A staple of 1990s rock music, Rage has disbanded before, including when its frontman quit in 2000. His recent leg injury forced the band to cancel its latest tour.
The rock band Rage Against the Machine is done touring and playing live shows, its drummer said in a social media post on Wednesday.
The band previously canceled the remaining performances of a reunion tour of Europe and North America that had been delayed by the pandemic and were planned for 2022 and 2023. They will not be rescheduled.
“While there has been some communication that this may be happening in the future,” the drummer, Brad Wilk, wrote on Instagram, “I want to let you know that RATM (Tim, Zack, Tom and I) will not be touring or playing live again.”
“I’m sorry for those of you who have been waiting for this to happen,” he continued. “I really wish it was.” He added in the caption: “Thank you to every person who has ever supported us.”
The band, which was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in November, did not immediately respond to a request for comment overnight.
Wilk and his bandmates, vocalist Zack de la Rocha, bassist Tim Commerford and guitarist Tom Morello, formed the group in 1991. The first public performance was in “somebody’s living room” in Orange County, Calif., according to the group’s website.
Rage rose to fame throughout the 1990s with a style that fused metal, punk rock, funk and hip-hop. The band was a commercial success and won critical acclaim, including two Grammy Awards and seven nominations. Its songs were featured in the soundtracks of the 1999 film “The Matrix” and the 2003 sequel, “The Matrix Reloaded.”
The band also embraced a leftist political message — the lyrics of its 1992 song “Know Your Enemy” denounced “compromise, conformity, assimilation, submission, ignorance, hypocrisy, brutality, the elite” — and held occasional onstage protests.
In 1996, while promoting its second album, “Evil Empire,” the band tried to hang upside-down American flags on its amps during a two-song set on “Saturday Night Live,” a performance that was cut short. At the Woodstock ’99 festival, Commerford burned the flag during a performance of “Killing in the Name.”
And in 2000, the band members were escorted from the site of the New York Stock Exchange by security officers after they tried to gain entry into the building while shooting a music video for their song “Sleep Now in the Fire.”
The band has split up before, including in 2000, at the height of its success.
“I feel that it is now necessary to leave Rage because our decision-making process has completely failed,” de la Rocha wrote in a statement at the time. “It is no longer meeting the aspirations of all four of us collectively as a band and from my perspective, has undermined our artistic and political ideal.”
The band’s members did not perform together again until 2007, when they headlined the final day of the Coachella music festival. They later toured in the United States, Europe and South America.
Rage took another hiatus in 2011. Wilk later said in an interview with Pulse Radio that the band’s performance at the L.A. Rising festival that year would be “our last show.”
During the pandemic, Morello wrote a newsletter for The New York Times about music and his life.
In July 2022, the band played its first concert in 11 years, in Wisconsin. That was the start of its “Public Service Announcement” Tour, originally been scheduled for 2020 but delayed by the pandemic.
Rage canceled its remaining tour dates in North America and Europe months after announcing that tickets were on sale. De la Rocha said the reason was that he had torn his left Achilles’ tendon.
“I still look down at my leg in disbelief,” he said in a statement in October 2022. “Two years of waiting through the pandemic, hoping we would have an opening to be a band again and continue the work we started 30 some odd years ago.”
Source: Music - nytimes.com
