Rage Against The Machine (RATM)

who here like rage against the machine? a lot of people ask me what music i like, and when i say ratm, they just look at me all confused. so i got to ask some of you, if you know who ratm is, and if you do, do you like them? that is the question as shakespear would say.(their a really great band,and my #1 favorite.)

also here is a vid of them perfomring their song testify, at the 2000 MTV VMA's

i have heard of them. there all right

didnt weird al make a parody from one of there songs

Who hasn't heard of them? Awesome band.

well everyone at my school has not heard of them. and they are unquestionably the best band in the world. tom morello is a reincarnation of hendrix i believe. in some ways, but not an exact replica. i should have said this the first time. i meant tht they both are really good, and tom is sort of like hendrix when you think about what they can do on guitar, hendrix is a wizard, and tom is liek a scientist. but yeah tom is never going to amount to what hendrix is. no one will, and no one can. i just meant that tom is really good, and he COULD be compared to hendrix, but is not.

Huh, that surprises me given that a lot of their songs still get plenty of airtime on mainstream radio. Either way, they're certainly a great band, though I don't consider them quite as great as you do I guess.

Tom Morello is a great guy. In addition to being an awesome musician, he's an activist who does great work with Axis of Justice (the orginization he formed with Serj Tankian of System of a Down, my personal favorite artist and band). I also like his solo music a lot. I'm all for hardrock, but more and more I've been getting into more mellow stuff, and "the Nightwatchman's" more folk based sound is awesome.

I wouldn't say they are the best band in the world, but I do like their music. I don't mind the activism as long as it doesn't interfear with the music. Sometimes they cross that line.

Never. Fucking. Say. That. Again. NEVER. Tom Morello has never, and will never, be as good as Hendrix. PERIOD.

Rage Against the Machine is a good band, and they deserve praise. It's depressing that a lot of younger people have no idea who they are. RATM definitely kicks the asses of Linkin Park and Fallout Boy and those other shitty bands that are popular now.

That Tom Morello comment is a big no-no. I give a good argument as to why, but you didn't bother so why should I.

As for my opinion on Rage Against the Machine, they're a really good band, if only they would just fucking tour in Texas. They came in for one show and I was out of state at the time.

My Tom Morello comment?

ok well its obvious u are a hard core hendrix fan. well when i said that, i was thinking that hendrix reinvented waht the electric guitar can do, and so did tom morello. so since they both reinvented what the guitar can do, i gues i really meant they are similar. but yeah if tom wanted to do half of what hendrix did in the short time he was alive, it just wouldnt happen.

Thanks for that. If Tom Morello lears to play with his penis, i'll accept him as 'somewhat' like Hendrix.

No, Nzephier's comment, I'm no hardcore Hendrix fan, but I do know enough to validate any claims for comparison to him, Tom Morello is not comparable to Jimi, He's good, just not comparable.

I think that's a good way to put it in the literal sense, not comparable. They were both good, but completely different types of players. Hendrix had amazing skill, and was probably the best "feel" player to ever play the electric guitar. He could just pick up the thing, feel the music, and play like no one else. He played some imaginative stuff, like the famous national anthem from Woodstock, but I don't think he really revolutionized, he just played better than everyone else.

Morello, on the other hand, was really interested in new sounds and did a lot to advance extended techniques and technology that would produce these. Skill wise, I don't think Morello has the same ease of technique and sound as Hendrix, and while he can improvise, he also doesn't have the same ability to pick up the guitar and just play something amazing off the top of his head. However, unlike Hendrix, Morello was legitimately playing his guitar differently from everyone else at the time and doing new things. He created a unique sound more so than Hendrix that continues to influence music today.

Asking who is better is like trying to compare Mozart and Varese, it's difficult to make sense of, and depends on where you place value.

That may all be true, but Hendrix had a great impact on music as well, possibly exagerated by his untimely death...but I think we've had similar arguments before on these forums.
Sometimes I wish Jimi Hendrix wasn't as good as he was because of the way his name is thrown around these days. It's great to apreciate an artist, but not so much that you praise the person themselves above the music they made. Which isn't to discredit Hendrix at all; after all, it was his music, and he had an amazing amount of talent.
More on the subject, I agree with you about the Morello bit.

I don't want to shoot you down, but the biggest thing I was going to argue was the influence and impact between Jimi Hendrix and Tom Morello, with Jimi being the bigger influence and Tom being...not very influential. I'm not saying Tom isn't influence someone's music, everything in the world can be of influence to something, he's just not influential enough to be considered influential.

I would instead say that Hendrix is often credited as an influence because he was well known and extremely good, but that he didn't create a style like Morello did. Hendrix was a continuation, and perhaps the pinnacle, of the blues/jazz rock style of guitar playing. If you disagree and think that he completely invented a new style of guitar playing, then please tell me which pieces best represent this, and I will make sure to listen to them.

Tom Morello, on the other hand, pretty much had his own style of playing that wasn't really used anywhere else until people started to copy him.

I think we are viewing influence in two different ways: influencing people/groups vs. influencing sound.

Is Hendrix influential in the sense that people copied him and aspired to be like him? Yes. Is Hendrix influential in the sense that created a new and different way of playing the guitar? I would say no.

What do you mean he didn't influence how people played guitar?

You take a look back at how people jammed before him, and there is no one who played the way he did before he broke out.

Edit:
Exampl - His rendition of the Star-spangled banner.

He did influence people, because he was a master of improvisation and great player. He made people want to play like him. But I don't think he introduced anything fundamentally new to guitar playing. Even in his national anthem, which is an uncharacteristic piece for him in many ways. He uses feedback, which hadn't fully caught but was also not really pioneered by him, and improvises with skill beyond pretty much any other guitarist. But essentially, I think his style is basically the style of his time, the same used by bands like Cream, the Yardbirds, Black Sabbath(pre-metal), and the like. He was just better at it.



I'm not sure that anyone has since. I think he was just incredibly talented in "feel" playing in improvising in a way that hasn't been seen since.



This is also an unusual piece and pretty different from most of his recorded stuff. Obviously live we have less evidence.


I still think it is similar to comparing Mozart(genius and natural who just seemed to intuitively understand music in a way beyond his peers) vs. Varese(sonic experimenter who searched for new sounds from his instruments). The results are even the same: everyone remembers Mozart and talks about how he changed music. Varese is respected by a few people, mostly within the classical music world, and while he did much more to change the shape of music than Mozart, it's not credited nearly as much.