This weekend, at Wisconsin’s Alpine Valley music venue, Rage Against The Machine played their first live show together in 11 years—a reunion that was announced in 2019 (see this story’s headline warning) and was meant to coincide with with the presidential election before it was delayed due to COVID. And, as you’d expect for Rage Against The Machine, there was some fury. (Oh, don’t let some incredibly stupid people find out!) As reported by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the show featured almost no stage talk, but a screen behind the band regularly showed relevant images such as “a border patrol agent posing menacingly with a barking German shepherd,” “a El Paso police van burning in slow motion” and “a blindfolded boy opened a piñata that looked like an ICE agent.” The most direct message, however (yes, more direct than a child knocking over an ICE agent’s pinata), was a statement projected on the screen about the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade: Forced childbirth in a country where black births face maternal mortality rates two to three times higher than white births. Forced birth in a country where gun violence is the number one cause of death among children and adolescents. OCCUPY THE SUPREME COURT. Elsewhere during the show, there was apparently a “popping” moment where Zack de la Rocha “quietly repeated” the line “I think I heard a gunshot” over and over during “Wake Up” and his lyrics “Killing In The Name”. ” (which recently went viral as part of a radio station’s marketing plan) were changed to state that it’s not just the police but some politicians who are “burning crosses”. The Journal Sentinel also notes that Rage is donating $475,000 raised from ticket sales for that show and two more at the United Center near Chicago to “reproductive rights organizations in Wisconsin and Illinois.”
