Freedom?? Yeah! Right!!

There's a live video of Rage Against the Machine(hereafter referred to as RATM) on stage, in Europe, I think, playing "Freedom." The stage looks like it's the size of a football field, and there's about a million people in the audience, all jumping up and down at the same time. Tom Morello is standing there with his guitar high on his chest, wearing a hat, just jamming out, and Zach de la Rocha can literally run across the stage it's so damn big. "Freedom," being the end of the eponymous RATM record, lasts about 5 minutes and it's all energy. At the end of the live version, Zach de la Rocha is LYING ON THE STAGE. It's like the damn song killed him. I remember being so impressed by that performance, and this song, especially when I was learning how to play the guitar.

"Your anger is a gift!"

This is also bolstered by the fact that I learned about this band when I was in Catholic school. I had just moved in to town and my good new friends at the school were all about Rage Against the Machine. Even to the point where one of the kids had his Rage CD taken away from him in Computer class, as he was listening to it on the (gosh!) CD-ROM drive in the computer. "This content is inappropriate for a school environment," spoke the teacher.

"What does the billboard say, 'Come and play' 'Come and play', forget about the movement?"

Maybe there wasn't a movement as I was trying to move through 7th grade, but it was still damn cool. It's too bad we never got a chance to start burning our school uniforms in protest (for the movement) et cetera.