Rage Against The Machine released Renegades in the United States on December 5, 2000, through Epic Records. Their fourth studio album collected 12 covers, drawing on the hip-hop, punk and rock records that had helped shape the band. “Renegades of Funk” led the release, but the project itself began with a much smaller assignment: a couple of extra tracks for a live album.
ABC News reported before the release that sessions with producer Rick Rubin had expanded beyond those two intended bonus recordings. The band kept working until it had enough material for a separate studio record. That changed the release plan: the covers could stand on their own, while the live album remained a separate project.
The word “covers” only explains part of what they were doing. Guitarist Tom Morello told Premier Guitar in 2008 that most of the music had been developed before the band settled on the lyrics it would accompany. Rage worked up riffs and arrangements, then Zack de la Rocha chose what to sing over them. “Maggie’s Farm” was a specific example: the music began as a Rage jam, with Bob Dylan’s words added afterward. Morello described the challenge as creating something recognizably their own while allowing “the lyrics of the original artist to shine through.”
That approach gave the album a connection beyond its varied source material. Cypress Hill’s “How I Could Just Kill a Man,” Minor Threat’s “In My Eyes” and MC5’s “Kick Out the Jams” came from different corners of the band’s influences. Putting them together made those influences explicit. Rage could acknowledge the artists behind the songs while using the arrangements to show how differently the material could work in their hands.
One selection also reached back into Rage’s own recording history. Their version of Bruce Springsteen’s “The Ghost of Tom Joad” had appeared as a single alongside the band’s 1997 home video. Renegades included a remixed, alternate version, connecting the new collection with a song they had already brought into their repertoire.
The circumstances surrounding the release changed sharply when de la Rocha announced his departure on October 18, 2000. He said the band’s collective decision-making had failed and no longer served its artistic and political aims. The recordings retained his vocals, but the group that had made them had come apart before listeners could buy the album.
Morello said the musicians hadn’t approached the sessions as a farewell. In a 2000 interview later republished by Louder, he described Rubin pushing them to loosen their established habits and experiment. “We were having a great time,” Morello recalled. Asked whether they had expected those sessions to be their last together, he said they hadn’t. His account places creative momentum at the center of the recording process, even as the band’s future became uncertain.
The live recordings that helped set the project in motion eventually followed in 2003 as Live at the Grand Olympic Auditorium. That release included concert versions of “I’m Housin’” and “Kick Out the Jams,” two songs also recorded for Renegades. The studio album had reached record stores nearly three years before the live record it was originally meant to supplement.
