bulls on Parade" at the Rock AM Ring festival in 1996 is made -- by imitating the discoloration, for example -- to look like an old and beat up picture found on old reel tapes.
Rage Against the Machine first exploded onto the scene in 1992 with their self-titled album, encountering widespread and instant success. Since then they have left only two major studio albums in their wake, although they manage to attract a sizable following of devoted fans whose trade in bootleg tapes finally led to this video.
