Twelfth Global Studies Conference

Abstract

Rage Against the Machine’s lyrics, videography, and album art highlight a superstructure that produces a conflict-ridden American ideology leading to uncritical definitions of criminality within globalized capitalism and cultural justifications for the police order. Their anarchic performativity synthesizes rap, hip-hop, funk, punk, and heavy metal political aesthetics to formulate a critical response to circulation of hegemonic cultural commodities, ideologies, and identities. It has been more than two decades since the release of Rage Against the Machine’s self-titled debut album, and their return to popularity reflects the reiteration of historical contradictions within the political economy as their anarchic, revolutionary aesthetic begins to politically resonate with a public affect of rage caught up in the rise of Trumpism. Rage’s long-time commodification and circulation as a sound product invites the consumption of the regressive listeners: the populist, inverted anger of the American reactionary Right has succeeded in no small part because it made itself, like Rage, directly legible. Hillary Clinton promised to repair and refine the globalized neoliberal machinery; Trump ran on a platform of raging against that machine and won. By turning to sound and performance studies of the Rage scene, we might better understand the affects characterizing new political subjectivizations that resist and also reproduce the police order via aesthetics that echo the dislocations and displacements endemic to global cities in the transnational era; however, Rage also reflects the emergence of new forms of resistance that find oppositional and appositional possibilities through immanent critiques and re-workings of already existing social relations.