Rage Against The Machine released The Battle of Los Angeles on November 2, 1999. Produced by Brendan O’Brien, their third studio album collected 12 songs, including “Testify,” “Sleep Now in the Fire” and lead single “Guerrilla Radio.” That single contained a guitar part Tom Morello initially thought he wouldn’t be able to reproduce onstage.
The sessions themselves left plenty of room for having fun. “We tried to record a song a day,” Morello told SonicNet’s Gil Kaufman in an interview published when the album arrived. Between takes, the band played touch football and video games. Morello described a clear distinction between the seriousness they brought to performing and the way they spent the rest of their time together. Making an angry record didn’t require staying angry around the clock.
Their growing audience also gave them more room to pursue their ideas. Morello explained that the band’s commercial success had expanded what they could accomplish beyond their beginnings in a North Hollywood rehearsal room. With Zack de la Rocha addressing subjects including sweatshops and consumerism, the challenge was to connect that reach with the convictions that had driven Rage from the start.
Morello’s experiments created practical problems once the songs had to leave the studio. In a Guitar World interview originally printed in December 2006, he explained that the “Guerrilla Radio” solo combined two recorded parts: one used a talk box, while the other ran different notes through a wah pedal. Playing it live meant finding a new method. He worked out a combination of wah and Whammy settings, then used his guitar’s toggle switch to manipulate the sound.
“Voice of the Voiceless” required an even more specialized solution. Its bagpipe-like solo was difficult enough to recreate that Morello had an Ibanez guitar built specifically for live performance, incorporating Whammy technology into the instrument. That let him manipulate feedback while chasing the sound he had captured on the record. The recording became something to solve again with an audience in front of him.
The band faced a different question about what those audiences took away from the music. Speaking with CMJ New Music Report ahead of the album’s release, Morello rejected the suggestion that listeners attracted primarily by the riffs were a problem. He remembered discovering politically engaged music through his own love of heavy bands, and understood that the physical excitement could be someone’s entry point. “We don’t play music that is for intellectuals in coffeehouses,” he said. For Morello, the political passion helped explain why the band played with such intensity.
That combination reached the top of the American album chart. The Battle of Los Angeles entered the Billboard 200 at No. 1 on the chart dated November 20, 1999. Rolling Stone and Time also selected it as their best album of the year.
Rage’s first breakup followed in 2000, and the covers collection Renegades arrived that December. Recognition for The Battle of Los Angeles continued afterward: the album received a Best Rock Album nomination at the 2001 Grammy Awards, while “Guerrilla Radio,” complete with the studio experiment Morello had to reinvent for concerts, won Best Hard Rock Performance.
