Watch 1,000 musicians blast through Rage Against the Machine’s Killing in the Name
Guitars! basses! drums! horns! And lots and lots of raging
Back in 2015 more than 1,000 electric guitarists and other musicians got together in Cesena, Italy to perform Foo Fighters' Learn to Fly in an effort to get the band to play a concert in their hometown.
The stunt worked – the Foos played in Cesena on November 3 of that year, opening their set with – what else? – “Learn to Fly.”
Since then, the Italian organization behind the performance, Rockin’ 1000, has staged similar gatherings centered around other Nineties-adjacent songs and artists, including Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit and Hole’s Celebrity Skin.
Now, Rockin’ 1000 has released a video of their latest event – 1,000 musicians blasting out Rage Against the Machine’s Killing in the Name for a stadium of frenzied, and, in some cases, body-painted, Germans at Commerzbank-Arena in Frankfurt on July 7.
Witness scores of guitarists, bassists, drummers, horn players(!) and a single conductor lead a literal mob of voices through the once-again timely (is it ever, unfortunately, not timely?) 1992 rap-metal classic.
Never has raging against the machine looked or sounded so joyous.
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Rich is the co-author of the best-selling Nöthin' But a Good Time: The Uncensored History of the '80s Hard Rock Explosion. He is also a recording and performing musician, and a former editor of Guitar World magazine and executive editor of Guitar Aficionado magazine. He has authored several additional books, among them Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck, the companion to the documentary of the same name.
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