10 Weirdest Cover Songs In Rock Music History
2. The Ghost of Tom Joad - Rage Against the Machine
Throughout his career, Bruce Springsteen never really had an insincere bone in his body. Every single song that he wrote has some part of his personality laced somewhere in there, whether it be the yearning to break free from your dead end town or wanting to bring down the higher ups who want to keep you at the bottom. The Ghost of Tom Joad was definitely a darker turn than many might have expected from him, but Rage Against the Machine knew a thing or two about that kind of darkness.
Most of the push to create this song came from Tom Morello, who had been a Springsteen superfan around the time that the band were making the album Renegades. In between the covers of punk and hip hop artists, the Ghost of Tom Joad actually fits surprisingly well in this context, with Zack de la Rocha more reciting these lyrics than actually singing or rapping them.
Although the actual words still hold a lot of water, what's different here is the music, with Tom blowing up the initial chords to brick walls of guitar noise in between the verses. As the words would suggest, this man might be sitting in the campfire light, but what he's waiting for might be bigger than what Springsteen had in mind. This is a man that's sitting by the fire and getting ready for the rapture to come down.