"When I Unplugged, I Connected to the Truth," by Tom Morello
The New York Times, November 17, 2021
If there is anything that one learns from the day-after-day experience of being alive (and I’m not sure there is anything truly to be learned, but if…) it is that everything is in relation to everything else. Duh-dum! That doesn’t mean that these relations are easily discerned. It doesn’t mean that X relates to Y in a simple, straightforward, 1:1 way. Hardly. Sometimes the nature of the relation does not emerge for weeks or years or even centuries. Sometimes it does not emerge at all. But that doesn’t mean that it’s not there. It’s there, friends and comrades, as sure as the nose on Tom Morello’s face. We should not expect to find cause equated with effect in the manner of a Hollywood production. I do not believe in god. But I do believe that shit moves in mysterious ways.
For instance, Tom Morello now writes a regular column for the New York Times. Okay. Whatever. But hold on, this anointment is a relation too. It confers upon Mr. Morello (as the Times themselves would refer to him) an authority. Thus far, he has chosen to apply this authority to his experience as an arena rocker and his convictions as a political activist. I don’t see any reason why any of us should expect this to change. Both the Times (they are a-changing) and Morello seem content to justify their relation along these lines of intersection: music and politics. Of course, neither the Times nor Morello invented this relation. It is old, old, old. But it owes its present day currency to the legacy of the 1960s: to Bob Dylan and Woodstock and the mindset that we now derisively refer to as “Boomer.” When we picture the March on Washington, or the Vietnam War, the killings at Kent State, or even the election of Richard Nixon (even he has soul), we hear the tunes: the opening harmonic pizzicatos of Stephen Stills’ “For What It’s Worth,” the swirly, modal exotica of the Doors’ “The End,” any of Dylan’s zeitgeist anthems.
Enter Morello, who wears his punk rock, power chord bonafides on his tattoo sleeves. He comes on like the new man, post-Boomer, enlightened in a particular way that we will soon stop calling “woke.” His band, Rage Against the Machine, was hardly flower power and something happening here that ain’t exactly clear. Morello’s music – from his band’s name on down – has always pointed its finger at the clarity of the something happening. Rage Against the Machine believed that they were engineering a relationship that was, against all odds, simple, straightforward, 1:1. But the universe doesn’t play like that. Rage Against the Machine were always exactly as straightforward as the machine itself. Point at the thing and call it “the thing”: product, slave, White, capital, nation, Christ, freedom, hot dog. But, again – it bears repeating – the universe doesn’t play like that.
Remember back in 2012, when then-Vice Presidential candidate, Paul Ryan, claimed (confessed?) to listen to Rage Against the Machine while pumping iron at the Congressional gym? Ryan was the Speaker of the House, and the up-and-coming hope of the neo-con branch of the Republican Party family tree. The very same New York Times called him “perhaps the most influential policy maker in the Republican Party, its de facto head of economic policy.” He no longer holds public office. In 2019, he joined the Board of Directors of Fox Corporation and started the American Ideas Foundation. (A Wikipedia search yields the following message: “Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name. Please search for American Idea Foundation in Wikipedia to check for alternative titles or spellings.”)
At the time (2012), Morello responded to Ryan’s professed affection for his band in the pages of Rolling Stone. “Rage’s music affects people in different ways,” Morello wrote, “Some tune out what the band stands for and concentrate on the moshing and throwing elbows in the pit.” Morello suggests that “what the band stands for” is a simple matter, straightforward, 1:1. But his nearly simultaneous acknowledgment of differing affect pre-empts the simplicity of what (or how) anything stands for anything else. Not to mention Paul Ryan. Morello’s columns for the New York Times evince his ongoing belief in this simplicity of relations.
At this point – although I feel that it ought to be taken as given – I should stress that any criticism herein is directed not at Tom Morello, the human being. I have never met Mr. Morello and have no reason to doubt his sincerity or the goodness of his heart. He appears, from what I can tell, to be continually on the right side of both issues and history. All indications are that he fights the good fight. Criticism, as it arises here, is directed instead at a set of presumptions – aesthetic and ideological – that despite Morello’s apparent decency, infect his positions and opinions as expressed in the “paper of record.” Whether such criticism is merely nit-picking or of some degree of greater importance will, of course, be for you, the reader, to decide. This too is a matter of relation, of differing affect, and is far from simple.
Hand in hand, then, we cross intrepidly into the breach.
Morello’s piece, dated November 17, is titled “When I Unplugged, I Connected to the Truth.” Already, in the conversational title, we’re up against it. Immediately, we recognize the big claim lurking, impossible to solve in a newspaper column. What truth? Whose truth? Is there, in fact, a truth; a truth we can reliably call “the truth,” Mr. Morello? The problem that seems to rise above the level of nit-picking is that, whether we’re talking about politics or music, we have some obligation to start from the understanding that there is no universal telos. All roads do not lead to Rome, nor Ryan, Republicanism, or Rage. There are lots of roads. They lead to lots of different places. And while all places may not be equal, none of them is “the place.” Morello’s essay hangs on a distinction between what he calls “roof-rattling, gut-trembling rock ‘n’ roll” – meaning electric guitar music – and acoustic folk music that Morello releases under the name The Nightwatchman. Morello’s assertion is that as the Nightwatchman, he began “to unearth who I really was as an artist. […] The four Nightwatchman records were an unveiling, and probably the truest expression of self in my catalog.”
The acoustic music is the truth to which he connected. The nature of this truth is that it lies buried in “dark existential ruminations, a purging of, or at least a wrangling with, demons I had not been conscious of.” Morello narrates his transition from “affable, reliable, cheery rocker,” to someone newly able “to peek into my own soul.” Carefully pursuing Morello’s claims, we can reasonably conclude that, for Morello, "the truth" apparently resides in the individual soul. Yet, wouldn’t we be justified in anticipating that Paul Ryan would also claim the existence of something called “the truth”? That he would locate it in the individual, and more precisely in that individual’s soul? Does not the conservative wing of the Republican party stake its strategy and its ideology (another relation) on just such an individual truth of the soul? Let’s zoom out – the big tent to which political parties love to allude: Does not America itself stake its identity on this individual truth of the soul?
Wouldn’t the political program conjured by Morello – a politics of workers and prisoners, of women and BIPOC communities, of migrants and Group of 8 protestors – wouldn’t such a politics live not in the individual soul, but in the collective will? Wouldn’t such a politics reject any notion of a definite article-“truth” in favor of a dozen or a hundred indefinite article-needs, -wants, and -helping hands? After the brief, energetic blossoming of flower power, so many of the movements' leaders – from Jerry Rubin to Eldridge Cleaver – embraced a philosophy of self, abandoning the collective struggle to which they had dedicated their youth, in favor of answering the individual mandates of capitalist self-realization. We’ve played this game before. It hasn’t gone well for us. Remember Ronald Reagan? It ain’t just nit-picking.
The narrative of Morello’s essay starts from the heights. Morello is already and unquestionably a rock-god, firmly entrenched in some Z101-all-the-hits-from-yesterday-and-today-Olympus. Upon stumbling on an unnamed (why unnamed?!) kid playing his acoustic guitar at a teen shelter open mic, Morello experiences his road-to-Damascus epiphany. This kid’s out of tune guitar and shaky voice is more real than the amplified, inflated arena rock that Morello and his bandmates are touring. Somehow, Morello fails to realize that the exaggeration of his electric music is a product of its, and his, relation to capital. He writes that he took up acoustic music “in defiance of good sense and commerce.” The market demands the bluster of Rage Against the Machine. Only such bluster can fill the arenas. Only such bluster can accompany the workout regimen of the United States Speaker of the House. (Pelosi’s probably rocking Slipknot as we speak.) Morello is deaf to this truth: thousands of rockers less fortunate than he, sing their truthful souls, their soulful truths, every night in basements and garages and seventy-five person capacity venues from San Diego to Halifax and beyond. Some are desperate to answer capitalism’s call and to land where Morello has landed. Others, however, play for wholly different reasons – reasons they probably can’t put a finger on; reasons that have nothing to do with truth or even with reason. They get together with others, unsure of what they want or how they’ll get it. They flail and flounder until something emerges from their erratic efforts. To their wonder, even if to no one else’s, this something takes on form and verve and occasionally meaning. It is not “the” or even “a” truth, but it is something, taking place where nothing had previously taken place.
Tom Morello, is this not your political vision? Is this not how we build movements and deconstruct the enmity and malice of the way things are? Is this not how we rage against the machine? The amplified song that is just now – this instant – bubbling to the surface in the collective awareness and abilities of four kids in Fargo or Talahassee or Searchlight, Nevada. This is a new node in a network of relations. Maybe they were inspired by the Sex Pistols or, like you were, the Clash. Maybe it was Creedence or Patti Smith or Bikini Kill or Billy Eilish. Maybe one of them is reading the Autobiography of Malcom X or Rimbaud or Angela Davis. Maybe one of them will see The Battle of Algiers at a friend’s house next week. Who knows?! Maybe one of them will read your column in the New York Times and tell her bandmates about what you said. Maybe they’ll get what you meant. Maybe they’ll get it all wrong and make something better than you or the Clash or even god ever could.
