Wake Up (Rage Against the Machine song)

The lyrics discuss racism within the American government and the counter-intelligence programs of the FBI; a spoken portion of the song is taken from an actual FBI memo in which J. Edgar Hoover suggests targets for the suppression of the black nationalist movement.^[1] The song also makes references to prominent black figures targeted by the government such as Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., and goes as far as saying that the government arranged their assassinations.

The closing lines to the song are:

"How long, not long because what you reap is what you sow"

These lyrics refer to a speech made by Martin Luther King Jr. called How Long, Not Long at the end of the Selma to Montgomery March on the steps of the State Capitol Building in Montgomery, Alabama. The final lines in that speech read "How long? Not long, because "you shall reap what you sow."

The opening riffs of the song are somewhat reminiscent of the opening chords of the Led Zeppelin song "Kashmir". A shorter version of the song is memorably featured at the end of the 1999 film The Matrix, though the version on the soundtrack is listed at 6:03, just one second shorter than the original track. This is a nod to both the band's name (the main antagonists of the movie are sentient machines) as well the name of the song (in the movie, humans are kept dormant so that they can be used to produce energy for the machines). The song is notable in that it features multiple musical parts, in an almost suite-like manner, and runs over 6 minutes. Its structure is very similar in this way to that of "Freedom," another track from the album, and it is a formula Rage would use many times throughout their career. There is also heavy use of quiet-to-loud dynamics, which was common in music during the early nineties.

Since their early live performances Zack has frequently used the final breakdown in the song to make statement about political & social issues, much in the same way as the album recording. At the 2007 Coachella Festival De la Rocha made a speech during the song, citing a statement by Noam Chomsky regarding the Nuremberg Trials,^[2] as follows:

A good friend of ours once said that if the same laws were applied to U.S. presidents as were applied to the Nazis after World War II […] every single one of them, every last rich white one of them from Truman on, would have been hung to death and shot—and this current administration is no exception. They should be hung, and tried, and shot. As any war criminal should be. But the challenges that we face, they go way beyond administrations, way beyond elections, way beyond every four years of pulling levers, way beyond that. Because this whole rotten system has become so vicious and cruel that in order to sustain itself, it needs to destroy entire countries and profit from their reconstruction in order to survive—and that's not a system that changes every four years, it's a system that we have to break down, generation after generation after generation after generation after generation…Wake up.

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The event led to a media furor.^[3] A clip of Zack's speech found its way to the Fox News program "Hannity & Colmes". An on-screen headline read, "Rock group 'Rage Against the Machine' says Bush admin should be shot." Ann Coulter (a guest on the show) quipped, "They’re losers, their fans are losers, and there's a lot of violence coming from the left wing."

On July 28 at their performance at the Rock the Bells festival in NYC, they made another speech during Wake Up just as they had done at Coachella. During this, De La Rocha made another statement, defending the band from Fox News, who he alleged misquoted his speech at Coachella:

A couple of months ago, those fascist motherfuckers at the Fox News Network attempted to pin this band into a corner by suggesting that we said that the president should be assassinated. Nah, what we said was that he should be brought to trial as war criminal and hung and shot. THAT'S what we said. And we don't back away from the position because the real assassinator is Bush and Cheney and the whole administration for the lives they have destroyed here and in Iraq. They're the ones. And what they refused to air which was far more provocative in my mind and in the minds of my bandmates is this: this system has become so brutal and vicious and cruel that it needs to start wars and profit from the destruction around the world in order to survive as a world power. THAT's what we said. And we refuse not to stand up, we refuse to back down from that position not only for the poor kids who are being left out in the desert to die, but for the Iraqi youth, the Iraqi people, their families and their friends, and their youth who are standing up and resisting the U.S. occupation every day. And if we truly want to end this fucking miserable war, we have to stand up with the same force that the Iraqi youth are standing up with every day, and bring these motherfuckers to their knees. Wake up…^[4]

At the Voodoo Music Festival, during the performance of "Wake Up," De La Rocha gave a rousing speech about his experience in the 9th Ward of post-katrina New Orleans. De La Rocha stated that the United States is fighting two wars: one in Iraq and one "against the people of New Orleans," before breaking into screams of "Wake Up!" at the end of the song.

At the Big Day Out in Australia 2008, De La Rocha gave a speech discouraging globalism, as it makes the rich richer, and the poor poorer, and applauded the crowd for voting out former Australian Prime Minister John Howard, then broke into screams of "Wake Up"

v • d • e Rage Against the Machine

Tim Commerford · Zack de la Rocha · Tom Morello · Brad Wilk

Demo	Rage Against the Machine (demo tape)

Studio albums	Rage Against the Machine · Evil Empire · The Battle of Los Angeles · Renegades

Live releases	Live & Rare · Live at the Grand Olympic Auditorium

Singles	1993: "Killing in the Name" · "Bombtrack" · "Bullet in the Head" · 1994: "Freedom" · "Year of tha Boomerang" · 1996: "Bulls on Parade" · "People of the Sun" · "Down Rodeo" · "Tire Me" · 1997: "Vietnow" · 1998: "The Ghost of Tom Joad" · "No Shelter" · 1999: "Guerrilla Radio" · 2000: "Sleep Now in the Fire" · "Testify" · "Calm Like a Bomb" · 2001: "Renegades of Funk" · "How I Could Just Kill a Man"

Related articles	Full discography · Inside Out · Lock Up · Audioslave · The Nightwatchman