Jan 02 2009
Commodifying Revolution! Che Guevara/Rage Against the Machine 17
These four companies account for a combined 80% of all music sales* Rage Against the Machine’s guitarist, Tom Morello, had this say about his band being signed to a major label:
When you live in a capitalistic society, the currency of the dissemination of information goes through capitalistic channels. Would Noam Chomsky object to his works being sold at Barnes & Noble? No, because that’s where people buy their books. We’re not interested in preaching to just the converted. It’s great to play abandoned squats run by anarchists, but it’s also great to be able to reach people with a revolutionary message, people from Granada Hills to Stuttgart**
The difference between Noam Chomsky and Rage Against the Machine is that Chomsky sometimes releases his books through independent publishers (Metropolitan Books and Open Media for example), though this still does justify the sale of revolutionary/anti-establishment writings at such mega-chain, system supporting bookstores as Barnes & Noble and Borders.
*Paul Cashmere, “Universal is The Biggest Music Company of 2005,” Undercover.com.au, January 5, 2006, http://www.undercover.com.au/news/2006/jan06/20060105_universal.html (accessed January, 2007).
** Wikipedia.org, “Rage Against the Machine,” Guitar World, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Rage_Against_the_Machine (accessed January, 2007).
