Understanding Testify

in his speech inducting Rage Against The Machine to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Ice-T said this: "if you want to go down in history, you've gotta either make something or break something" and the fascinating thing about Rage is they've always been ready to do both. the breaking part is easy to see: they're musical arsonists, fusing revolutionary hip-hop with the raw aggression of metal to decimate their opposition's arguments and their audience's eardrums. but as loud as Rage can be, and as full of righteous anger, there's also a hopefulness to their music, a sense that if the right kind of outrage is pointed in the right direction, the world can be made better, even if it has to be dragged there kicking and streaming. Tom Morello summed that up pretty well in his acceptance speech, saying "when protest music is done right, you can hear a new world emerging in the songs, skewering the oppressors of the day and hinting that there might be more to life than what was handed to us. can music change the world? the whole *ing aim is to change the world, or at a bare minimum, to stir up a *load of trouble! " and though the band has had more than its share of conflict, as evidenced by the fact that only Morello even showed up to accept the award, that philosophy has always united them, and it's a large part of why their work has endured as long as it has. it runs through all their songs, but nowhere is it more obvious than the opening track of the Battle of Los Angeles: Testify. let's take it apart. (tick, tick, tick, tock) the song starts like this. (bang) I like to think of intros as instructions on how to hear the rest of the song, and this is a perfect example: the first 30 seconds give you every tool you need in order to experience Testify. and what they tell you is that Testify is a study in contrast. you've probably heard music theory folks say that western music is built on cycles of tension and release. most of the time, we're talking about harmony: there's a crunchy, dissonant chord followed by something simple and consonant, and that contrast creates a strong sense of resolution. but chords aren't the only thing that can be dissonant. there's all sorts of ways to create musical tension, and the verses of Testify are a grand tour of pretty much all of them. that tour starts with Tom Morello's guitar. (bang) so… there's a lot going on here. fortunately, Morello himself broke down the process of creating this in a 2000 issue of Guitar World, so we know, very precisely, what he did, and all the different kinds of dissonance he's creating. first, there's harmonic dissonance, although not the kind you'd expect. Morello is using his Whammy pedal to harmonize a minor 7th above, so while he's playing a low D, you're also hearing C. and, like, the minor 7th isn't that crunchy an interval. it's no tritone, no b9. no, the tension here is less about clashing frequencies and more about the voicing. a minor 7th is a really wide interval. if I fill some notes in the middle, we can make a lovely-sounding minor 7 chord, but without them, it sounds less like a b7 and more like a failed octave. it almost reads like the guitar is out of tune with itself. there's also some register dissonance: when the notes get too low, intervals that would otherwise sound fine can become muddy. to avoid that, arrangers use what we call lower interval limits: for the minor 7th, the lowest safe one is this, but Morello's playing a little below that, and you can hear that muddiness creeping in. and then there's tempo dissonance. or maybe subdivision dissonance? he's playing a lot of stuff. this overwhelms the parts of your brain that are trying to track the rhythm: a simple test, which I think I first learned from the youtube channel Metal Music Theory, is that the fastest tempo you can comfortably process is about as fast as you can tap with one finger. by that metric, Morello is playing about double the limit, which we know because of the technique. and here, I'll admit to some uncertainty, because the technique he describes in Guitar World isn't what he does live. both versions work, though, and they wind up sounding pretty similar, so I guess I'll just teach the controversy. live, at least in the three concert videos I watched, he's just tremolo picking, plucking the strings up and down really fast. basically what you'd expect. but what he says he does in the studio is far more interesting. there, he's picking slowly, and in between, he creates new attacks by changing pickups. for non-guitarists, the pickups are the magnetic coils that turn the vibrations of strings into an electrical signal that drives the amp, kinda like the guitar's internal microphone. most guitars have two, one close to the neck and the other by the bridge. the neck pickup sounds warmer, often used for rhythm parts, while the bridge is bright and edgy, so it's perfect for riffs. but in this case, the actual tones don't matter, because we don't really hear them: instead, he flicks the switch back and forth so fast that it breaks the sound apart, creating a sort of artificial strum. and, as Rage fans know, Morello loves playing with pickups: most often, he turns one of them all the way down so he can use the toggle as a sort of ad-hoc mute button, but here they're both cranked to 11, transforming it into a sort of sonic woodchipper. and he could definitely still do that live, so why doesn't he? I mean, you'd have to ask him to be sure, but if I had to guess

I'd say it probably comes down to one simple fact: when you're playing live, you're stuck with one guitar. he plays the main riff on his Telecaster, but there, the toggle switch for the pickup moves left to right, not up and down, which makes it much harder to alternate at speed. he can't just overdub a new guitar like he could in the studio, and tremolo picking is close enough, so he does that instead. I think. Tom, if you're watching this and I'm wrong, please let me know. anyway, this flicking back and forth also creates timbral dissonance, chopping up the signal so it's not really recognizable as an electric guitar. Morello does this sort of thing a lot: he loves to play the guitar not as an instrument, but as a physical object, a tool he can use to make whatever sounds he wants, to the point where Rage has had to specifically clarify that all the sounds on their albums are made with just voice, guitar, bass, and drums. we'll see a more extreme example of that when we get to the solo, and if you don't know how he plays this solo, you're gonna wanna stick around. in the meantime, though, this timbral dissonance is amplified by his use of the wah pedal. I said before that he's just playing a low D, but listening to it: (bang) it's easy to assume he's moving. but those higher sounds aren't actually notes. at least, not exactly. the wah pedal is a band-pass filter, which means it mutes frequencies outside a particular range. moving the pedal moves that range, and Morello is slowly rocking it back and forth. he starts with a more mellow bass tone and glides up to a shrill, piercing treble, which gives us yet another kind of dissonance: process dissonance, or the dissonance of gradual change. this one's tricky, 'cause not all gradually changing processes do this, and I'm not sure "dissonance" is even the right word to describe it, but in my experience, if you're going from something stable to something harsh, making that change slowly magnifies the effect, because you can't be sure when that rising tension is going to end. here, Morello's use of the wah pedal isn't symmetric: it's a two-bar loop, but he doesn't reach the top until halfway through the second bar, leaving just 2 beats to fall back down. this means most of the phrase is rising toward that higher, harsher treble sound, so you get this driving anxiety that never seems to reach its apex. the rest of the instruments are doing their own things, and we'll get to them in a minute, but first, I want to take a second to talk about why the verses are so unrelentingly dissonant. Testify is a song about propaganda, about how the media can be weaponized to shape public opinion in favor of the status quo. carefully presented narratives cover up atrocities, invent new moral panics as a distraction, and misrepresent opposition to turn public opinion against them. the call to testify is a call to reject that indoctrination and speak the unvarnished truth, but the lyrics of the verses are begging to be mollified, to be told that everything is alright and you don't have to worry. the layers of musical dissonance, then, symbolize the cognitive dissonance of seeing injustice and choosing to ignore it, staying silent out of a practiced loyalty to convenience and the established social order. that dam eventually breaks, but we've still got three verse parts to look at, so let's move on to Tim Commerford's bass. (bang) at the start of each phrase, Commerford completely disappears for four seconds, leaving a massive gap. this creates orchestral dissonance: does this section have a bass? it refuses to make up its mind. remember, the intro teaches us how to hear this song, and there, the bass lays out for four bars, before coming in: (bang) to ramp up into the riff. so when Commerford again drops out at the start of the verse, we're back in that space, and when he returns, the implication is that he's ramping up to a new release. but then he stops. and then he starts. and then… you get the picture. the arrangement seesaws back and forth between bass and no bass, spaced perfectly to give you just enough time to get used to one version before switching to the other. when he's in, he's helping tie the band together, but whenever he leaves, he hangs them out to dry, and that massive hole in the arrangement makes the song feel like it keeps getting derailed. and when he is playing, we hear what I'm gonna call precision dissonance. at this point I'm just making up words, but they describe real things. basically, he's slip-sliding all over the dang place. (bang) specifically, he's starting on the 12th fret of the low D string, sliding all the way down, then back up. in principle, this is just octave Ds, which makes sense, that's the root of the key, but that slide is so slow that most of what we hear isn't D, it's the weird, microtonal space in between. this doesn't really change the implied pitches, but it does make it a little harder to recognize. compare this: (bang) to this. (bang) the second one demands more attention. there's also some rhythmic dissonance, with the syncopation in these little percussive fills: (bang) although unlike most of the stuff we've talked about, this resolves cleanly to the next

downbeat. and that brings up an important point: this is all about cycles of tension and release, but those cycles can operate on lots of different layers. something like Morello's minor 7th whammy thing runs throughout the whole verse, building a slow, lasting tension that will eventually release to the riff, but here we have a much more local tension that shows up and quickly resolves. what interests me most about Testify is the longer, section-wide dissonances, but in highlighting them, I don't mean to downplay the importance of these local gestures. in fact, this particular one helps reinforce the orchestral dissonance: by using syncopation to strengthen the downbeat, Commerford seems to be promising more to come, which makes his sudden retreat even more jarring. but if we're talking about unrelenting, section-long tension, then it has to be time for Zack de la Rocha. his vocals are built on a simple repeating pattern of three attacks: (bang) and they give us our strongest sense of metric dissonance. typically, if you have three evenly spaced hits, the natural accent will fall on either the last note, or sometimes the first. here, though, de la Rocha positions them with the downbeat, and thus the musical accent, in the middle, bouncing off the strong beats and dragging your ears into the syncopated space between. in poetry, we call this pattern with an accented middle syllable an amphibrach, and you can hear it in words like "harmonic", although interestingly, it's the exact opposite stress pattern of the word "testify". I don't know if that's intentional, but either way it's really cool. de la Rocha keeps this sustained rhythm going without breaks for the entire verse, occasionally adding some extra 16th notes: (bang) but always returning to his core repeating cell. that unrelenting pattern, combined with the strained, shouting tone of his delivery, is quite frankly exhausting to listen to, because it forces me to remain on high alert the whole time. with no breaks and no resolutions, he's not giving me any space to relax. and finally, there's Brad Wilk's drums. I saved these for last because they're the part that changes the least. here he is transitioning from the opening riff into the first verse. (bang) there are some differences, but the overwhelming affect of both is the pounding cymbal. and this is, maybe, another form of dissonance, which I gues I'll call dynamic dissonance: that cymbal is a perfect support for the ultra-heavy riff, but in the verse, where Morello switches to his weird fluttering thing and Commerford is only occasionally even playing, one might expect Wilk to follow suit by moving to the quieter hi-hat. but he doesn't: across the kit, his dynamics remain constant. he's staying aggressive even as his bandmates back off, creating a clash between him and the rest of the song. does that count? I'm counting it. anyway, the main actual difference between these two drum parts is the snare echo: during the verses, he adds an extra snare hit on the 16th note before beat 3. (bang) this is fairly common in funk drumming, although the echo is often played as more of a ghost note, whereas Wilk is hitting it just as hard as the others. I'm not sure I'd call this particularly dissonant on its own, but in combination with de la Rocha, I do think there's something there. Wilk's backbeat snares are positioned on the 2 and 4, the only breaks in de la Rocha's delivery, so the two seem to be in direct conversation: (bang) except that echo keeps popping up mid-sentence, like it's trying to interrupt. I should note that this only happens when Commerford is laying out: whenever the bass comes back, Wilk switches to this beat: (bang) which trades the syncopation for heavier kicks, probably to avoid overcrowding the rhythmic landscape. that's all the parts, but the final ingredient here is time. all these layers of dissonance run, unaltered and unresolved, for 40 seconds. which may not sound like a lot, but when you're being held in this unstable equilibrium that keeps looking like it's about to resolve but never does, 40 seconds feels like a lifetime. near the end, de la Rocha switches his delivery a bit, dropping the second three-note cell from each bar and replacing it with an echo: (bang) before finally delivering the coup de grace: (bang) that calls the riff back in and resolves literally every kind of dissonance all at once. don't believe me? let's go through the list. harmonic dissonance: ok, so, this one's tricky. the first thing Morello plays is the Hendrix chord: (bang) a particular voicing of a dominant 7th with an added minor 3rd on top. some folks will call this a #9, but I prefer to think of it as a b3, because it recognizes that, in the blues tradition this chord belongs to, mixing chord qualities isn't uncommon. and because it's clearly speaking the blues idiom, to my ears, this doesn't really sound dissonant. it's crunchy, sure, but if dissonance implies a need to resolve, I don't get that here. I'm very used to hearing Hendrix use this as a I chord. and while the rest of the riff is mostly single notes and power chords, if we extend our concept of harmonic

dissonance to include the overall scale, it's basically just minor pentatonic. the only spicy bit is this Ab chord at the end: (bang) but that's more of a local dissonance, nothing like the 40 seconds of unrelenting minor 7ths Morello just finished subjecting us to. register dissonance: lower interval limits only apply to simultaneously sounding pitches. a riff made of single notes and power chords isn't gonna cause problems, and the two full chords he does play are both voiced plenty high on the neck. spacing dissonance: no uncomfortably fast rhythms here. it's all quarters and 8ths, not too long, not too short. just right. timbral dissonance: I mean, it's distorted, and if you don't listen to a lot of metal, that could be enough. but for me, this category is all about recognizability, and I can pretty easily tell that this: (bang) is an electric guitar. it's definitely heavy, but I don't hear the need to resolve. and process dissonance is obviously gone: nothing is gradually changing, and even if it was, this is a force multiplier. it needs some other kind of dissonance to latch onto in order to have an effect. on orchestral dissonance, this section definitely has a bass. Commerford is in the whole time, doubling Morello on the riff, which also resolves his precision dissonance: he does bend up to that Ab: (bang) but it's fast, and other than that he's hitting each note square on. no sliding here. as for rhythmic dissonance… ok, yeah, there's some syncopation in the second bar. (bang) to be fair, though, syncopation sounds good. I can't be held responsible for that. de la Rocha lays out for large chunks of the section, and while I didn't technically add a dissonance label to his incessant, omnipresent shouting in the verse, it's definitely a relief to hear him take a break. as for the metric dissonance of his phrasing, he's gone from bouncing off the downbeats to setting them up. (bang) he's still not hitting them, but a handy way to think about syncopation like this is that each off-beat note sort of belongs to one of the two slots on either side. it's either early or late. in the verse, the final attack couldn't belong to the downbeat because something was already there. here, though, the line ends before the bar does, so this last 16th is sort of a downbeat in potentia. the note itself is syncopated, but it still creates resolution. at least, that's how I hear it. that leaves Wilk. his main thing was the dynamic dissonance with the rest of the band, which kinda feels like cheating since the whole point is he didn't change, but still, the band does catch up with him, meeting him at the level he's been playing the whole time and resolving that tension as well. and yeah, I'll admit it, this exhaustive list of dissonances might seem a little overwrought and academic. but I really can't overstate how cathartic this moment is, and every single piece is doing some part to help make that happen. all these overlapping tensions create an unbelievable release. and it's not just a cool musical transition: it's the whole point of the song. if the verses are the cognitive dissonance of following media narratives, this riff is the clarity of seeing the world with your own two eyes. that's why the verse drags itself out for so long. the whole song revolves around this moment, and the longer you sit in that rich, thick dissonance soup, the more powerful the resolution becomes. this back-and-forth cycle carries through most of the song, until after the second chorus, it splinters off into a series of mini-sections. first, we get this breakdown: (bang) which is a little respite from the overwhelming volume of the rest of the song. Wilk finally moves from those cymbals over to a hi-hat: (bang) and Morello jumps into this galloping rhythm on some high octave Ds: (bang) muting the strings in between for a lovely little bit of funk. Commerford is still doing his disappearing act, weaving in and out, although the gaps are smaller, and they way he dances around de la Rocha: (bang) makes it feel less like a drop-out and more like call and response. he's engaging with the rest of the band. as for the lyrics, he's switched from directly criticizing the media to showing the consequences of ignorance, specifically in the ongoing brutality of America's lust for oil. he's reminding us that the status quo is both violent and extremely profitable for its owners, and urging us to consider the true cost of the lifestyles we're being sold. and then we get the solo. (bang) I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what this was. I thought maybe he was doing something with string harmonics and the whammy pedal, but none of the gear breakdowns I could find said anything about the effects here, so I did what I always do when I can't tell what a performer is doing: I looked up some concert videos, and… *sigh* frickin' Tom Morello, man. do you wanna know what this dude did? of course you do

that's why you clicked this video. so, to create this sound, he unplugs his guitar, takes the audio jack from the end of his cable, and taps it directly onto the strings. thanks to the nearby pickups, guitar strings are slightly magnetized, so coming into contact with the jack sends some wild feedback through the cable that the amp interprets as a signal and dutifully turns into sound. by sliding the jack around on the string, Morello gives himself a rough sort of pitch control, and by lifting it up he creates breaks in the feedback, and thus rhythms. and to be clear, this doesn't have to be on a guitar string: any conductive surface will do. in a 2010 show at Finsbury Park, for instance, Morello instead took his solo by pressing the jack into the palm of his hand. but the principle remains the same: it's a complete guitar solo that sounds nothing like a guitar, driven by feedback made by touching the sensitive audio jack to places it wasn't supposed to touch. again, playing the guitar as physical object. after that, we get a different style of breakdown. before the solo, we had a funk break, moving to a lighter texture with plenty of rhythmic excitement. but this is a metal break, slow but still heavy. (bang) in fact, it's arguably the heaviest part of the song, with Morello's deep, growling D chords showing off the full power of that drop D tuning. on top of that, de la Rocha abandons any attempt at subtlety, laying bare the song's themes by repeating the slogan of the Ministry of Truth, the propaganda arm of the Party in George Orwell's 1984. y'know, in case you weren't sure what they were trying to say. this builds up into a final chorus: (bang) and as with most final choruses, I find myself looking for something new. by the end of the song, the once-climactic release of this riff has become a bit predictable. rock bands have found lots of ways to spice up their last chorus, from adding new instruments, to vocal ad libs, to changing keys, but Rage's solution is so much funnier. here's how this section sounds the first time we heard it: (bang) and here it is from the end of the song. (bang) and no, I didn't mess with the volume: they literally just turned it up a couple notches. or, technically, they turned up the compression, not the volume, but the point is it feels louder. it's so simple, but so effective, that I find myself wondering if this happens all the time and I just didn't notice. and maybe it does, but I did do a quick gut check by comparing it to another song from the same album, Sleep Now In The Fire, and I didn't hear it there, at least not to the same extent. either way, I love it. it almost feels like cheating, but since when has Rage ever followed the rules? and that's pretty much it. after that final chorus, the song just ends abruptly with these bent chord stabs. (bang) I wanted to talk about Testify because, like I said at the beginning, I find it really useful to remember that anger has a purpose. Rage Against The Machine is, to me, a really hopeful band. not the naive kind of hope that says everything will always work out for the best, but the mature, realistic hope that even when it doesn't, a better world is still worth fighting for. the machine, if you'll pardon the turn of phrase, is worth raging against. I like that. I talked a lot here about tension and release, and that's actually the whole topic of my next video: I'm doing a deep dive on how to make a satisfying musical climax. I'll be going through some really cool scholarship, plus my own favorite techniques, and while that's gonna come out in a couple weeks, if you can't wait, it's already live right now on my patreon. I've been making these videos for a long time, but they take a lot more work than you might expect, and throughout the years my patreon patrons have always been there to help make sure I can keep doing that work and making the best videos I know how to make. I really couldn't do this without them, so for a little while now, I've been posting videos early for anyone at the $3 tier or above as a way to say thanks for their generous support. if you want to join them and see that next video now, there's a link to my patreon in the description. and as always, thanks for watching. thanks to our featured patrons, Susan Jones, Jill Sundgaard, Howard Levine, Warren Huart, Damien Fuller-Sutherland, Neil Moore, Geoff, and Michael Mol! check out Patreon for a fuller outro, and as always, keep on rockin'!