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Artist
Zack De La Rocha
12+ albums
politicalHip-Hoprapalternativerock
about
Zacarías Manuel de la Rocha (born January 12, 1970 in Long Beach, California) is a rapper, musician, poet and activist, best known as the lead singer and lyricist of Rage Against the Machine. His latest release has been under the name One Day As A Lion. In 1983, de la Rocha's father Roberto (known as Beto)—a member of Los Four, the first Chicano art collective to be exhibited at a major museum (LACMA, 1974)—suffered a nervous breakdown and took his religious ideals to extremes. He destroyed his art, and, when de la Rocha visited him on the weekends, he was forced to fast, sit in a room with the curtains closed and the door locked, and help destroy his father's paintings. The Rage Against the Machine song Born of a Broken Man refers to Beto's nervous breakdown, and Zack's determination to not become the same. After a while, he was unable to cope with this lifestyle and stayed with his German-Irish mother in Irvine, which at the time had one of the highest percentages of White Americans in Southern California. For elementary school, he attended the UC Irvine Farm School, a laboratory school housed in ranch hands' bungalows associated with a slaughterhouse operation that was formerly on the site - houses that are among the very few still in existence from the Irvine Ranch. Among the people he met there was Tim Commerford. The lifestyle Beto forced upon de la Rocha brought culture shock upon him as well as an identity crisis. He was alienated from the Chicano community and was
