Quotes by Tom Morello - Page 2

If aliens came down and challenged us to a Battle of the Bands to decide the fate of Planet Earth, I would feel very confident putting early Van Halen forward as our champion.
Tom Morello / Guitarist
Battle
Champion
Fate
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A good song should make you wanna tap your foot and get with your girl. A great song should destroy cops and set fire to the suburbs. I'm only interested in writing great songs.
Tom Morello / Guitarist
Girl
Song
Writing
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The one thing that Hendrix had that is unique among extraordinary guitar players is he had songs that were on the radio. His guitar genius was exposed to the masses by 'Foxy Lady.'
Tom Morello / Guitarist
Exposed
Hendrix
Guitar Players
Lady
Masses
The One Thing
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Bashing the elite is what I'm all about in my music because they absolutely don't deserve the privileged position that they're in, and we're seeing this around the globe right now.
Tom Morello / Guitarist
Globes
Music Is
Position
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Music and the arts feed our souls, but a decent wage puts food on the table. Musicians, fans of music, and grassroots political organizations are a potent force to fight for social justice.
Tom Morello / Guitarist
Art
Fighting
Organization
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I don't want to leave this mess around my children to clean up. I want to swing absolutely as hard as I can to straighten things out before they get to the age where it starts hurting them.
Tom Morello / Guitarist
Children
Hurt
Swings
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Things like rebellion and resistance to authority are absolutely as much a part of the human experience as love and cars are, and it's a part that doesn't get covered very much in pop music.
Tom Morello / Guitarist
Car
Rebellion
Resistance
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As a guitar player, I've been influenced by dance music - it was Crystal Method and The Prodigy back in the day. I would listen to those textures and try to approximate them on the electric guitar.
Tom Morello / Guitarist
Dance
Dance Music
Electric
Electric Guitar
Guitar Player
Method
Music Guitar Day
Approximate
Crystal
Influenced
Textures
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Baseball is a business. Sure, we fans are wistful dreamers who fantasize about glory on the diamond, but to the people who hold the purse strings, the Cubs win the economic World Series every year.
Tom Morello / Guitarist
Baseball
Cubs
Diamond
Economic
Fans
Glory
Series
Strings
World Series
Business World People
Hold
Purse
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The reason why many young people in the Vietnam War era were active was their lives were threatened by the draft and they were going to perhaps be forced to go overseas and fight in an immoral war.
Tom Morello / Guitarist
War
Fighting
People
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Whenever I set out in a new direction, whether it's with a new band or being a frontman or writing a comic book or entering into movie scoring or anything like that, I wouldn’t say that I do it fearlessly...
Tom Morello / Guitarist
Band
Book
Writing
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My job is to steel the backbone of people on the frontlines of social justice struggles, and to put wind in sails of those struggles. And people who are fighting on a, on a daily basis, at a grass roots level.
Tom Morello / Guitarist
Fighting
Justice
Struggle
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Well, I don't care for Paul Ryan's sound or his lyrics. He can like whatever bands he wants, but his guiding vision of shifting revenue more radically to the one percent is antithetical to the message of Rage.
Tom Morello / Guitarist
Band
Sound
Vision
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Charles Manson loved the Beatles but didn't understand them. Governor Chris Christie loves Bruce Springsteen but doesn't understand him. And Paul Ryan is clueless about his favorite band, Rage Against the Machine.
Tom Morello / Guitarist
Band
Clueless
Manson
Rage
Springsteen
Against
Understand
Beatles
Bruce
Bruce Springsteen
Loved
Favorite
Charles
Chris
Governor
Machine
Paul
Paul Ryan
Ryan
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Charles Manson loved the Beatles but didn’t understand them. Governor Chris Christie loves Bruce Springsteen but doesn’t understand him. And Paul Ryan is clueless about his favorite band, Rage Against the Machine.
Tom Morello / Guitarist
Band
Clueless
Machines
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My music is - there's no litmus test, there's no political litmus test for listening to it - but I am never going to compromise one iota to satisfy with someone who's uncomfortable with the ideas I feel in my heart.
Tom Morello / Guitarist
Compromise
Ideas
Listening
Political
Uncomfortable
Music Heart I Am
Iota
Litmus Test
Satisfy
Test
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I grew up on misogynist, devil-worshipping heavy metal music, and then it was groups like The Clash and Public Enemy that reminded me that there were a different set of ideas that could be expressed with great music.
Tom Morello / Guitarist
Clash
Great Music
Heavy
Heavy Metal
Music Great Me
Expressed
Metal
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The way corporate media likes to portray America is as a homogenous whole that high-five's each other at the Super Bowl. But what we have is a grotesque disparity between the rich and poor that is only getting wider.
Tom Morello / Guitarist
America
Corporate
Disparity
Grotesque
Likes
Media
Super Bowl
Way
Bowl
Portray
Super
Wider
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What draws people to the instrument is the love for guitar players that play a certain way. I mean, even though it wasn't intentional, it was hard to avoid copying Eddie Van Halen. He was basically the *bleep* back then.
Tom Morello / Guitarist
Guitar
Mean
Player
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I think you might be considered a terrorist for asking the question! It can be so broadly defined now. And the thing is, you’re not privy to those decisions. Anyone who expresses any opinion can be considered a terrorist.
Tom Morello / Guitarist
Asking
Decision
Thinking
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With guitar, I'd always mixed more sounds that occur in hip-hop, or occur on Crystal Method records, or occur at the zoo - so I've never been sort of tethered or have limited myself to the traditional rock n' roll vocabulary.
Tom Morello / Guitarist
Method
Records
Traditional
Vocabulary
Crystal
Myself Guitar Always
Limited
Mixed
Rock
Occur
Sounds
Zoo
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Racism is a problem, economic inequality is a problem, not enough rock n' roll on the radio is a problem. But all those problems will become insignificant when the oceans rise in a way that threatens organised human activity.
Tom Morello / Guitarist
Activity
Economic
Enough
Human Activity
Inequality
Insignificant
Organised
Problem
Racism
Radio
Rise
Those
Human
Rock
Oceans
Threatens
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I feel fortunate to have made records during an era where people actually bought music. But I have friends in struggling up-and-coming bands now that will certainly never be able to pay the rent, because music has been devalued.
Tom Morello / Guitarist
People
Records
Struggle
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The real estate agent had to go door-to-door in the apartment building we wanted to rent, asking if it was OK for this interracial family - my mom is white and I was a 1-year-old half-African kid - to live in the apartment building.
Tom Morello / Guitarist
Kids
Mom
Real
Agent
Estate
Real Estate
Rent
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I saw 'Purple Rain' in the summer of '84, and, 'Spinal Tap' notwithstanding, it's the greatest rock & roll film of all time. There's so much Prince coming at you that you have to remind yourself he's also a breathtaking guitar player.
Tom Morello / Guitarist
Breathtaking
Guitar
Guitar Player
Purple
Rain
Spinal Tap
Summer
Tap
Notwithstanding
Remind
Spinal
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I think it's crucially important to be present in the lives of your children. They are my most important cause that I fight for. But I also feel an added responsibility that I want to leave them a better world than this one that we have now.
Tom Morello / Guitarist
Children
Fighting
Responsibility
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When I am most successful as a guitar player is when I'm able to just sort of lose myself. You stop thinking about technique or anything like that and just trying to evoke the emotion of that song brings, which is a very strong emotion for me.
Tom Morello / Guitarist
Song
Strong
Successful
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When real substantive change happens it's the people who watch your show, they're the ones that make it happen. It's people whose names are not highlighted in history books. They're the ones that stand up in their place and time to make change.
Tom Morello / Guitarist
Book
Names
Real
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For the millennium [New Year's Eve], you really have a choice to make. You either have to be naked with your head on fire and a shotgun in Bali or else you have to spend time with friends or family around the fireplace. And I'm choosing option B
Tom Morello / Guitarist
New Year
Choices
Fire
Years
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I have another name for what they're terming whistleblowers, and that's righteous heroes. From Bradley Manning to Snowden. They're people of conscience who are unwilling to turn a blind eye to the crimes of our government. And thank goodness for them.
Tom Morello / Guitarist
Government
Eye
Hero
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I myself am a very, very peaceful person. Throughout our history, from our own American revolution to the resistance against apartheid in South Africa, to labor strikes in the US, people have resorted to violence to achieve a more progressive society, from time to time.
Tom Morello / Guitarist
Peaceful
People
Progressive Society
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I find it ironic that now water is more expensive than music. On the one hand, record companies can't go crying when they've gouged consumers for decades, charging exorbitant prices for CDs that cost 29 cents to make. On the other hand, when music is free, musicians starve.
Tom Morello / Guitarist
Cds
Hands
Water
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When I moved to Hollywood, I was expecting it to be this Mecca of extraordinarily talented musicians, and it was instead the era of Faster Pussycat and bands that had an appeal, but I couldn't do anything like that. There's nothing in my being that can do anything like that.
Tom Morello / Guitarist
Expecting
Faster
Hollywood
Mecca
Moved
Appeal
Talented
Extraordinarily
Instead
Musicians
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There are literally billions of people on the planet who live in an unimaginable poverty that's not in any way different from the plight of the people in Orchid. And you can't have the splendor of Rodeo Drive without the sweatshops of Indonesia; those two things go hand in hand.
Tom Morello / Guitarist
Orchids
Hands
People
Two
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In our country there's never been a successful progressive struggle that did not have a soundtrack, whether it was the civil rights movement, workers' rights movement, women's rights movement. There's got to be songs at the barricades, and those are the kinds of songs that I try to write.
Tom Morello / Guitarist
Country
Song
Struggle
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I think that there are artists of different genres whose calling is to use their art to hope to affect and better the human condition - whether it's System of a Down, or Rage Against the Machine, or Public Enemy, or the Clash, Bruce Springsteen, or Pete Seeger. It's a group that I'm proud to be counted among.
Tom Morello / Guitarist
Calling
Clash
Different
Enemy
Human Condition
Proud
Rage
Springsteen
Against
Condition
Affect
Among
Artists
Bruce
Bruce Springsteen
Public
Counted
Down
Genres
Group
Machine
System
Whether
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Then about 12 years ago it dawned on me that folk music - the music of Woody Guthrie and Phil Ochs, early Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Pete Seeger - could be as heavy as anything that comes through a Marshall stack. The combination of three chords and the right lyrical couplet can be as heavy as anything in the Metallica catalogue.
Tom Morello / Guitarist
Bob
Cash
Chords
Combination
Dylan
Folk Music
Heavy
Lyrical
Metallica
Three
Woody
Years
Years Ago
Music Me Anything
Bob Dylan
Catalogue
Dawned
Early
Folk
Guthrie
Johnny
Marshall
Phil
Stack
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In America, we have freedom of choice. But some are free to choose between Lamborghini and Rolls Royce while others are free to choose which dumpster they're going to have their meal out of next. Some are free to choose which, you know, homes and farms to foreclosed on, while others choose which bridge they're going to sleep under tonight.
Tom Morello / Guitarist
Home
Choices
Sleep
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I don't believe that the Democratic party has anything to do with the Left. We have two political parties in the US: a right wing party and a right centrist party. That's the Democrats. I laugh when people describe Barack Obama as a socialist president. As a socialist musician, I'll tell you when we have a socialist president. We don't have one now, not even close.
Tom Morello / Guitarist
Believe
Laughing
Party
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There are many fans of hard rock music that have been wrongly pigeonholed as apathetic. This music is not music for the elitist coffeehouse culture in SoHo. It' s rock 'n' roll music for kids across the land, and I think that makes it much more subversive in a way, in that it has the form and the function of a powerful, populist music, but it can carry very incendiary messages.
Tom Morello / Guitarist
Kids
Powerful
Thinking
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America touts itself as the land of the free, but the number one freedom that you and I have is the freedom to enter into a subservient role in the workplace. Once you exercise this freedom you’ve lost all control over what you do, what is produced, and how it is produced. And in the end, the product doesn’t belong to you. The only way you can avoid bosses and jobs is if you don’t care about making a living. Which leads to the second freedom: the freedom to starve.
Tom Morello / Guitarist
Jobs
Exercise
Land
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There's a unique component of music that is different from, the written pamphlet or a speech. There's something, when you get the right combination of rhythm, melody and the right lyrical couplet, that feels like truth in the reptilian brain. There's something hardwired in our D.N.A.. And when you get a large group of people singing together in solidarity, it's something that, in my experience, and I've played countless demonstrations and protests through the years, it's something that can really help a struggle.
Tom Morello / Guitarist
People
Struggle
Unique
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Poverty is not an accident of, sort of, an economic spreadsheet. Poverty is a crime. There are criminals involved. And those criminals walk the streets as free men. What my music is about, and what - this from the riots in the streets of Greece and Spain to the people's uprisings in Egypt and Libya and Madison is about is holding those people accountable, those who are responsible for subverting the entire global economy and causing so much misery and then laughing about it with their, you know, clinking their champagne glasses on their yachts.
Tom Morello / Guitarist
Men
Laughing
People
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I didn't choose to be a guitar player. That was something that felt like it was chosen for me. And with that blessing and curse, I, throughout my entire career, it's been my job to weave my convictions into my vocation. And whether I'm standing in the streets of Chicago or the Occupy Wall Street or in Madison, Wisconsin, my job is to steel the backbone of people on the frontlines of social justice struggles, and to put wind in sails of those struggles. And people who are fighting on a, on a daily basis, at a grass roots level, for the things that I believe in.
Tom Morello / Guitarist
Believe
Struggle
Wall
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I didn't abandon my studies. Because I was, through no - clarify this. Through no particular genius of my own, I was the first person from Libertyville Public High School to attend Harvard, not because I was smarter than anyone or better than anyone, but no one had ever applied before. It was like University of Illinois, a fine institution, was the sort of the upper echelon of places where kids went from that school. And so I felt sort of a duty to myself and my peers to continue with those studies, and to continue to, intellectually arm myself for my coming struggles.
Tom Morello / Guitarist
Kids
School
Struggle
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I think I was meant to be a musician who speaks his mind about social justice issues. And I grew up in a lower middle class family, but a family that had enough money to buy a $50 guitar and a $50 amplifier, and had a basement to rehearse in. What I think the global human cost of this horrific poverty is how many Mozarts or curers of cancer are slaving away in the Maquiladoras along the Tijuana border, or in the Indonesian sweat shops? There are billions of people who will never become the people they could be, or the people they were meant to be, due to crushing poverty.
Tom Morello / Guitarist
Cancer
Crush
Thinking
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My take is that there's two ways to approach history. You sit in your armchair and you watch it on the news and you return to your PlayStation. Or you get out in the streets and you make it. Like, when those Supreme Court justices, you know, legalize desegregation, it wasn't due to their infinite wisdom. It's because people whose names you do not read about in history books, people whose faces you will never see, were the ones who struggled and sacrificed, sometimes gave their lives, to make this country a more equal one. When, it's like those people don't make history, it's us.
Tom Morello / Guitarist
Book
Country
People
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Every story has a point of view and whether it's by what one chooses to include or exclude from a story or whether it's a very specific agenda that is pushed, there is no such thing as objective media. Once you realize that it's more than just a marketplace of ideas, it's a battleground of ideas that are suppressed and the ideas that are pushed forward in the mainstream media are the ones that independent media has a chance to address. I think that the democratization of media in that way can be very helpful in allowing the truth to come out in a way that it might not on CNN or FOX.
Tom Morello / Guitarist
Chance
Independent
Thinking
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Tom Morello Quotes - Page 2

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