Tom Morello
Tom Morello is a musician best known as the lead guitarist of the now-defunct band Rage Against the Machine and a left-wing political activist. Morello is on the Council of Advisors for Progressive International, a left-of-center organization of international socialist political parties and socialist-aligned activist groups that aims to serve as a guide for the international socialist movement. 1
Contents
Background
Tom Morello was born on May 30, 1964, 2 in Harlem, New York as the son of Mary Morello and Kenyan diplomat Ngethe Njoroge. 3 Morello described his mother as the most radical member of his family who taught kids in a conservative suburb “about Cesar Chavez and the Grape Boycott, Malcom X, anti-colonialist African studies.” 4 He graduated from Harvard College in 1986 with a Bachelor of Arts in social studies. 5
Music Career
Lock Up
Tom Morello began his professional music career as a guitarist for the band Lock Up in the late 1980s. Lock Up’s first LP was “Something Bitchin’ This Way Comes” with the Label Geffen Records. 6
Rage Against the Machine
Morello is most known for being a guitarist in the band Rage Against the Machine, a rap-rock band that released its first album on Election Day 1992. The band was explicitly left-wing, described by the press as supporting “revolutionary” politics. 7 Rage Against the Machine broke up and reunited multiple over the course of its existence. As of January 2024, the band had broken up for the third time. 8
Audioslave
After lead singer of Rage Against the Machine Zack de la Rocha left the band in 2000, Morello and the rest of the band members collaborated with singer Chris Cornell, renaming their band Audioslave. 9 Audioslave existed from 2001 to early 2008 and sold more than 8 million records. 10
The Nightwatchman
While playing with Audioslave, Morello also performed the solo acoustic guitar under the name The Nightwatchman. In 2003, Morello went on a tour as The Nightwatchman with other artists like Billy Bragg and Steve Early on a 13-city music tour supported by labor unions, environmentalist groups, and other left-of-center organizations, including Common Cause and the AFL-CIO. 11
Prophets of Rage
In 2016, Morello created another political activist band called Prophets of Rage, which performed in protest at the 2016 Republican National Convention. 12
Political Advocacy
During the George W. Bush administration and after, Morello criticized the Iraq War as a “disaster” that was started by “criminal behavior.” 13
In 2008, Morello performed at the Service Employees International Union (SEIU)’s Labor Day Festival on Labor Day in St. Paul Minnesota, the site of the 2008 Republican National Convention. 14
Morello also supported the Occupy Wall Street movement, crediting the organization with success in raising the minimum wage in many jurisdictions to $15 per hour and fighting for economic inequality. 13
In 2015, Morello created Firebrand Records, a record label focused on signing and recording radical-left musicians from around the world. 13
In 2016, Morello performed at a protest outside of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio. In the 2016 presidential election, Morello supported Hillary Clinton as “the lesser of two evils” despite her support for policies that led to the “horrific quagmire” of wars in the middle east and her support from Wall Street. Morello labeled Hillary Clinton’s opponent Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) a “dreamer.” 15
In 2017, Morello called then-President Donald Trump a “racist demagogue,” claiming President Trump was “basically calling for ethnic cleansing” for his proposal to ban immigration from specific Muslim majority countries with high levels of terrorism. 15
After the riot at the U.S. Capitol building in January 2021, Morello said that American “came within a baby’s breath of a fascist coup.” Morello added that he grew up “in Trump country,” that Trump supporters are “decent people,” and that “it’s not their fault for being f*cked over by the oligarchy for decades.” 4
In 2024, Morello signed an open letter calling on the Biden administration to restore net neutrality, a left-of-center policy governing internet bandwidth distribution. 16
As of January 2024, Morello regularly retweeted posts from labor unions, including the United Auto Workers (UAW), the California Faculty Association, the AFL-CIO, and SEIU. 17
Morello also sits on the Council of Advisors for Progressive International, a left-of-center organization of international socialist political parties and socialist-aligned activist groups that aims to serve as a guide for the international socialist movement. 1