Tom Morello
Tom Morello
Thomas Baptiste "Tom" Morellois an American musician, singer-songwriter and political activist. He is best known for his tenure with the band Rage Against the Machine and then with Audioslave. Morello was most recently a touring musician with Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. He is also known for his acoustic solo act called The Nightwatchman, and his latest group, Street Sweeper Social Club. Morello is also the co-founderof the non-profit political activist organization Axis of Justice, which airs a...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionGuitarist
Date of Birth30 May 1964
CityNew York City, NY
CountryUnited States of America
The real estate agent had to go door-to-door in the apartment building we wanted to rent, asking if it was OK for this interracial family - my mom is white and I was a 1-year-old half-African kid - to live in the apartment building.
There are many fans of hard rock music that have been wrongly pigeonholed as apathetic. This music is not music for the elitist coffeehouse culture in SoHo. It' s rock 'n' roll music for kids across the land, and I think that makes it much more subversive in a way, in that it has the form and the function of a powerful, populist music, but it can carry very incendiary messages.
In my own way, I was a rebellious kid.
Music is not some stuffy college lecture, ... On a good day, Rage Against the Machine is not able to just rock you like a hurricane, but also to fuel the engine with indignation and the band's activist convictions.
We offer a stark contrast to the bland escapism that chokes the charts,
We were playing some RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE and SOUNDGARDEN songs in the past, but we'll probably be playing a wider variety of those this time out. Between RAGE , SOUNDGARDEN and TEMPLE OF THE DOG , there's 11 or 12 records of our own that we could draw from, so it's pretty exciting.
We're very involved in picking the bands. KASABIAN is great. I know less about SEETHER , but I hear they rock.
We've done smaller tours at the beginning of records, we've done Lollapalooza , but this is our first real official AUDIOSLAVE tour.
We've been able to have our cake and eat it, too. Every song, every T-shirt, is absolutely a pure expression of what we want to do. And it connects.
We were all against the war from the very beginning. But now, I think you're seeing more and more that Middle America is turning against the war for reasons that are described in this video. The real human cost, the human tally of this awful war is shown in a very subtle, very real and very humanistic way. That's why it has such a great weight to it, because it personalizes this tragedy that's happening halfway around the world.
We were all against the war from the very beginning, ... But now, I think you're seeing more and more that Middle America is turning against the war for reasons that are described in this video. The real human cost, the human tally of this awful war is shown in a very subtle, very real and very humanistic way. That's why it has such a great weight to it, because it personalizes this tragedy that's happening halfway around the world.
The video tells a very simple story and a very real story. It's a story of a woman who loses her husband and a child who loses his father. That's the simple story. The bigger picture is that the culture of violence at home breeds a culture of violence abroad, and there's a price to be paid for that. And that price is the loss of lives and families destroyed and to sum that up in a three-and-a-half-minute video is something that was pretty incredible.
It's not like we just changed a rapper for a singer, ... We happen to have one of the greatest rock singers of all time.
It's a venue where you can really feel the history. You know, it was one of my first pilgrimages. I went on a rock tour just to go there and check it out.