Rage Against The Machine: Zack De La Rocha (vocals); Tom Morello (guitar); Timmy C. (bass); Brad Wilk (drums). <p>Additional personnel: Maynard James Keenan (background vocals). <p>Engineers: Stan Katayama, GGGarth, Auburn Burell. <p>Recorded at Sound City, Van Nuys, California; Scream Studios, Studio City, California; Industrial Recording, North Hollywood, California. <p>On paper, Rage Against The Machine reads like Beavis, Boogie Down Productions and Butt-Head: an angry and enlightened rap frontman who preaches a multi-cultural alternative to what they teach you in schools and show you on TV, backed by a funky heavy metal rhythm section whose vampage and riffing pay direct tribute to the likes of the Edgar Winter Group and Led Zeppelin. <p>But there's no sense of fusion here. Neither a metal band toying with rap nor a rap group fronting as a rock band, R.A.T.M. is four guys who were never told that there's a difference, and who don't care to know. The knowledge-is-good-but-schools-are-bad rap, "Take The Power Back," gives way to a metal instrumental bridge; and the guitar that introduces the Martin/Malcolm/Cassius homage, "Wake Up," pays its own tribute to Zeppelin's "Kashmir." The closest spiritual--but not stylistic--reference point are the alternative raps of the Disposable Heroes Of Hiphoprisy; and Rage's "Bullet In The Head" may be the best song about TV since the Heroes' "Television, The Drug Of The Nation." <p>Rapper Zack De La Rocha has a thin voice that sounds more like a bored suburban thrasher than an inner-city rhyme animal, but his lyrics are something else altogether. Rising high above the nihilism of both hard-core rap and punk, he offers not just good slogans for a t-shirt, but the promise of a system to replace the one he's bent on destroying. His is a revolution with a purpose.