For Fans of Rage Against the Machine

Every RATM record has something to recommend it, but the self-titled debut is the one where the fury is still raw and the ideas are still arriving at full speed. From the opening locked groove of 'Bombtrack' to the closing spiral of 'Freedom,' it argues its case without once stopping to catch its breath. It is one of the rare debuts that feels like a complete artistic statement rather than a promise of things to come.

Before Morello, the guitar riff was either blues-descended or punk-blunt. He introduced the whammy pedal, kill-switch rhythms, and scratching techniques borrowed from hip-hop DJs, and in doing so invented a sonic vocabulary that has not been equaled. The riff on 'Bulls on Parade' does not descend from anything that came before it. That is an extraordinarily rare thing in rock.

Most politically conscious games hedge their message into both-sides neutrality. Disco Elysium does not. It argues, openly and at length, about class, ideology, and the collapse of revolutionary movements into nostalgia. It is verbose where RATM is percussive, but the underlying conviction, that the system is broken and the question is what you do about that, is the same. The skill checks are just guitar solos in a different medium.

Zack de la Rocha's lyrics were not slogans dropped on top of music: they were specific, historically grounded, and drew from a left political tradition that had its own canon. Howard Zinn's 'A People's History of the United States' is the closest thing to a reading companion the band had. It tells American history from the bottom up, from the enslaved and the colonized and the workers, and it reaches exactly the same conclusions the band reached through sound.