10 Greatest Guitar Solos Of The '90s

The dawn of the alternative movement was the perfect time to not be the greatest at guitar. Everyone in the Seattle almost seemed to be doing music as a hobby more than anything else, and it was never expected that you would be the greatest on your instrument. It was a different story when you went back down to California though, and Tom Morello was the closest that we got to a guitar anti hero.

Even though Tom put more than enough time and practice into being a more than capable lead guitar player, Killing in the Name was the first time we got to see where his real strengths were. Not willing to play the same kind of leads that he saw in his heroes like Randy Rhoads, the solo here is more about creating a feeling through every note he plays, using digital whammy effects and pedals to create a sound that feels like lasers going off whenever he was playing.

When you go even deeper through Rage's discography, this was a sign of things to come, with every other song being an opportunity for Tom to become the DJ in the band, going on long stretches of instrumental breaks and making glitchy computer sounds with just a guitar and an amplifier. The LA scene just a few years of prior may have given us the likes of Ratt and Dokken, but this is the kind of off the wall solo that feels like it belongs in a Stanley Kubrick film.