‘Street Fighting Man’ by Rage Against the Machine
- Renegades
- Rage fails to be born in time for the revolution, and we get stuck with B-sides. This is the epitome of breakup collection. The Rolling Stones got Street Fighting Man right on the first try.
- Buy it at Amazon
There are few better ways to be gently guided back to the world of the waking than a song that starts off with guitars that sound like sirens. Well, maybe there are a few, especially when the source of the music is crappy little speakers in the next room, but that’s not really the point.
Street Fighting Man isn’t the best song off an album that’s certainly not Rage’s best or most cohesive work. It is, however another great experiment from a band whose sound is arguably just one grand experiment. “Renegades” is pretty much exactly that: the stuff that didn’t make it onto the albums. Live stuff, B-sides, experimental stuff, stuff that’s not very good — you get a little bit of each musical renegade on this CD.
The idea of politics is music goes back centuries, but Rage famously took it a step further — making most of their work overtly political and usually listenable. Rage’s cover of the Rolling Stones classic, however, probably sounded better on paper. Tom Morello’s guitar siren sounds more like a weird techno beat than anything that could actually get listeners rioting in the streets. It’s hardly background music to a revolution.
While their sound may always be distinctive, and Rage definitely makes the song their own, it just doesn’t come close to waking up the revolutionary in me, as evidenced by the fact that I fell back asleep while it was playing and had to go back and listen to it again. Look, I even got out of bed in time to catch the end of The Thanksgiving Song on Tuesday.
Mick Jagger knew there was no place for a revolution in the streets even in turbulent 1967, so since he couldn’t kill the king, he settled for singing in a rock ‘n’ roll band. To Zack de la Rocha, every song is a chance for a revolution. Street Fighting Man isn’t really a revolution as a song, and it was probably about three and a half decades too late to cause one among apathetic Gen-Xers. Maybe he’d have better luck today.
