Wake Up (Rage Against the Machine song)

"Wake Up"
Song

"Wake Up" is a song by American rap metal band Rage Against the Machine. It is the seventh track from their self-titled debut album. While never released as a single, it remains a staple of their live shows and is usually played as the last song before the encore. It appeared in the feature film The Matrix.

Composition

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 its director J. Edgar Hoover suggests targets for the suppression of the black nationalist movement. The song also makes references to prominent African-American 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 which paraphrases part of a well-known Bible verse, "whatever a man sows, this he will also reap" (Galatians 6:7). The speech was delivered at the end of the Selma to Montgomery March on the steps of the State Capitol Building in Template:City-state. The final lines in that speech read "How long? Not long, because 'you shall reap what you sow'."

Political speeches

In live performances, the band's frontman Zack de la Rocha frequently makes statement about political and social issues during a quiet section towards the end of the song. (On the record, this part of the song features de la Rocha reciting a memo written by J Edgar Hoover.) At the 2007 Coachella Festival, de la Rocha made a speech during the song, citing a statement by Noam Chomsky regarding the Nuremberg Trials, 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.

The event led to a media furor. 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." Alan Colmes then challenged Coulter for having said of former US President Bill Clinton, "The only issue is whether to impeach or assassinate".

On July 28 at their performance at the Rock the Bells festival in New York City, 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, whom 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 a 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…"

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, saying it makes the rich richer and the poor poorer. He applauded the crowd for voting out former Australian Prime Minister John Howard, then broke into screams of "Wake Up".

At the band's June 8th gig in Dublin, Ireland, De La Rocha gave a speech discussing the current economic system and how multinational companies are blaming the middle/working class for the problems that the multinational companies themselves caused.

In other media

A shorter version of the song was featured in the end credits of the 1999 feature film The Matrix, though the version on the soundtrack is listed at 6:03, just one second shorter than the original track.

"Wake Up" appears in the debut episode of the ABC television series Dirty Sexy Money, first broadcast in 2007.

The song appears on the soundtrack of the action sport video game Dave Mirra Freestyle BMX 2. .