de la Rocha, Zack (1970- )

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    Rage Against the Machine Won’t Tour Again, Says Brad Wilk

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    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.” More

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      Selena Gomez’s Boldly Revealing Ballad, and 9 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Yves Tumor, Yo La Tengo, Sipho and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage.Selena Gomez, ‘My Mind & Me’Selena Gomez has spoken openly of her mental-health struggles — bipolar disorder, depression, psychosis — in recent years. Her new song, “My Mind & Me,” arrives as the title track of a documentary that reveals some of her low points. The music moves from fragility to determination, from lone, echoey piano notes to a supportive march and a mission statement, as she sings, “All of the crashing and burning and breaking I know now/If somebody sees me like this then they won’t feel alone.” It’s self-exposure in service of empathy, and it tapers back to the hesitant solitude of those piano notes. But the video squanders some of its good will by ending with a product endorsement. JON PARELESLucius, ‘Muse’“Muse,” a one-off single from the indie-pop group Lucius, pairs a cool, clarion arrangement with Jess Wolfe and Holly Laessig’s impassioned vocals — a tension of opposites that gives the song its spark. “I’m calling out your name, a desert that needs the rain,” they sing together on the chorus, a kind of prayer for divine inspiration and, as they put it, “the wild and holy window to the truth.” LINDSAY ZOLADZTiësto featuring Tate McRae, ‘10:35’On the sleek “10:35,” the rising Canadian pop star Tate McRae teams up with longtime EDM mainstay Tiësto (the D.J. whose remix of Calum Scott’s “Dancing on My Own” cover has turned into the Philadelphia Phillies’ victory anthem). McRae’s crystalline vocals are a fitting match for Tiësto’s gleaming, synthesized production, and the song is propelled by an effective push and pull between the anxieties of daily life and the blissful comforts of love. “The TV make you think the whole world’s about to end,” McRae sighs, before a lover’s embrace causes time to stop: “All I know, it’s 10:35 and I can feel your arms around me.” ZOLADZIbrahim Maalouf featuring De La Soul: ‘Quiet Culture’Ibrahim Maalouf, a Lebanese-French trumpeter, composer and producer, surrounds himself with guests — the Cuban musician Cimafunk, the New Orleans band Tank and the Bangas, the jazz singer Gregory Porter — on his new album, “Capacity to Love.” De La Soul makes its latest reappearance on “Quiet Culture,” counseling perseverance and relief from noise: “The quieter we become, the more that we can hear.” Maalouf’s track eases between a jazz ballad and unhurried funk, framing and counterpointing the rhymes with his Arab-inflected melodies. PARELESYves Tumor, ‘God Is a Circle’“Sometimes it feels like there’s places in my mind that I can’t go,” Sean Bowie, who records as the gothic glam-rocker Yves Tumor, begins on the haunting single “God Is a Circle.” Rhythmic, shallow breathing provides the percussive backbone of the track and adds a visceral chill to its nightmarish atmospherics. The song suddenly turns revealing, though, when it dredges up memories of a repressive past: “My mama said that God sees everything/My daddy always taught me to say ‘thank you,’ ‘yes ma’am,’ ’no, sir,’ ‘yes, please.’” The whole thing sounds like an exorcism, or maybe the antic, demonic moment just before one is deemed necessary. ZOLADZAlgiers featuring Zack de la Rocha, ‘Irreversible Damage’Irreversible Damage” is an exercise in seething, sputtering tension from the Atlanta-based rock-hip-hop-electro group Algiers. With a nagging electric guitar loop, a pullulating electronic bass, ominous synthesizer chords and programmed drums that keep disrupting their own beat, the song is an onslaught of abstract lyrics — “No rehab for my jihad/A rapture in a grief storm,” Zack de la Rocha (from Rage Against the Machine) raps — hurtling toward some dire but unknown outcome. When the words are done, the song shifts into a six-beat furor that feels both tribal and apocalyptic. PARELESYo La Tengo, ‘Fallout’In February, the New Jersey indie-rock legends Yo La Tengo will release their 16th album, “This Stupid World,” a place from which the calming, immersive first single “Fallout” offers a brief escape. “I wanna fall out of time,” Ira Kaplan sings on the chorus. “Reach back, unwind.” The band self-produced “This Stupid World” and recorded much of it while jamming together live; as a result, “Fallout” sounds as sumptuously shaggy and comfortingly loose as a favorite autumn sweater. This is the sort of timeless Yo La Tengo song that could have reasonably appeared on any of their albums across the last three decades, but something about its combination of prickly frustration and hard-won serenity feels especially appropriate right now. ZOLADZSipho, ‘Arms’The English songwriter and producer Sipho Ndhlovu revels in drama and desperation, with a voice that regularly leaps between grainy declamation and a tearful falsetto. “Arms” is one long crescendo of regrets overwhelmed by desire. He admits to being “led astray” and implores, “Can’t we share the blame?,” but by the end he’s unconditionally enthralled, brought to his knees by lust. Nearly the entire song uses just two chords but brings in massive reinforcements: strings, drums, voices, electronics and an arena-rock lead guitar, all pushing him closer to the brink. PARELESquinnie, ‘Itch’The 21-year-old songwriter Quinn Barnitt, who records as quinnie, has picked up the mixture of tentativeness and bold declaration, bedroom-pop intimacy and multitrack craftsmanship, that has paid off for Clairo and Olivia Rodrigo. In “Itch,” she juggles desire and fidelity, wondering, “What if I never scratched another itch for the rest of my life?/Would I die satisfied, knowing it can always get better than this?” The production often harks back to Simon and Garfunkel’s pristine guitars and the Beatles’ string ensembles, but her frank self-questioning is new. PARELESOld Fire featuring Bill Callahan, ‘Corpus’John Mark Lapham, a composer from Texas who records as Old Fire, called his 2016 album “Songs From the Haunted South,” a succinct self-description for his suspended-time blends of electronics and roots-rock instruments; his new album is “Voids.” On “Corpus.” he has the songwriter Bill Callahan, whose own extensive catalog is generally much folkier, intoning a few enigmatic lines — “I’ve got a child in Corpus/Hey Mac, can you bring that boat back” — in his somber baritone. Instruments and electronic tones gather around him like darkening storm clouds, and there’s no deliverance. PARELES More

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      Rage Against the Machine Returns for Fresh Battles

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      The rap-rock group’s first tour in more than a decade arrives at a moment of political tension, and opens with the like-minded hip-hop duo Run the Jewels.CHICAGO — Four songs into Rage Against the Machine’s set Monday night at the United Center, the frontman Zack de la Rocha pulled up with a limp, hobbling across the stage while the rest of the band closed out “Bullet in the Head,” a jaggedly groovy anti-propaganda anthem from the band’s 1992 self-titled debut album. Early in the song, he’d been jumping, bounding toward the arena ceiling. At its end, he was carried offstage by crew members.His bandmates followed him, but after just a few moments, they were all back, with de la Rocha planted on a monitor on the right of the stage, his left leg stuck at an obtuse angle.“If I have to crawl across this stage, we’re going to play for y’all tonight,” he said. “We came too far,” salting the exhortation with an expletive.“Far” could have meant the decade-plus since the band last performed live, or the two-decades-plus since it released its last album. It might have meant the intense preparations to return to the road for these shows, the Public Service Announcement Tour, which was originally scheduled to begin in March 2020, but was derailed by the coronavirus pandemic.Tom Morello with de la Rocha, who appeared to sustain an injury early in the show and performed the remainder sitting down.Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York TimesOr perhaps it meant “far” in a more spiritual, conceptual sense — Rage is a band indelibly linked with the 1990s, when its anticapitalist rap-rock filled amphitheaters and festival grounds. It was the defining political act of that decade, its success a reminder that radical ideas could be conveyed through crisp-edged rock, reaching the ideologically aligned and, almost certainly, many who were not. For a band with a comparatively slim discography — four studio albums, one of which is a set of covers — it had outsized impact.Think of the two and a half years since Rage was originally meant to return to the road: the efforts to overturn the 2020 election and the assault on the Capitol, the ongoing scourge of police violence against Black people, the striking down of Roe v. Wade. Maybe “too far” means too far to give up ground now.Rage greeted this current social and political moment with a blistering torrent of controlled chaos in a concert that was part fist-pumping chant-along, part corporeal surrender. For 90 minutes — most of which de la Rocha, 52, conducted from his perch at the side of the stage — Rage was vital and ferocious. “Sleep Now in the Fire” was rowdy and tart, and “Guerrilla Radio” used groove to drive home agitated lyrics. “Killing in the Name,” which closed the show, brought the room to a rousing call and response about police injustice.After “Wake Up,” de la Rocha engaged in a quick sermon. “The ruling class in this country has proved itself unworthy of ruling anybody,” he said, urging the crowd to help “to fight back this fascist tide.”At times the group emphasized its points with text and video. During “Freedom,” the screen behind the band flashed with information about forced birth’s relationship to maternal mortality, lack of parental leave and lack of universal health care, concluding with the exhortation “Abort the Supreme Court.” Videos depicted a police van engulfed in flames, a snarling police dog chasing after a suspect, a helicopter hovering over a boat full of migrants. (This will almost certainly be the only major tour this year at which local activists hand out leaflets outside the venue reading “Who is the Chicago billionaire family who get richer every time a bomb drops? And what can be done about it? #CancelCrown.”)Footage projected behind the band showed a burning police van.Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York TimesTim Commerford, on bass, and the drummer Brad Wilk provided a dense, rolicking foundation for the band’s music.Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York TimesUnderneath the maelstrom was a certain smoothness, underscoring the ways in which the band, still in its original lineup — de la Rocha, Tom Morello on guitar, Tim Commerford on bass and sometime backup vocals and Brad Wilk on the drums — has matured in the three decades since its debut album. In its early days, it could at times be blunt and inelegantly dogmatic. But there is a polished fervor to them now. Morello occasionally displays flash on the guitar, like the D.J.-esque filigree on “Bulls on Parade,” and the combined rhythm section of Commerford and Wilk build a dense, rollicking foundation.Even sitting down, as he did for the majority of the show, de la Rocha remained magnetic. His rapping was more liquid than it was at the outset of his career, finding cleaner pockets and also utilizing the spaces between syllables as effectively as the syllables themselves. His only ostentation was a fuschia-ish T-shirt. (Fear not, though — it was advertising the stridently independent punk label Dischord.)When de la Rocha released his first solo single in 2016, “Digging for Windows,” it was produced by El-P, who had been a stalwart of New York’s independent rap scene in the mid- to late 1990s and also produced scabrous, industrial hip-hop for others, including the Atlanta sage Killer Mike.Killer Mike and El-P — the duo Run the Jewels — opened the show with their own brand of political rap music.Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York TimesRun the Jewels — the duo of El-P and Killer Mike — is the opening act on this tour, making for a bill that pairs different generations and philosophies of agit-rap. Its set was chaotic fun, jittery and rambunctious. Their words poured out in fusillades that were sometimes hard to parse in the cavernous space, but protest manifests in myriad ways — the production that’s both nervy and nervous, the light sense of mayhem and mischief that coats all of their songs.Both outfits have aligned politics. “It’s always us against them, us against the oligarchs,” Killer Mike warned. The duo dedicated “Walking in the Snow” to people who have lost their lives “at the hands of people that were paid to protect them.”But there is a wryness to Run the Jewels, even at their most impassioned. For them, American dystopia is tragicomedy; for Rage, it’s a call to arms.That said, Rage is not wholly without a sense of humor. At the show’s end, the house lights went up, and the group members hugged for a long stretch, then faced the crowd and gazed upon them like long-lost family members they’d just reconnected with. As they left the stage, the speakers in the arena began pumping Bobby McFerrin’s “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” — a bit of irony, a bit of nihilism, a bit of revolutionary optimism. More