E major · Camelot 12B · 75 BPM
Bombtrack
by Rage Against the Machine
- 75
- BPM
- E major
- Key
- 12B
- Camelot
- 46
- Danceability
- 3
- Acousticness
Tim Commerford, the bassist of Rage Against the Machine, composed the riffs for "Bombtrack," which opened the band's self-titled 1992 debut album. The track became the band's third single, and its lyrics addressed social inequality, proclaiming that "landlords and power whores" were going to "burn". Like most of the group's songs, it carried the anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist stance that defined their blend of heavy metal, rap, punk rock, and funk.
The single artwork featured Cuban photographer Alberto Korda's famous image of Che Guevara, Guerrillero Heroico, in a mirrored two-tone version by Irish artist Jim Fitzpatrick. In the Netherlands, the song reached number eight, making it the band's highest-charting song there. It was one of three songs on the album written in the key of F sharp, alongside "Know Your Enemy" and "Fistful of Steel".
A music video depicted support for the Peruvian Maoist organization Sendero Luminoso and its leader Abimael Guzman. The group played inside a cage, mimicking Guzman being shown to journalists after his capture by the Peruvian military. An opening sequence stated that the people of Peru had waged revolutionary war for 13 years against their oppressive U.S.-backed government. The clip was left off the band's first home video, but it appeared in 2003 as bonus material on the Live at the Grand Olympic Auditorium DVD.
Bombtrack runs at 75 BPM, the tempo of soul, trip-hop and half-time hip-hop. In classical terms it sits in largo territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 3.2 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 800 ms. It is in E major, Camelot 12B, which shares its notes with C# minor and mixes cleanly with A major and B major.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.