Sarah Ditum
The leftie band that’s all the Rage
OShould I go and see Rage Against the Machine when they tour next year? On the one hand, they will be brilliant. On the other, there’s zero chance of me getting through the concert without the band making at least one statement that leaves me in a state of high irritation.
Probably, I decided, a slogan denouncing Israel for “colonialism”. Then I thought maybe it was unfair to pin my purchasing decision on something I’d only imagined them doing, so I checked their tweets — and there was the post about Israel, exactly as expected.
Rage are political, in the radical leftist sense. One of their big influences is Detroit proto-punk band MC5, who matched ferocious guitar attacks with a dedication to Marxism and the Black Panthers (in 2000, Rage covered MC5’s “Kick Out the Jams” on the album Renegades).
Going to a Rage gig means submitting to stand in the vicinity of a higher concentration of men who are liable to tell me to read Chomsky than at any time since I went on a Stop the War march in 2002.
The most annoying thing about being told to read Chomsky is that I already have.
When I first got into Rage in the early noughties, the politics were part of the appeal: I wanted to immerse myself in them. Listening to Rage is an experience in absolute, pummelling clarity. They’re the ones who’ve seen through the charade of America. They know the invisible strings that bind the military-industrial complex together, and they know who shot Martin Luther King too — according to their song “Wake Up”, it was the FBI, in retaliation for anti-Vietnam activism.
As documentarian Phil Tinline points out in his Radio 4 series Conspiracies: The
Secret Knowledge, it makes perfect sense that “Wake Up” found its way onto the end credits of The Matrix in 1999. Both song and film deal in the same paranoid pleasure: that everyone else is living in a fiction, but you are one of the elect to see through the simulation. Rage pull you along the slender trail from America’s obvious corruption and racism to the more tenuous — and exciting — possibility of a malicious system behind it all.
And if there’s an enemy, then there’s something to attack. The real point of the music is its exquisite purity of aggression. Even the song “Revolver”, which sketches an abusive relationship within a thumbnail feminist critique of marriage (“he bought rings and he owns kin”), feels in thrall to the violence. “Her body numbs as he approaches the door,” spits vocalist Zack de la Rocha as the song builds around him until it explodes into — well, presumably into the moment this imagined man lays into the woman. In Rage’s incessant urgings to revolt, it’s always about the confrontation, never what the peaceful post-uprising world might look like.
In truth, the most rebellious thing I ever did under the influence of Rage was in absolutely no way a threat to the establishment. When I worked in a discount CD store in the Moor quarter of Sheffield about 20 years ago, the manager would sometimes put Rage’s “Killing in the Name” on
PART OF BEING A FAN IS THE DESIRE NOT TO BE AN EMBLEM OF EVERYTHING THE BAND HATES
at full volume and close the shop ten minutes early, ushering out customers to the refrain: “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me.” In the circumstances, a more accurate version would have gone: “Fuck you, I will do what you tell me, just very slightly ahead of schedule.”
However much the politics are a serious part of Rage’s music (and the band is deeply serious about its politics), I suspect that for a large chunk of their audience, the insurrectionary aesthetic is taken in roughly the same way as other metal bands’ forays into satanism. It’s received as nihilistic kitsch, basically. And some listeners just don’t care at all: over the last few years, the band’s guitarist Tom Morello has issued repeated tellings-off to rightwing groups for using the band’s music.
The problem for me is, I do take it seriously. I read Chomsky. I just thought he was rubbish. At 40, I know my politics are that most contemptible thing to the left: liberal tending to small-c conservative. You couldn’t get me to sign a petition against first-past-the-post now, let alone convince me we should “destroy all nations” as per Rage’s cover of “Renegades of Funk”. But nobody’s making rap-rock songs about Chesterton’s fence, and I can’t, in all honesty, imagine anything much worse.
There’s a pang for me here, because part of being a fan is the desire to feel like part of something — or at a minimum, not an emblem of everything the band you’re watching hates. When I imagine myself at a Rage concert, I think of journalist Jeffrey Goldberg’s extraordinary profile of Chris Christie, Republican politician and superfan of avowed Democrat Bruce Springsteen. At one point, Goldberg asks Christie how he’d react if Springsteen ever told him: “You absolutely don’t understand me.” Christie’s reply in this imagined dialogue with the Boss is both touchingly vulnerable and hilariously pompous.
“Just because we disagree doesn’t mean I don’t get him,” says Christie. “I get what he’s trying to express and advocate for, I just don’t agree that those are the most effective policies for our government.” I like to think I’d have a cooler response if Rage decided to excommunicate me. Maybe a blunt declaration of my determination to go on enjoying them anyway. Something like: “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me.”
they were comprehensively debunked. His painting is now ascribed to an anonymous Italian follower of Leonardo of the early seventeenth century, more than a century after Leonardo applied the first dabs of paint. The fuss around the painting had given it a degree of fame, so when the
Hekking Mona Lisa came up for auction in June at Christie’s in Paris it carried a not inconsiderable estimate of €200,000€300,000. When the hammer fell, however, it had made €2.9 million.
The price is nothing short of bonkers. What the anonymous “European collector” who bought it has got for his millions is an at best adequate and truncated version of the original (its side columns are missing). It is not good enough to be by the hand of a significant painter and not a single reputable Leonardo scholar links it with Leonardo himself. Even the painting’s celebrity wouldn’t seem to warrant such a sum and €2.9 million is an awful lot for some reflected glory.
It is not as if copies of the Mona Lisa are in short supply either. An exhibition at the Louvre in 1952 listed more than 50 extant versions. In 2019 alone three copies came up for sale: one, attributed to the young Romantic painter Théodore Chassériau (1819-1856), went for €162,500; another seventeenth century version went for €552,500; the third, again seventeenth century, went for a whopping $1,695,000.
What the paintings and prices both testify to is the longstanding fame of the painting and its mystique. These days authenticity is usually prized above all things (which is why a genuine Leonardo silverpoint drawing of a bear, offered this month at Christie’s London, fetched a record £8.8 million) but in the pre-Romantic age copies were seen as barely inferior to the original work.
The earliest copy of all, dated 1503-1516, was painted in Leonardo’s studio by a pupil, probably either Salaì or Francesco Melzi, as work progressed simultaneously but haltingly on the original. Now in the Prado in Madrid, it is based on the same original drawing as the Mona Lisa and is painted on Leonardo’s favoured walnut panels using his high-quality pigments. Its vivid colours, after restoration in 2012, give an idea of what the degraded original must have looked like when fresh.
Another contemporary workshop version, known as the Isleworth Mona Lisa, now owned by a group of investors based in Geneva, shows a slightly younger woman than the Louvre portrait and possibly includes touches from Leonardo’s own hand.
And he may also have contributed to the most intriguing of all the alternative Mona
Lisas, that held by the Musée Condé in Chantilly. It is a preparatory drawing for a painting, made in charcoal c1513-1516 (when Leonardo may still have been at work on the original), and shows a female sitter similar to Mona Lisa and in the same pose. This time, however, she is naked. Given her age, mystery and closeness to Leonardo, she really would have been worth €2.9 million.