|
Thomas Morello (born May 30, 1964) is an American musician, singer-songwriter and activist. He is best known for his tenure with the band Rage Against the Machine and then with Audioslave. Morello is currently a touring musician with Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band.〔http://ultimateclassicrock.com/tom-morello-interview-springsteen-high-hopes-2014/〕 He is also known for his acoustic solo act called The Nightwatchman, and his latest group, Street Sweeper Social Club. Morello is also the co-founder (along with Serj Tankian) of the non-profit political activist organization Axis of Justice, which airs a monthly program on Pacifica Radio station KPFK (90.7 FM) in Los Angeles. Born in Harlem, New York, and raised in Libertyville, Illinois, Morello became interested in music and politics while in high school. He attended Harvard University and earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Social Studies. After his previous band Lock Up disbanded, Morello met Zack de la Rocha, and the two founded Rage Against the Machine together. The group went on to become one of the most popular and influential rock acts of the 1990s. He is best known for his unique and creative guitar playing style, which incorporates feedback noise, unconventional picking and tapping as well as heavy use of guitar effects. Morello is also noted for his leftist political views and activism; his creation of his side project The Nightwatchman offered an outlet for his views while playing apolitical music with Audioslave. He was ranked number 40 in ''Rolling Stone'' magazine's list of the "100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time". ==Early life== Tom Morello was born on May 30, 1964, in Harlem, New York, to Ngethe Njoroge and Mary Morello. Morello is of Irish and Sicilian descent on his maternal side, and Kikuyu Kenyan descent on his paternal side. His mother was a schoolteacher from Marseilles, Illinois, who earned a Master of Arts at Loyola University, Chicago and travelled to Germany, Spain, Japan, and Kenya as an English language teacher between 1977 to 1983. His father was a Kenyan participant in the Mau Mau Uprising, and served as Kenya's first ambassador to the United Nations. Morello's paternal great-uncle, Jomo Kenyatta, was the first elected president in Kenyan history.〔 His parents met in August 1963 while attending a pro-democracy protest in Nairobi, Kenya.〔(Tom Morello:One Man Revolt ) by ''The Huffington Post'', July 21, 2009〕 After discovering her pregnancy, Mary returned to the United States with Njoroge in November, and married in New York City. When Morello was 16 months old, Njoroge returned to his native Kenya, and denied his paternity of his son.〔 Morello was raised by his mother in Libertyville, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. There he attended Libertyville High School, where his mother was a U.S. history teacher. She was the homeroom teacher for Tom's classmate and fellow guitarist Adam Jones, of the band Tool, while teaching at Libertyville. Morello sang in the school choir and was active in speech and drama club; a prominent role was Oberon in ''A Midsummer Night's Dream''. Morello developed leftist political leanings early, and has described himself as having been "the only anarchist in a conservative high school", and has since identified as a nonsectarian socialist. In the 1980 mock elections at Libertyville, he campaigned for a fictitious anarchist "candidate" named Hubie Maxwell, who came in fourth place in the election. He also wrote a piece headlined "South Africa: Racist Fascism That We Support" for the school alternative newspaper ''The Student Pulse''. Morello graduated from high school with honors in June 1982, and enrolled at Harvard University as a political science student that autumn. Morello graduated in 1986 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Social Studies. He moved to Los Angeles, where he supported himself, first by working as an exotic male stripper. He went by the moniker of Tom "Meat Swinger" Morello. "When I graduated from Harvard and moved to Hollywood, I was unemployable. I was literally starving, so I had to work menial labor and, at one point, I even worked as an exotic dancer. 'Brick House' (by The Commodores) was my jam! I did bachelorette parties and I'd go down to my boxer shorts. Would I go further? All I can say is thank God it was in the time before YouTube! You could make decent money doing that job – people do what they have to do."〔Adam Jones, his high school classmate, moved to Los Angeles as well; Morello introduced Jones and Maynard James Keenan to Danny Carey, who would come to form the band Tool. From 1987 to 1988, Morello worked in the office of California Democratic Senator Alan Cranston;〔 however, this proved to be a negative experience for Morello, who decided never to pursue a career in politics. "I never had any real desire to work in politics but if there was any ember burning in me, it was extinguished working in that job because of two things: one of them was the fact that 80 per cent of the time I spent with the Senator, he was on the phone asking rich people for money. It just made me understand that the whole business was dirty. He had to compromise his entire being every day. The other was the time a woman phoned up to the office and wanted to complain that there were Mexicans moving into her neighborhood. I said to her, 'Ma'am, you're a damn racist,' and she was indignant. I thought I was representing our cause well, but I got yelled at for a week by everyone for saying that! I thought to myself that if I'm in a job where I can't call a damn racist a damn racist, then it's not for me."〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Tom Morello」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|