The politically charged ’90s rock revival continues.
As members of Rage Against the Machine, Public Enemy, and Cypress Hill rally against Donald Trump across arena tours that run on 25-year-old hits, enigmatic former Rage frontman Zack de la Rocha on Thursday offered a grouchy and pointed new song.
Produced by El-P of Run the Jewels fame, “Digging for Windows” is a grinding, dark, thickly worded rant against the outside world. “Fuck that bright shit, the spot or the flashlights—we in L.A. ducking both, in the shadows with lead pipes,” de la Rocha sneers at the beginning.
On Twitter, El-P hinted that this song may finally appear alongside a full studio album from de la Rocha.
https://twitter.com/therealelp/status/773885755210862595
https://twitter.com/therealelp/status/773887290116411392
But as Pitchfork notes, de la Rocha has left a trail of high-end producers for nearly 20 years—DJ Shadow, Questlove, Trent Reznor—all without ever actually releasing a solo record.
“Digging for Windows,” if nothing else, packs a harrowing urgency with its strong rapping about the paranoia that accompanies brown and black Americans when the bottom drops out and they run out of options. It’s not a blatant derision of Trump, but rather a fist at the institution on lyrics like: “won’t mark the name on a ballot, so they can be free to devour our options / and just like you I’m a target, ill defined by the guap in my pocket.”
In other words, it’s some vintage raging against the machine.
