The Tapes Archive

Tom Morello: Hi, how are you?

Marc Allan: Good, how’re you doing?

Tom Morello: Just fine.

Marc Allan: The first thing I wanted to ask you about is there is a rumor going around here that you guys were dropping off this tour and canceling your tour but I’m taking it this is not true.

Tom Morello: Oh yeah, it’s absolutely not true. We canceled seven dates from our headlining tour with Quicksand, I’m sorry, can you hold on just one second?

Marc Allan: Yeah, sure.

Tom Morello: Brad, our little drummer boy, hurt his he had a sprained muscle in his spine, and the doctor said he just had to rest, so home for about a week and a half and he’s hopefully all healed up for the beginning of the Cypress Hill tour.

Marc Allan: Is this a good match?

Tom Morello: Oh, I can’t wait for it. I mean, not just Cypress Hill, but Seven Year Bitch they’re my favorite band, and we’ve played shows with Funkdoobiest before, and again we’re covering a lot of territory and it’ll give us an opportunity to play to a real straight up and down hip hop audience, which is what we’ve tried to do in the United States with the exception of the Lollapalooza Tour and the couple of little runs we’ve done on our own, our three US Tours have been with Public Enemy, House of Pain and Cypress Hill. So keeping our connections with the hip hop community intact is something that’s very important to us.

Marc Allan: Do you think Rage Against the Machine is the Public Enemy for white kids?

Tom Morello: I wouldn’t say, I certainly wouldn’t limit it to white kids, I mean our audience is pretty ethnically diverse. But we do speak to some of the same injustices and inequalities that Public Enemy does but we do it with guitars, and so it’s not and while I think that Public Enemy has I mean, when we played with Public Enemy two-thirds of the audience was white at many of the shows which was interesting, but the directness of the message is something which we have very much in common with Public Enemy, and due to the fact that we do play aggressive, punk rock-oriented music, it’s inescapable that a sizable percentage of the audience will be fairer skinned, but we never limited ourselves to that. Because of the band’s ethnic diversity and because of the musical diversity draws from some traditionally non-white genres, we’ve made every effort to have our audience be as broad-based as our influences are.

Marc Allan: You described yourself in some of this biomaterial as a socialist rock musician, so can a socialist rock musician make music on a major label?

Tom Morello: Well yeah, I mean, that’s obviously no accident. That’s part of the strategy. I have no elitist illusions about the romantic purity of independent labels, we’re trying to do something no band on any independent label has ever done which is to substantively affect the fulcrum of power as it affects our audience. In order to do that we decided to cast the nets wide when reaching angry young people from Prague to Belfast to Indianapolis.

Marc Allan: Do you think that your audience, I mean I’m sure that there were some people there who were really seriously, there’s a lot of injustice in the world, and I’m sure that there are some people who are incredibly affected by it that come to your shows. But do you think that there are a lot of just suburban white kids, or suburban, forget the white all right, suburban kids who are just going “Yeah, I’m mad, I’m mad at my parents. “They don’t give me enough allowance.”

Tom Morello: It’s always been our intention not to strictly preach to the converted, and that reaching people and exposing them to a new set of ideas is something that’s very important. Now some of those people are gonna take some things away with them and some aren’t. That’s, we have no control over that. But reaching those people is very important. I was a suburban kid, and my local record shops I had nothing to choose from. My choices were limited basically to the musical spectrum ranging from KISS to Fleetwood Mac and Donna Summer.

Marc Allan: And everything in between, yeah.

Tom Morello: And that was about it, and there was no Minor Threat. There was nothing like that until years late the Clash and the Sex Pistols filtered through. So it’s really our intention to find those angry young boys and girls out there now and start organizing, is what we’re doing. On this tour we’re attempting to highlight the Leonard Peltier case, are you familiar with that?

Marc Allan: Yeah, sure.

Tom Morello: And pushing an anti-censorship agenda. We’re passing out at the shows literature basically five points to stir up trouble in your hometown. With regards to a least for censorship. At face trying to organize a successful boycott of record retailers who have bowed down to the censor. ‘Cause it’s our belief that the censorship battle can be won at the retail level. So far all of the pressure on the record chains or the Mom and Pop stores have come from the PMRC and the right-wing fundamentalists who are well-connected and well-funded, but they’re not the ones who buy records, people in the Lollapalooza audience or the Cypress Hill audience or the Rage Against the Machine audience who by basically making an example of a few record shops in our community that have bowed down to censorship we can turn the tide back one record store at a time.

Marc Allan: Can you give me a detail or two?

Tom Morello: Yeah, first is identifying the record shops in your community, which either refuse to sell parental advisory stickered albums to people of all ages. Right now there are over 3000 record shops in the States which refuse to sell stickered albums to minors which I think is a travesty because when you’re 15, 16, 17-year-olds are, even younger than that are beginning to put things together and see where they fit to the world around them, to deny people of that age where they may be becoming politically aware music from confrontational anti-establishment artists is criminal, I mean, and that to me is really the whole point of censorship, is to deny access to young people of angry music, or music that questions the status quo. Secondly, once you’ve identified the offending record store to ask them to basically do the right thing support the first amendment and whether it’s stock records that, blacklisted records, or not keep them in an 18, keep them in a pornography section of the shop, and if they refuse to do that which they probably will, a lot of this is based on the assumption they don’t take young people seriously, is to teach them that they should. And by passing out flyers at your local high school junior high, college, and local rock shows or when national acts come through anywhere or dances, wherever record buyers gather simply pass out flyers that say boycott X records basically.

Marc Allan: Does this include Walmart, K-Mart for not stocking “Bad on It”?

Tom Morello: Absolutely.

Marc Allan: Okay.

Tom Morello: They’re some of the principal offenders and some of the ones that need to be dragged down. Obviously, record stores do not care about the first amendment or they wouldn’t be so eager to bow down to the censor, but also obviously I don’t believe that they are ideologically concurrent with the groups like PMRC that claim NWA records or Rage Against the Machine records are causing the moral decay of our society. They just don’t want the hassle, and the idea is to give them a bigger problem, and to start chipping away at what they do care about which is their profit margin, where they become less competitive with the record shops in their area which are doing the right thing and selling any record to anybody, then we’ll get their ears. And also I think a key part of any successful boycott is picketing, picking some public property and on a weekend afternoon during heavy record-buying hours, just you and a couple of friends or as many people as you can get, just carry the same placards that say, “X record store supports censorship. “Boycott them,” is really gonna make an impact not only in changing the record store’s policy but in helping young people to really taste their own power, and to realize that just sitting back on your couch and complaining about censorship or complaining about other problems in your school or in your community or in the world in general isn’t enough, getting up and acting is what needs to be done in order to achieve results. This is an important first step because censorship is an issue which directly affects, it’s domestic repression which directly affects our audience.

Marc Allan: I know we’re supposed to keep these to 15 minutes well I’ll try to get these in, but you bring up so many good points, it’s really hard to do it. To sit here and go, “Well yeah, okay next question.” What I’m interested in really though is how do you know you’re right? How do you know that you’re right, that this is the thing to do and maybe it’s not a good and I’m just playing devil’s advocate here because I believe, I agree with you. I think music should be available to everybody who wants to listen to it, I don’t think anybody ever got hurt by ideas. But how do you now that you’re right? That you’re telling kids the right thing to do?

Tom Morello: Well that’s the issue of censorship. There’s never been one shred of scientific evidence that has demonstrated that any lyric from any rock or rap record has ever adversely affected the behavior of any individual, period. And so then, with that being the facts then you have to start analyzing why it is censors that those who would censor are attacking this music. And I think that there’s a racist element to it. For example, the head office of Musicland had sent out an edict to all the different branches with a blacklist of records, the vast majority of them are rap artists, and it excludes Andrew Dice Clay and people like that, I don’t want to get into the specifics of the validity of the different kinds of art but I mean, there really is a ideological agenda behind the pro-censorship movement. And keeping the confrontational music out of young people’s hands I think is paramount. It’s really all about power, because in order to exercise our right of freedom of expression and our right to exchange ideas, we have to exercise the power in order to do it, and right now the other side has been responsible for most of the pressure. There’s some really good anti-censorship groups out there. Rock Out Censorship is one in the Midwest. So is Parents for Rock and Rap. But there are adult organizations, who are organizing and trying to lobby on the legislative level and what we wanna do is encourage street action by people in our audience to not only draw them in the political arena, but right this particular wrong.

Marc Allan: And I imagine that a large majority of your audience is in their 20s, maybe early 20s, maybe teens, whatever. Is this music gonna last for them? Are they gonna be listening to it when they’re 35?

Tom Morello: Sir, I can’t make that prediction. I really can’t say.

Marc Allan: This is something that I’ve been thinking about for a long time, ’cause I’m 34 years old and even though I don’t listen to much old music anymore just because of my job, I wonder I know I can go back and listen to the stuff I liked and pretty much think that yeah, I was right, this was good. And I wonder if your audience is gonna be able to do the same, and not just you but rap audiences and things like that, is this gonna be the music are they gonna look back on their teen years and go, “I don’t know.”

Tom Morello: Well what, I mean, I think the important test is gonna be what the society we live in looks like in 15 years because of the people in our audience. We’re fighting on both an ideological and a real plane and the organizing that we’re doing now will manifest itself in constantly recreating the society that we live in, and by not shying away from confrontation and by not shying away from struggle hopefully it is, us and the people in our audience who are gonna make this society 15 years from now look very different than it does today. And that will be the background against which they’ll be able to judge their musical taste in their early 20s.

Marc Allan: Two other things, I’ll let you go. What do you think your reaction’s gonna be the first time somebody tells you “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me”?

Tom Morello: I’ve heard that more than once. I’ve heard that more than once already.

Marc Allan: Oh yeah, okay.

Tom Morello: We’ve heard that at a couple of shows.

Marc Allan: The record company?

Tom Morello: They’ve been beaten into submission. I’m not sure how much will they have left to do anything. And the record company I believe knew what they were getting into, certainly in the face of Lollapalooza for example, really dimmed, I enjoyed the tour very much I’m glad that we did it, we got to play with a lot of good friends and artists with integrity all summer long, that’s my own thing. But Lollapalooza really got outflanked from the left they see themselves as this extremely progressive touring entity and when we called them out. Did you hear about the whole t-shirt debacle?

Marc Allan: No.

Tom Morello: Well, we normally sell our shirts for $10. $10 for short-sleeved shirts, $13 for long-sleeved shirts. ‘Cause we know how much it costs to make them and we’re not gonna rip our audience off. And the official Lollapalooza shirt was $23 and they would not let us undercut their $23 price. And so we said, “It would be better for everybody “if you just let us sell our shirts at a fair price.” They feared that given the average audience member given the choice between a $10 shirt and a $23 shirt might choose the $10 shirt and their profits would be cut. I’m sorry, can you hold on one second?

Marc Allan: Yeah, sure.

Marc Allan: Hi, that’s telling you, “Get off the phone. “You’ve got another interview.” Anyway, so what was the upshot of this with the–

Tom Morello: I’m sorry, just one second, I want to make sure I catch this next interview before he goes complaining back to the record company.

Marc Allan: Okay.

Tom Morello: So the fallout of this was we didn’t sell shirts on the tour, because we couldn’t sell them at a price we thought was fair and every day from the stage Zack pointed out exactly where the money from that $23 was going. What percentage was going to the local promoters. What percentage was going to the land proprietors that do nothing but show up at the end of the day with a truck to carry away the kid’s mic. Told them just what a ripoff the $23 t-shirt was. The result was that Lollapalooza t-shirt sales plummeted dramatically all summer long, and they learned a lesson. I don’t know if they learned a lesson. They were taught a lesson, they sat in class. They were schooled. We’ll see next year with things. I think they just weren’t ready for that.

Marc Allan: Well, nobody really thinks that a band is gonna come out and be true to its ideals because there just aren’t very many people who are true to their ideals anymore. So one other question and I’ll let you go. This is for another story I’m working on. What do you think music’s gonna be like in the year 2000? Not your music, just music in general?

Tom Morello: Right, that’s looking ahead to see what music’s gonna be like on our next album. My principal concern is that. Who would have guessed 10 years ago that bands like Primus would be selling a million records now because it’s so completely unpredictable. The only thing I’m fearing is a return to new wave. That’s my one dread.

Marc Allan: Why, did you get rid of all your skinny ties?

Tom Morello: It’s really my one fear and I’m sure it’ll come around. It’ll be very hip and fashionable but I’m scared. By the year 2000 hopefully there will be a healthy dose of musical experimentation and challenging music put out by us and that’s what I can hope for, but who knows? But we’re in a period now where you have artists who have something to say and reaching a lot of people which is rare for the most part in the history of rock music and I am sure there will be a glam backlash some time in the future. But it’s just important for artists to do if they just stick to their guns and keep what we’re trying to do is to really sever the bonds between our music and entertainment, really forge bonds between music and activism in a way that hasn’t been done before, and so we’re really exploring uncharted territory in that regard. And so music may be some completely different thing so in a completely different world by the year 2000. And so I’ll be interested to see where we fit in all that.

Marc Allan: And as you’re hanging up here, is Adlai Stevenson the inspiration for all this since you’re from Libertyville?

Tom Morello: Oh you’ve done your Libertyville research.

Marc Allan: Oh, I just knew him as the man from Libertyville. I’m not old enough to, I wasn’t born in the time that he was from, and I still, I’ve seen enough Adlai Stevenson to stuff to know it.

Tom Morello: Right, not I think that Adlai Stevenson’s much to middle of the road for our political take.

Marc Allan: Okay, tell the record company that interviews with you cannot be done in 15 minutes.

Tom Morello: I’ll let them know.

Marc Allan: Sorry about that, but I appreciate your time.

Tom Morello: Thanks, man.

Marc Allan: Take care.

Tom Morello: Okay, bye.