Testify
by Rage Against the Machine
- 117
- BPM
- G major
- Key
- 9B
- Camelot
- 47
- Danceability
- 3
- Acousticness
A song called "Testify" was played at the KROQ Almost Acoustic X-Mas on December 12, 1993. It shared only a title with the track on The Battle of Los Angeles. Some of its lyrics went into "Down Rodeo" and the final version of "People of the Sun." The newer song made its live debut under the working title "Hendrix" on January 23, 1999, at a surprise show at the Troubadour in West Hollywood. The instrumental part was the same as the final version, but the lyrics were completely different.
It opens the album and was its third single, with a cover taken from the 1968 Olympics Black Power Salute. The bridge quotes the slogan from Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four about who controls the past. Rage Against the Machine opened most concerts of its reunion tour with it.
Tom Morello plays the sweeping intro sound with a Whammy pedal, a short delay and a wah pedal on the open low D string. For the solo, he pulls the lead out of his guitar's jack and taps it against the bridge while working the pedals. Michael Moore directed the video, which morphs George W. Bush and Al Gore into one "mutant" that "appears as two but speaks as one."
Testify runs at 117 BPM, the tempo of pop, funk and disco-leaning dance. In classical terms it sits in moderato territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 2.05 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 513 ms. It is in G major, Camelot 9B, which shares its notes with E minor and mixes cleanly with C major and D major.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.