When you’re 15, or thereabouts, you love the art you love more passionately than you’ll ever love art again. Around that age, your sense of taste has only just recently come into being. Some complicated interaction between macrocultural forces and neurological development has transformed you from a kid with a favorite Ninja Turtle to a young adult with “an aesthetic” — albeit an imperfectly calibrated one, prone to bouts of abandon. Encountered in this condition, Donnie Darko is no mere protagonist; he’s your proxy. “The Bell Jar” doesn’t engross you; it defines you. That Dalí print isn’t MoMA merchandise taped above your bed; it’s a mirror into your soul. This kind of adolescent fervor burns hot and fast and, like any other intoxicant, can lead to a hangover, such that when you later recall an object of youthful infatuation, you may feel compelled to append caveats: “I was going through a phase. ... ”

The band I loved most at 15 was Rage Against the Machine, the multiplatinum rap-rock group from Los Angeles that was almost precision-engineered to be loved most at 15. Fronted by Zack de la Rocha, who proudly proclaimed himself a “militant poet,” the band helped to both sculpt and shatter my sense of the world. During the run-up to America’s first invasion of Iraq, in 1990, teachers at my public school did not debate the war’s merits; they festooned our classrooms and their lapels with yellow ribbons. Years later, listening to a cassette of the band’s debut album, I heard de la Rocha liken those same ribbons — which I hadn’t thought about much as a fourth grader — to swastikas. It was revelatory to hear such an audacious, if intemperate, voice of dissent.

On the band’s best-known song, “Killing in the Name,” de la Rocha drew a connection between cops and white supremacists with a 12-word slant rhyme all the more powerful for its matter-of-factness: “Some of those that work forces/are the same that burn crosses.” It was through Rage Against the Machine’s album art that I learned about the self-immolation of Thich Quang Duc; through their lyrics I learned about Frantz Fanon; through their videos I learned about the F.B.I.’s Cointelpro operations. The aggregate effect was to frame mistrust of authority — which we regard as standard-issue adolescent equipment — as both necessary and grounded in ugly facts of American history.

Today, rap-rock is derided as a goofy grotesque, thanks mostly to lesser acts that came after Rage, aping their aggression, jettisoning their political convictions and outselling them in the process. But in Rage’s efforts to distill the spirit of forebears as dissimilar as EPMD and Bruce Springsteen, they perfected a novel sound. If de la Rocha’s voice was too guttural, too bellowing, too dude-ish, the band would have been unsustainably bottom-heavy. Crucially, he had a treble register and four vocal modes: whisper, snarl, bark and an all-time-great shriek. Joining him up front was a fellow leftist of color, the half-Kenyan Tom Morello — a brilliant guitarist who did a dead-on impression of a dumb one, toggling between pummeling riffs indebted to Led Zeppelin and squalls that conjured Public Enemy.