“Wake Up” by Rage Against the Machine

"Wake Up" sits on Rage Against the Machine's self-titled 1992 debut, and it's a history lesson delivered at full volume. Zack de la Rocha's lyric goes after racism in Washington and the FBI's covert counterintelligence operations, points to Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. among the African-American figures the state targeted, and accuses the government of arranging their assassinations. The spoken section reads from a real memo in which J. Edgar Hoover floats targets for crushing the black nationalist movement.

All four wrote the music; the band produced with Garth Richardson and Andy Wallace mixed. It was never a single, but it has become a live staple, usually the final song before the encore, with de la Rocha often swapping the Hoover memo for a speech on the issues of the day. It also plays over the final scene of The Matrix.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.