No Shelter

"No Shelter" is a song by American rock band Rage Against the Machine, released in 1998 on the Godzilla soundtrack. It can also be found as a bonus track on the Australian and Japanese release of The Battle of Los Angeles in 1999. The song is about how the mass media distracts the public from more important issues in the world and manipulates people's minds.

Released "during the lull between Evil Empire and The Battle of Los Angeles" the band's critics held that the song's placement "in one of the biggest summer movies of 1998 reeked of selling out and hopping in bed with the enemy."

Appearing at Woodstock 1999, the band opened with the song. In a piece recalling his attendance at the performance, journalist David Samuels noted "The cultural contradictions involved in [RATM's] playing agitprop to a $150 a ticket crowd are evident from the band's first song, "No Shelter," a Marcusian anthem and also the band's contribution to the soundtrack for the movie Godzilla. It is at once an angry grad student rant, denouncing the cultural myth that "buyin' is rebellin'," and also proof of the near infinite capacity of that culture to absorb any criticism as long as it features kick ass guitars."

In the journal Studies in Popular Culture, scholar Jeffrey A. Hall examined the song in his essay "No Shelter in Popular Music: Irony and Appropriation in the Lyrical Criticism of Rage against the Machine". Hall noted: quote|Lead vocalist Zack de la Rocha attacks the entertainment industry and Hollywood films like Rambo and Amistad, yet the most potent lyric clearly addresses the motion picture Godzilla, the film the soundtrack was to promote. Clearly not a typical motion picture promotion. Textual analysis of the raw and rapid fire lyrics of No Shelter reveals a leftist political attack consistent with positions RATM advanced in concerts, lyrics, and their well maintained website. A careful reading of the lyrics will reveal potent political attacks on the entertainment industry, the entirety of their rhetorical strategy is realized in the presence of this song on the soundtrack of Godzilla. Rage lyrically appropriates the soundtrack and utilizes the streamlined functioning of the corporate promotion to advance criticism of Godzilla and Hollywood's consumption of audiences and their cultural identity. The presence of Burkean irony and refraction in No Shelter demonstrates that the band acknowledges its role in the circular relationship between the text and its commercial context: the song is set forth as a promotion of the film and its soundtrack, and yet it returns as an assault on that very context. Their politically and commercially savvy attack on Godzilla creates the possibility of the very mechanisms that could stifle the impact of their leftist stance to be used to magnify and refract Rage's message throughout the chain of commercial promotion.

The song contains multiple references to popular culture, criticizing corporate advertising and capitalism. It mentions numerous products, films, brands, and other topics. Among them are Steven Spielberg, Amistad, the VCR, Fourth Reich, Americana, Coca Cola, Rambo, Nike, and the aforementioned Godzilla series. This branding has resulted in the complete video being removed from some markets on YouTube due to threatened legal action by some of those brands.

"No Shelter" was featured daily as the closing theme song on "Red Heat" on Hardcore Sports Radio Sirius channel 98 from the late fall of 2009 to mid June 2010 at which point the show was augmented. The song is still featured as the closing before the augmented segment re opens. Nick Turse mentioned the song in his book The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives. Turse wrote "In the late 1990s the otherwise dreadful soundtrack for Godzilla, that blockbuster flop of a movie, featured one cut that transcended its origins. No Shelter, by rebel rap/rockers Rage Against the Machine the group decried: 'Tha thin line between entertainment and war.' The line had by then grown thin indeed. Today, it hardly exists. The military is now in the midst of a full scale occupation of the entertainment industry, conducted with far more skill (and enthusiasm on the part of the occupied) than America's debacle in Iraq."