Chicago — The other members of the band conclude with four songs from Rage Against the Machine at the United Center on Monday night, with frontman Zack de la Rocha dragging and hovering across the stage. “Bullet in the Head” A jagged and groovy anti-propaganda national anthem from the band’s 1992 self-titled debut album. Early in the song, he was jumping towards the arena ceiling. Finally, he was taken behind the scenes by the crew.
His bandmates chased him, but after a while everyone was back. Delarosha was planted on the monitor on the right side of the stage, and his left foot was obtuse and stuck.
“If I need to crawl this stage, we’ll play for everything tonight,” he said. “We went too far,” he salted his recommendation in abusive language.
“Distant” can mean more than 10 years since the band last performed live, or more than 20 years since the last album was released. Originally scheduled to start in March 2020, it may have meant a fierce preparation to get back on track for these show, a public service announcement tour that was hit by a coronavirus pandemic.
Or maybe it meant “far” in a more spiritual and conceptual sense. Rage is a band that has an indelible relationship with the 1990s when anti-capitalist rap rock was filled with amphitheaters and festival venues. It’s been a decisive political act of its decade, and its success reaches many people whose radical ideas are conveyed through rocks with sharp edges, ideologically consistent, and almost certainly not. Reminds me that there is a possibility. It had a huge impact on the band with its relatively slim discography (4 studio albums, one of which was a set of covers).
Consider the two and a half years that Rage originally intended to return to the road. Efforts to overturn the 2020 elections and attacks on the Capitol, the ongoing tragedy of police violence against blacks, Roev’s blow. Wade. Maybe “too far” means that it’s too far to give up on the ground right now.
Rage greeted this current social and political moment with a violent torrent of controlled chaos at a concert that was partly a fist stab and partly a physical surrender. For 90 minutes, mostly 52-year-old Dela Rocha from a perch next to the stage, Rage was vibrant and ferocious. “Sleep Nowin the Fire” was a violent and tart, and “Guerrilla Radio” used grooves to drive exciting lyrics at home. “Killing in the Name” Closing the show, he brought a call and response to police fraud in the room.
After the “wakeup”, Delarosha gave a brief sermon. “The ruling class of this country has proved that no one is worth controlling,” he said, urging the crowd to help “face this fascist tide.”
From time to time, the group emphasized that point in text and video. During “freedom,” the screen behind the band flashes with information about the relationship between forced childbirth and maternal mortality, lack of parental leave, and lack of universal insurance, and recommends “aborting the Supreme Court.” It was concluded with. The video depicts a police van in flames, a roaring police dog chasing a suspect, and a helicopter floating on a boat full of immigrants. (This is arguably a local activist outside the venue saying, “Who is the Chicago billionaire family who gets rich every time a bomb falls? And what can they do about it? #CancelCrown” This is the only major tour to hand out leaflets. “)
There is a certain amount of smoothness underneath the swirl, emphasizing that the band was still in its original lineup — Delarosha, Tom Morello on guitar, Tim Commerford on bass, sometimes backup vocals, Brad Wilk on drums. — It’s been 30 years since the debut album. In its early days, it could sometimes be dull, graceful and dogmatic. But now they have a sophisticated enthusiasm.Morero sometimes displays a flash on the guitar like a DJ-style filigree “Bulls on Parade” And the rhythm section, which combines Commerford and Wilk, builds a precise and swaying foundation.
Even while sitting, Delarosha kept the magnetism, as he did for most of the show. His rap was more fluid than at the beginning of his career, he found cleaner pockets and used the space between syllables as effectively as the syllables themselves. His only show was a fuchsia-ish T-shirt. (But don’t be afraid — it advertised a very independent punk label Dischord.)
When Dela Rocha released her first solo single in 2016 “Digging for Windows” Produced by El-P, who established a solid position in New York’s independent rap scene in the mid-to-late 1990s, he also created cunning industrial hip-hop for others, including Atlanta’s sage Killer Mike.
Run the Jewels — a duo of El-P and Killer Mike — is the opening act of this tour, creating a bill that combines different generations with the philosophy of agit-rap. The set was chaotic fun, jerky, and violent. Their words were poured into salvos, which can be difficult to analyze in a cave-like space, but protests manifest themselves in countless ways — nervous and nervous works, the mayhem that covers all the songs. A light feeling of mischief.
Both costumes are politically consistent. “It’s always us against them and us against oligarchs,” Killer Mike warned.Dedicated duo “Walking in the snow” To those who died “in the hands of those paid to protect them.”
But even their most enthusiastic people have the pain of running gems. For them, American dystopia is a tragicomedy. For Rage, it’s a call to weapons.
However, Rage is not completely without a sense of humor. At the end of the show, the lights of the house went up, the members of the group hugged for a long time, then faced the crowd and stared at them like a long missing family they had just reconnected. As they left the stage, the arena speakers began pumping Bobby McFerrin’s “Don’t worry, be happy” — a little ironic, a little nihilism, a little revolutionary optimism.