Rage Against the Machine- “Maggie’s Farm”
From their album Renegades

Uncle Bob Dylan performed on the Grammys last night, and he sounded terrible—embarrassing even. Anyone who suggests otherwise probably isn’t being honest with himself. The man is my favorite musician ever, but I’ll admit that his voice is shot. He has lost the dried-out husk of a lower register that made him sound haunted and immersive on the uniformly great Time Out of Mind, along with other pleasant late-career surprises such as Modern Times. It’s now loud but never powerful, thin but never delicate.

To be fair though, the Powers That Be didn’t help him out with the choice of song either. Because he was backed up by fifteen-or-so assorted musicians, he or they chose “Maggie’s Farm,” a song that can easily be opened up. Because of its repetition, it’s a deceptively easy song to sing, but the entire meaning of it, the righteous anger welling up in the speaker, has to be built with vocal nuance. Each verse has more immediacy and agency. The speaker starts “with a head full of ideas” “praying for rain,” passively lamenting his arrangement of dead-end manual labor as “a shame.” But with each repetition of the chorus, he sounds more insistent and brave. He doesn’t want to be “just like them,” and even in that small personal victory, he finds the strength to go on. It’s a song about defiance, so it frankly shouldn’t be sung by a man in a silk shirt who has given in. A 2011 Dylan can’t physically create the same subtleties that a Bringing It All Back Home-era Dylan could.*

All the qualities I’ve just described—power through repetition, defiance as an end goal, slow builds—are exactly what made this a perfect choice of cover for Rage Against the Machine.

History hasn’t treated Rage well. Part of it is the pandering Audioslave project that traded on their legacy but seemed to represent its antithesis. The other part is that their bread-and-butter audience was a mixture of smokey dorm room revolutionaries and meatheads who don’t listen closely enough to know they’re The Man. Let me know if you can find a less admirable cross-section of people. Plus, there was always something sneaky about how Rage professed a far-left, anti-consumerist polemic but were signed to the biggest label in the world. I guess that’s how things worked in the mid-’90s.

Anyway, what revisionist history can’t change is the visceral power of their unified rhythm section and Tom Morello’s thunderous groove. Zack de la Rocha is at his most dynamic and volatile here in a song that, in all the best ways, serves the spirit of the original while still being a prototypical Rage song.

*- If you have the means, I also recommend the drastically different, coked-out arrangement of the same song on disc one of At Budokan.