Rage Against the Machine
Four guys from Los Angeles whose eight-line chant of refusal became a rite of passage for every suburban kid with a Discman. Rage Against the Machine fused metal, rap and funk to revolutionary politics, tried to hang upside-down flags on Saturday Night Live, charged the New York Stock Exchange for a video, and broke up in 2000 at the height of it.
Guitarist Tom Morello, bassist Tim Commerford, drummer Brad Wilk and singer Zack de la Rocha came together in Los Angeles in 1991, taking the name from a song de la Rocha had written for his hardcore band Inside Out. Their self-released demo cassette came with a cover of stock-market clippings and a single match taped to the inlay card, and when they signed to Epic, Morello said the label "agreed to everything we asked" and that the band saw no ideological conflict "as long as we maintained creative control." The debut album arrived in November 1992 with Malcolm Browne's Pulitzer-winning photograph of a Buddhist monk burning himself to death in Saigon on the cover. "Killing in the Name," a song with eight lines of lyrics, became its engine; on February 21, 1993, BBC Radio 1 accidentally played the uncensored version, all seventeen expletives, on its Top 40 show.
Lollapalooza 1993 turned a slow seller into a hit, with US sales climbing from 75,000 before the tour to 400,000 by year's end; the album was triple platinum by 2000. Evil Empire debuted at number one in April 1996, and that month on Saturday Night Live the band tried to hang inverted American flags from its amplifiers to protest guest host Steve Forbes, so its planned two songs were cut to one. They opened for U2 in 1997 and gave the profits to causes including a garment workers' union and the Zapatista front, and police in several cities tried to cancel a co-headlining tour with Wu-Tang Clan. The Battle of Los Angeles debuted at number one in 1999 with 450,000 first-week copies, and "Wake Up" landed on the soundtrack of The Matrix.
The year 2000 was the implosion. In January the band filmed "Sleep Now in the Fire" with director Michael Moore on Wall Street until the New York Stock Exchange closed its doors and security escorted them away. In September Commerford climbed the set scaffolding at the VMAs after Limp Bizkit beat them for Best Rock Video and spent a night in jail, and on October 18 de la Rocha quit, saying the band's "decision-making process has completely failed." Morello later admitted they had "fist fights over whether our T-shirts should be mauve or camouflaged." The covers album Renegades went platinum a month after release, and the final shows were September 12 and 13 at the Grand Olympic Auditorium.
After September 11 a Clear Channel memo of "lyrically questionable" songs listed their entire catalog. They reunited at Coachella in 2007, and in 2009 a Facebook campaign sent "Killing in the Name" to the UK Christmas number one over The X Factor's winner, which the band repaid with a free show in London's Finsbury Park. A 2022 reunion tour ended when de la Rocha tore his Achilles tendon; they entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2023 and disbanded for a third time in January 2024.
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Three New York punks who made the first rap album to top the Billboard chart, then spent the 90s outrunning the frat-party joke. The Beastie Boys played their own instruments on Check Your Head, starred as fake 70s cops in the Spike Jonze video for "Sabotage," headlined Lollapalooza, and closed the decade with Hello Nasty and two Grammys.
Wu-Tang Clan
A nine-man crew out of Staten Island that came out swinging in 1993 with kung-fu samples, a logo you could draw on a desk, and a business plan other labels had turned down. Wu-Tang Clan's Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) rebuilt New York rap, the solo albums kept coming, and Wu Wear stores and Macy's racks proved the "W" was a brand.
Limp Bizkit
The Jacksonville metal band that defined nu-metal's MTV dominance. Fred Durst's backwards red Yankees cap and Wes Borland's shock-value body paint made them impossible to ignore. They broke through with a cover of George Michael's "Faith" reimagined as down-tuned metal. They became the sound of late-90s TRL, then evaporated just as fast.
The Matrix
The Wachowskis' sci-fi thriller rewired action cinema with bullet-time, philosophical depth, and Keanu Reeves as an accidental messiah in a simulation. Released March 1999, The Matrix became an instant cultural landmark, launching a franchise and spawning endless "red pill" debates in college dorms.