Continuing the theme of first songs on first albums as mission statements: Rage Against the Machine gave us an ironic take on this with “Bombtrack.”
Rage Against the Machine made three albums of original music, spanning from 1992 to 1999. In that seven-year period, the sound of the band evolved very little, sticking with the heavy pentatonic-based riffing, beat-boxing whammy pedal solos, and ever-frantic scream-rap being spit from the ready mouth of Zach de la Rocha. So it's little surprise that “Bombtrack” serves as an excellent mission statement for the band. It “established" a template only in the sense that the template changed essentially zero through every song in the band’s discography.
This could be a negative if their formula didn’t have the benefit of some of the most imaginative heavy riffs devised for an electric guitar. The songs were a series of riffs, each building to an incisive mantra before shifting gears into the next riff section. The dramatic advantage of this style shows the line between politics and performance and the eerie symbiosis they have. It turns out that heavy, aggressive metal riffs repeated on a long building loop to a shrieking climax mirrors the patterns of some of the most manipulative of political speaking practices. And so as the guitars, bass, and drum repeat each breathtaking musical idea, de la Rocha has a prime opportunity to infect them with his incessant sloganeering, equally on repeat. The drama of these songs is in how long a segment can repeat before changing, what that change will be (inevitably awesome), and what the new political rant will be to overlay it and ride the section out to peak fury.
Also, it wasn’t an issue that their style barely changed, because the dudes who got into this music the most were/are not really into the “self reinvention” idea so much as they are into the idea that they are the ones who are perpetually right in a world of decadence and compromise.
Paul Ryan is on record as a fan of Rage Against the Machine.
The band also pioneered the concept of joining a major conglomerate entity for the purpose of commandeering the wide reach of its media apparatus, with the goal of spreading a supposedly positive populist utopian philosophy through the spitting of aggressive bile about the society as-is, wholly absent-minded of the practicality of all people being able to fit happily into the utopian paradigm. In their day, they were heavily criticized by their most dedicated purists for this embrace of establishment infrastructure. Amongst those this concept used to most harshly offend, it has since found much more emphatic acceptance.