It was recently announced that Rage
Against The Machine will be reforming to play a handful of shows in
March and April of 2020. This news was met with what seemed to be an
equal amount of “Holy Shit!!!” and “Who gives a shit.”
The largest amount of backlash is
coming from the arbitrary puritans that can't get over the fact that
Rage will be playing Coachella. I had the same feeling when I first
heard that they were going to be playing at this soulless suck fest
at a polo ground that has become more about celebrity and fashion
instead of the music. Not to mention the greedhead political
leanings of those who operate Golden Voice Productions, the
organizers of Coachella.
Then it dawned on me. All of the
dehydrated, beautiful, young people that will be blitzed out of their
gourds on MDMA at this festival will also have a cellphone in their
pockets. They will surely be taking shaky videos of Rage's set and
beaming them out all over the internet to their social media
followers. Thus giving the band a worldwide audience to jam their
message down the throat of the masses.
This is why The Clash were always on
CBS/Epic Records and opened for bands like The Who. They had a
message and took it directly to the largest possible amount of people
instead of only preaching to the choir. Rage Against The Machine
clearly has an agenda on this tour since they are playing mostly
southwestern border towns that have been under siege by ICE and
Border Patrol.
I know Rage Against The Machine gets a
bad rap for ushering in the awful trend of rap-metal bands that
sprang up in the mid to late 90s but that's not really their fault. That was the fault of the record companies trying to cash in on what
they thought was the musical trend set to follow Grunge. Don't blame
Rage, blame Capitalism and corporate synergy for bringing the likes
of Kid Rock and Fred Durst into our lives.
Rage Against The Machine started my
political awareness as a youth. Every time I listened to those
records and poured over the liner notes I was slowly shaken out of
my apathy. That band helped to open my eyes to the fact that we are
all surrounded by old guard pigfuckers that don't want society and
culture to move past 1950, especially if it will inconvenience them
out of a few cents.
That band served as a gateway drug to
knowledge to help fill in the many blanks to the whitewashed history
that I learned in school. Their second album, Evil Empire,
had a photo of various books spread out on a table that I had made a
list of and went hunting in local used book stores to try track down
as many as I could. Not only was I learning about Leonard Peltier
and Mumia Abu-Jamal in the band's lyrics, I was now reading essays
from the Black Panthers and The Autobiography Of Malcolm X
in an effort to chuck off the low-level generational racism that I
was raised with.
I had missed out
on seeing the band live the first time around. I did have a ticket
in hand for their joint tour with the Beastie Boys that was cancelled
because one of the Beastie Boys was in an accident while riding a
bike through New York City but that was the closest I ever got.
Much like
Aus-Rotten, Rage Against The Machine had been screaming a warning at
the top of their lungs almost twenty years ago when they called it
quits and society hasn't learned a fucking thing in that time. Hopefully things will be different this time around when the band
takes a stage to grab us by the collective shoulders and shakes us
while slapping us across the face in an attempt to wake us up. If
not, there's at least the very real potential for post show rioting
and turned over police cars that have been set on fire.
Over the years,
their records have gathered dust on my shelf as I have not
necessarily outgrown them but more of having used them as a
foundation and built too far above them to access them. After this
run of shows was announced, I dragged all three studio albums off of
the shelf and gave them a spin. And then I listened to them again
and again. I'm not sure if the records still hold up under my
microscope of musical snobbery or if it was a straight dopamine rush
of nostalgia but goddammit if I'm not fighting the urge to book a
flight to Phoenix in March.
Proposed tour dates
are as follows:
March 26th—El
Paso, TX
March 28th—Las
Cruces, NM
March 30th—Phoenix,
AZ
April 10th—Indio,
CA
April 17th—Indio,
CA
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