Following Rage’s cancelled tour, guitarist Tom Morello has said that the band are “in time of healing”, and there are “no internal discussions” about their current status. Their planned two-song performance was cut to one song when the band attempted to hang inverted American flags from their amplifiers ("a sign of distress or great danger"), [28] a protest against having Republican presidential candidate Steve Forbes as guest host on the program that night.

If the through-line of Rage's third album is the dynamic specific to Los Angeles – where black, white and hispanic communities collide in the city's patchwork of neighbourhoods, and the contrast between the impoverished and super-rich is visibly at its starkest – Born As Ghosts lays bare the implications that being born a couple of hundred yards down the street can have for an individual's future prospects. Would the times benefit from a culturally, spiritually, rocking-ly, potent band like Rage being onstage? Coming in at a concise 150-seconds and featuring some of Tom Morello's most innovative guitarwork – pencils and wrenches reportedly dragged across his strings – it cuts through five centuries of colonialism and straight to the point.Key to the band's identity, Rage Against the Machine has voiced viewpoints highly critical of the domestic and foreign policies of current and previous U. On April 8, 2021, it was announced that the "Public Service Announcement" Tour had once again been rescheduled to the spring and summer of 2022. There were no wars predicated on a lie about weapons of mass destruction, no social media to disseminate revolutionary tweets to the masses, just pockets of left-wing activism fighting against the WTO in Seattle and the IMF in D. At that point, Ted had become this rightwing caricature, but I really loved his records back in the 70s, so I said yes. A jagged anti-authoritarian warcry against the badge-wearing 'chosen whites' that openly highlights the history of collaboration between law enforcement and white supremacism, its message still has more relevance to contemporary America than many "fans" would like to admit.

In August 2008, during the Democratic National Convention in Denver, Rage headlined the free Tent State Music Festival to End the War. On August 11, 2022, the band announced they had canceled the UK and European leg of their tour due to a leg injury de la Rocha sustained during a show on July 11, 2022, in Chicago, IL, [142] described by Glen E. De la Rocha is reported as saying, "We are all bigger and more mature and we do not fall into the problems we faced 10 or 15 years ago.

When the band kicked into “Guerilla Radio,” the lead single from their third album, 1999’s The Battle of Los Angeles, de la Rocha said as much—including a line about the Republican nominee, branding Bush as the offspring of the corrupt former head of the CIA: “More for Gore or the son of a drug lord/None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord! Somehow taking agitprop into the mainstream, their unequivocal message and eye-catching activism – from 1993’s naked protest against kitchen-sink censors the Parents Music Resource Center to starting a riot at the 2000 Democratic National Convention – won over a legion of fans that somehow only continued to swell after their initial disbandment in 2000, due to apparent ‘creative differences’. In May 2018, Wilk stated that "nothing would make him happier" than if the band was to reunite, but stated "It's just really a matter of getting us all on the same page". Despite Morello, Wilk and Commerford's commitments to Prophets of Rage, the latter confirmed in a May 2016 interview with Rolling Stone that Rage Against the Machine had not split up, explaining, "We just do things our own way. By June 11, 2020, every Rage Against the Machine album had entered the top 30 of Apple Music's Rock Albums chart, and their self-titled debut album had entered the Billboard Top 200 at number 174.