Listen to the Tom Morello interview

Angry young men are a staple of popular music. Tom Morello’s anger spills over into activism.

When Morello performs Wednesday in Indianapolis with his band, Rage Against the Machine, he will be pushing an anti-censorship agenda and trying to educate the audience about Leonard Peltier, an American Indian Movement member convicted of shooting two FBI agents in 1975.

In between inciting the crowd to Take the Power Back, Settle for Nothing and Know Your Enemy, the band will hand out fliers explaining how the crowd can successfully boycott stores that refuse to carry “controversial” records.

The Libertyville, Ill., native and Harvard-educated guitarist says Rage Against the Machine is working “to forge bonds between music and activism.” They’re “encouraging street action” in music that combines rap, hard rock, punk rock and funk.

Rage Against the Machine is one of three opening acts for Cypress Hill, the popular rap act whose self- titled debut album sold more than 1.5 million copies. The followup, Black Sunday, debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard magazine Top 200 albums chart and yielded the hit Insane in the Brain.

Morello says touring with Cypress Hill enables his group to keep  connected to the hip-hop community. In the past, Rage has toured with the rap groups Public Enemy and House of Pain.

Rage also opened this year’s Lollapalooza tour, where the show’s organizers learned just how serious the group is about its beliefs.

Morello says the band sells its T-shirts for $10, less than half the price of a typical concert shirt. Lollapalooza, however, set a $23 price for shirts and wouldn’t let Rage sell its items for less.

Took ’em to school

“Every day, from the stage, Zach (de la Rocha, the band’s singer) pointed out where the money from that $23 shirt was going,” Morello says. “What percentage was going to the promoters, what percentage was going to the land proprietor who’d do nothing but show up at the end of the day with a truck to carry away the kids’ money.

“He told them what a ripoff the $23 T-shirt was. The result was that Lollapalooza T-shirt sales plummeted dramatically all summer long. They learned a lesson. I don’t know if they learned a lesson. They were taught a lesson. They sat in class.”

Morello’s activism still leaves a few questions unsettled. For example, should a self-proclaimed “socialist rock musician” make music for a major record label owned by Sony?

“I have no elitist illusions about the romantic purity of independent labels,” he says. “We’re trying to do something that no band on any independent label has ever done, which is to substantially affect the fulcrum of power as it affects our audience. To do that, we decided to cast the nets wide to reach angry young people from Prague to Belfast to Indianapolis.”

Isn’t the band preaching primarily to a suburban audience that perceives its biggest problems to be early curfews and low allowances?

“I was a suburban kid. In my local record shops, my choices were limited to the musical spectrum of Kiss to Fleetwood Mac to Donna Summer. It’s really our intention to find those angry young boys and girls out there now and organize, which is what we’re trying to do.

“There’s never been one shred of scientific evidence that has demonstrated that one lyric from any rock or rap record has ever adversely affected the behavior of any individual. So, to exercise our right of freedom of expression, our right to exchange ideas, we have to exercise the power.”