Photo by Scott Penner / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 2.0
There's a contradiction at the heart of every Rage Against the Machine t-shirt, and it's the same contradiction the band spent their entire career refusing to resolve. You are wearing a product. The product bears the name of a band whose explicit position was that the system producing the product is corrupt. The shirt is the machine. The shirt is also the rage. Both things are true at the same time and neither one cancels the other out.
RATM formed in 1991 in Los Angeles. De la Rocha had been in a hardcore band called Inside Out. Morello had a political science degree from Harvard and had been working in the office of Senator Alan Cranston. These were not people who arrived at political music through the aesthetic — they arrived at music through the politics, which is why the band always sounded different from every other "political" rock act of the era. When Audioslave happened later, when Morello played with Bruce Springsteen, when de la Rocha went quiet for years — none of it changed what the original band was. Four people who meant it.
The self-titled debut came out on Epic Records in 1992. Epic is a subsidiary of Sony. This is the contradiction again: the most anti-corporate band of the decade distributed through one of the largest corporations in music. De la Rocha was asked about this constantly. His answer, when he gave one, was usually some version of: the message reaches more people this way. Whether you find that satisfying probably says more about you than about him.
"Killing in the Name" was the single. It got radio play despite the fact that the climax of the song is the phrase "fuck you, I won't do what you tell me" repeated sixteen times. The video aired on MTV. The album eventually sold three million copies in the US alone.
The bootleg tees started circulating almost immediately. Unlicensed screen printers in LA and the Bay Area made shirts outside the Epic/Sony merchandise pipeline. The bootlegs weren't counterfeits in the usual sense — they weren't trying to pass as official. They were their own thing: someone with a screen press and an opinion about what the shirt should look like. The irony is that bootleg RATM merch is probably more aligned with the band's actual philosophy than anything the label sold.
This tee is vintage. It's not a reissue. It came from a collector and it's the only one we have.
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Header image: Photo: Scott Penner, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons