Here's the Rage Against the Machine/Imagine Dragons Crossover You Never Knew You Needed

Tom Morello and Dan Reynolds are on a new track with the Bloody Beetroots and Shea Diamond

BY Josiah HughesPublished Jul 2, 2020

Rage Against the Machine axe man Tom Morello has launched a new single with plans to donate proceeds to the NAACP, Know Your Rights Camp, the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Marsha P. Johnson Institute. In addition to those wonderful things, the song also serves to demonstrate just how good Imagine Dragons frontman Dan Reynolds can be in the right context.

No seriously — Reynolds absolutely tears the track to pieces. "Stand Up" is a pissed-off banger that the "Radioactive" singer absolutely owns as he shreds his vocal cords. The tune also benefits from pairing Morello's Rage-y riffs with some edits from the Bloody Beetroots, as well as some additional vocals from Shea Diamond.

Morello shared the following statement about the song:

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.

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.


Listen to "Stand Up" below.

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