Tom Morello has backed his new single “Stand Up” with a montage of protest footage stretching from the Civil Rights Movement to Black Lives Matter and the George Floyd protests.
The track, which the Rage Against the Machine guitarist debuted earlier this month, also features Imagine Dragons’ Dan Reynolds, the Bloody Beetroots and artist/activist Shea Diamond.
“I grew up in the tiny lily-white, archly conservative town of Libertyville, Illinois. When I was a kid, someone hung a noose in my family’s garage, there was occasional n-word calling, etc, etc. On June 6 of this year, there was a Black Lives Matter rally and march in that same town that drew over 1,000 people,” Morello previously said of the track.
“It seems that the times, they are a’changin’. I was so inspired that night, I reached out to Dan from Imagine Dragons. The Bloody Beetroots and I had conjured a slamming track and within 24 hours Dan had sent back a completed vocal. We got Shea Diamond, a Black transgender woman with a long history of activism, on the track and the coalition was complete.”
Morello is donating 100 percent of royalties from the track to NAACP, Know Your Rights Camp, Southern Poverty Law Center, and the Marsha P. Johnson Institute; additionally, record labels KIDinaKORNER and Interscope will donate an amount equal to the artists’ record royalties derived from streams of the track for a three-year period.
In addition to the Laka Laka-directed visual, Morello and his collaborators staged a live conversation Thursday on social media to discuss “Stand Up”:
