Rage Against The Machine

I just returned from a testament to the power of music, the power of the people, and the power of grassroots organization to foment revolutionary ideals and action. Rage Against The Machine played a free thank-you concert in Finsbury Park, next to our house, and although I didn't have a ticket, I wanted to at least get close enough to feel the noise.

The concert was a tribute to a UK campaign to knock the X-Factor single from the #1 slot at Christmas. The X-Factor is Simon Cowell's creation, Britain's version of American Idol, and it's all about manufacturing cheezy pop music. Fed up with five years in a row of X-Factor #1 singles at xmas, a British couple started a Facebook campaign to get as many downloads as possible of Rage's "Killing in the Name of." Ultimately, Rage pulled off a totally unexpected upset and got the #1 slot, with over 500,000 downloads to the X-Factor's 450,000.

So at 8:30 this evening, having struggled with report writing all day, I walked across the bridge over the train tracks and into Finsbury Park. The usual suspects ringed the concert area - punks, drunks, potheads, dreadheads, and square-looking people like me whose appearance belied a more colorful youth:-)

As the first booming bass notes sounded, the crowd inside the gated area screamed, and those of us without tickets on the outside strained our necks and searched for higher ground to get a glimpse of the giant TV screens. I was happy enough to be this close to one of the most hardcore and inspirational bands of my time, and I bobbed my head and played my air guitar along with tunes like 'Bombtrack' and 'Bulls on Parade,' remembering the good old 90s and all my high school memories.

But then, as the band launched into 'Know Your Enemy,' I decided to see if I could get closer, and it turned out I wasn't the only one with this idea. A shirtless drunk guy went running through police cordons and yanked down a set of temporary chain-link fencing separating us from the main gates. A woefully obese security guard yelled at him, saying "I'm gonna get you!" but the drunk guy continued his rampage, hauling down section after section of fencing. By this time, people had begun streaming over the downed barrier and mounting an assault on the main gates, giving each other a leg up and triumphantly climbing atop the gate to celebrate before hopping down on the inside to be part of the show.

The police were frantically trying to blockade people right and left, but as at the Woodstocks of the 60s and the 90s, the streams of freaks couldn't be stopped! So many people were breaching the gates in so many places that the police finally gave up and let everyone through. It was a magical moment, and I was ecstatic to enter the fray of waving hands and thrashing bodies.

The band played for another hour, and I was mesmerized by every sound, until they stopped to bring onstage the couple who began the campaign. Everyone cheered, and then Rage announced that they had donated 100% of the profits of those 500,000 downloads to Shelter, a charity for the homeless in the UK. We all roared our appreciation as the band handed over a giant check for the couple to give to Shelter, and I noticed that Tom Morello's guitar was graffitied up with the words "Arm the Homeless," in the grand tradition of musical political revolutionaries like Woody Guthrie, whose guitar was famously scrawled with, "This machine kills fascists."

Fittingly, the show ended with a full-blooded rendition of the track that inspired this unlikely campaign, and upon leaving the people swarmed over and through any gates that police refused to use as exits. So many lines of Zack de la Rocha's militant poetry could describe this evening perfectly, like when we watched the chain-link fence being hauled down as he was raging:

"Yes I know my enemies,
they're the teachers who taught me to fight me
Compromise, conformity, assimilation,
submission, hypocrisy, brutality, the elite
All of which are American dreams,
all of which are American dreams..."

But the most fitting of all had to be when the entire crowd screamed along with him at the climax of Killing in the Name of... and if you don't already know those words by heart, I suggest you download the single:-)