(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Thu 6 November 2025 23:00, UK
Music always needs to evolve, and it’s a necessary part of art in general to ensure that creativity is always on the cultural verve and in keeping with the world we live in, but no genre needed to evolve quite as desperately as rock.
Ever since the 1950s and Elvis Presley, it has arguably been the definitive genre of music that gained the most mainstream collection of fans, but in that mainstream came gatekeepers who staunchly believed that its brilliance was rooted in tradition: blues riffs and mid-tempo rhythms kept those fans happy, and anything outside of that was viewed with intense scrutiny.
Naturally, that attitude became harmful by the mid-1970s, and so new diverse genres like disco, soul and even psychedelic and punk rock began to emerge. However, in the 1990s, it was truly under threat, as culture began to rapidly change face. With the millennium on the horizon, the traditional modes of rock were becoming quickly antiquated, and so it needed an exciting resurgence to prove why it had been so popular for so many years.
Because at its very best, rock music is the soundtrack to counterculture, but in its own way, 1990s rap was becoming a rival force in that regard. Speaking to a subculture in an unfiltered and authentic way, it began to capture a zeitgeist of fans similar to that of rock in the 1960s.
Rage Against the Machine cleverly blended these sensibilities to usher in a new dawn of rap rock, which universally captured the angst of those living in the shadows of society, while simultaneously moving rock into a brave new genre. In this new fusion, they could boldly take on political agendas in a way that old school rock could, but do it in a contemporary and more relatable way.
They were a shot in the arm for rock music and proved that no matter the decade, no matter how far into modernity we are plunging, there is always a way to evolve. It’s why bands like Bring Me The Horizon have managed to top festival bills and sell out arena tours in the modern age, as in their brand of heaviness, they are evolving the rock genre to speak to a more contemporary crowd.
So it was only right that Rage’s Tom Morello and Bring Me The Horizon found a song to collaborate on, where they could merge their appetite for the future and create something fresh, and this culminated in the 2021 track ‘Let’s Get the Party Started’, about which Morello stated: “I admire the fact that Bring Me The Horizon are forward-facing fans of hard rock”.
Adding, “They’re not tethered to what has come before; they’re willing to unapologetically rock super hard with their horns up, but at the same time, they have a flexibility to try different things. I thought we might sound great together!”
While the method and approach might differ from that of Rage’s in their ‘90s pomp, the sentiment is still the same, and that is something that should be protected, because perhaps now in the modern age, more than ever, authenticity in music is so important.
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