Rage Against the Machine – "Killing in the Name" (1992)

F*ck you, I won’t do what you tell me

F*ck you, I won’t do what you tell me

F*ck you, I won’t do what you tell me

F*ck you, I won’t do what you tell me

F*ck you, I won’t do what you tell me

F*ck you, I won’t do what you tell me

F*ck you, I won’t do what you tell me

F*ck you, I won’t do what you tell me

You took the words right out of my mouth.

*     *     *     *     *

All four members of Rage Against the Machine were given writing credits for “Killing in the Name,” but it seems that guitarist Tom Morello came up with the record’s characteristic riffs.

Morello and I share a birthday – he was born in Harlem 12 years to the day after I was born in Joplin, Missouri.

His Kenyan father, Ngethe Njoroge, participated in the Mau Mau uprising against the British in the 1950s.  He and Morello’s white mother – a schoolteacher from Illinois named Mary Morello – met at a pro-democracy protest in Nairobi in August 1963.  

Ngethe Njoroge

She returned to the U.S. with Njoroge after discovering she was pregnant.  The couple were married in November of that year, but Njoroge denied that his paternity of Morello two years later and returned to Kenya – where he later became Kenya’s first ambassador to the United Nations.  (Morello’s family included several prominent Kenyan politicians.  One of his aunts was the first female member of the Kenyan legislature, while his great uncle was the first elected president of Kenya.)

Tom Morello with his mother, Mary Morello

Morello went to Harvard College.  While he was there, he formed a band called Bored of Education, which won the Ivy League Battle of the Bands in 1986.  The band’s keyboard player was Carolyn Bertozzi, a Stanford professor who received a MacArthur “genius” grant in 1999, and was a co-winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.  She is the author or co-author of some 600 scientific papers.

*     *     *     *     *

“Killing in the Name” was released on Rage Against the Machine’s eponymous debut album in 1992.  

Click here to listen to “Killing in the Name.”

Click here to buy the record from Amazon.