10 Perfect Rock And Roll Protest Songs

Every great Rage Against the Machine usually stems from some type of anger boiling up from deep inside of them. Like Zack de la Rocha said on the song Freedom, anger is a gift, and using those pent up emotions to actually enact change in the world is sometimes the only way you can wake your audience up from what's really going on behind the scenes. It may have started out with crooked cops on songs like Killing in the Name, but The Battle of Los Angeles kicked things off with Zack gunning straight for the big wigs in Washington.

Before you even look at the music video, the raw sounds of Testify get you ready for the more abrasive lyrics to follow, as Zack talks about a country that continuously spits on you and does everything it can to maintain the status quo, with the rich still profiting off the backs of the poor and everyone left to suffer down at the bottom. Compared to the early days of Rage's music, this is where things jumped up a notch, with Zack asking for some sort of witness as he lets out his anger through gnashed teeth.

We may have been entering a new millennium, but Testify was the cautionary tale of what could happen if politics continued to go downhill. The calendar may have read the year 2000 when this song came out, but there's a fine line between the politics of the day and the politics of 1984.