10 Perfect Rock Guitar Riffs
6. Killing in the Name - Rage Against the Machine
You ever have those things that shouldn't work but totally do? Like how everything about the idea seems wrong and yet comes together perfectly when put into the right context? Yeah, Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine has practically molded his entire damn career on that sentiment alone.
Like almost all of Rage's songs, Killing in the Name is played in drop D tuning, which turns the lowest tuned strings into an open chord if you bar with one finger. But that's not what Tom does on this tune. Throughout Killing in the Name, he offers a smorgasbord as to how much you can do with just tuning one string differently, from the machine-like sounds coming out of the intro to the primal groove when the beat finally kicks in.
As much as Tom gets a reputation for being the DJ in RATM for his outlandish approach to soloing, there's a lot more rhythm behind his sound as well. When we reach the breakdown before the chorus, the way he links up with Brad Wilk on the triplet rhythms is so tight that you have to wonder whether they actually share a brain. It would have had to work that way though. If you're making a song about going to war against injustice, you've got to come up with the goods.