In the Mix

I saw a couple of wild-eyed and wickedly intense rock bands this weekend, on opposite ends of I-95. One of them was the White Stripes in Wilmington on Friday night, which there's a review of in the Monday Inquirer.

The other was Rage Against The Machine, the rap-rock headliners at the Rock the Bells festival at Randalls Island in New York on Saturday, who were playing their second gig since reuniting at the Coachella Festival in April. (At that date in the California desert, Rage‘s first since splitting in 1999, singer Zach de la Rocha made some incendiary remarks about George W. Bush that he took time to clarify on Saturday.)

Rock the Bells is the biggest hip-hop tour of the summer 2007, though it’s not coming to Philadelphia, or D.C., for that matter. In most cities, the Wu Tang Clan, who have a new album due this fall, are the headliners. But on five dates – two in NY, plus shows coming up in Chicago and California – the reunited members of Rage (frontman de la Rocha, plus guitarist Tom Morello, bassist Tim Commerford and drummer Brad Wilk, who played together in the fopgettable Audioslave) top the bill.

Along with the Che Guevara and Bob Marley shirts at the festival in which almost all the guys on stage and hardly any of the guys in the audience were black, I saw a bunch of people in the crowd wearing shirts that read Hip Hop Is NOT Dead.

That’s a response to Nas, who stated the opposite in the title to an album that came out late last year. (And who joins Rock the Bells in Atlanta on Tuesday). But while it was nice to see rap fans acting proud of their culture, a more accurate and to-the-point T-shirt would have read: Hip Hop Is OLD.

Taking a look around made that unequivocally clear, and argued that the hip-hop concert business is becoming more and more like the rock concert business: the young bands have the hits, while the old bands sell the tickets.

Everybody I saw on the main stage in seven hours at what had to be the dirtiest music festival I’ve ever been to in my life (with an absurd shortage of trash cans, fans had no choice but to toss their overpriced empty beer and Vitamin water bottles on the ground) had been around, and then some.

Most of the headliners origins go back to at least the early ‘90s – from the Wu Tang, whose first album came out in 1993, to proud pot smokers Cypress Hill, to Philadelphia’s The Roots, who sounded as vital as ever, playing a horn happy late afternoon set that was partly a show stopping display of the hyper speed rhyming skills of rapper Black Thought, and partly an old time soul revue.

And that’s not to mention Public Enemy, the once incomparable Black Power rappers whose heyday was the late 1980s. Backed by a live band plus a DJ, PE broadsides like “Bring the Noise” and “Shut ‘Em Down” still sounded potent, but their set had the perhaps inevitable air of an oldies acts rehashing its hits. Main mouthpiece Chuck D seemed a little too eager to demonstrate his continued virility as he jumped down and started doing push ups like Jack Palance. (Though with two hands, not one.) And while he went out of his way to praise sidekick Flavor Flav as one of the greatest hype men in history, that apparently wasn’t enough for the reality TV star, who took the time out to introduce his children to the crowd, demonstrate his rudimentary drumming skills and do some advance publicity for his upcoming celebrity roast on Comedy Central.

There was also a second Paid Dues stage at Rock the Bells, devoted to alt-hip-hop that , along with the Roots and Rage, provided the best evidence of creative life on Saturday. Over there, I heard the Living Legends a crew from L.A. and San Francisco unburdened by machismo who paraded six rappers each a sharper rhymer than the previous. And I also caught Brother Ali, a pale-skinned Minneapolis MC who showed himself to be impressively verbally dexterous on the mic on his Nina Simone-sampling single “Uncle Sam Goddamn.“ (He prefaced the song by calling Simone “the greatest artist in history,” an example of hip-hop hyperbole that might not seem like that much of an exaggeration to anyone who’s heard how great her music sounds in the Italian immigration art house hit movie Golden Door.)

For most of the day, calls for audience participation were met with lukewarm response, even from Method Man, Ghostface Killah, the RZA and the other Wu Tang hometown heroes. The reason for that was clear once the headliners hit: the football field sized crowd full of pumped up guys were tolerant of the other acts, but were really there to get back in touch with their Rage.

De la Rocha and Morello’s band has always shouted out from the Left. They’re ardent supporters of Mumia Abu Jamal, and back in 1993 when the Lollapalooza tour played South Philadelphia they protested against censorship in music by appearing on stage naked with duct tape over their mouths and the letters ‘PMRC’ scrawled across their chests. (If you want to find pictures on the Internet, it’s not hard, no pun intended.)

So it’s not surprising that the re-united Rage have come out swinging politically in their post-Sept. 11 incarnation. At Randall’s Island, de la Rocha said that President Bush “should be brought to trial as a war criminal and hung and shot” (which would likely seem redundant to even his fiercest enemies) and called Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney “the real assassins.” That’s one sure way to get on Bill O’Reilly’s dark side.

But whatever you think of their politics, there’s no denying the power of Rage’s music. Whether he’s making his guitar sound like a scratching-DJ or a helicopter or firing off spiraling call-the-ambulance leads, Morello - who told me in an interview in June when he was on tour as The Nightwatchman that Rage had “no plans whatsoever” beyond the Rock the Bells dates - is a genuine innovator on guitar. And his bag of tricks works perfectly with the rhythm section’s hard-rock-and-funk fusion.

In songs like “Bulls on Parade” and “Testify,” the Rage attack is all about meeting what the band portrays as criminal negligence and belligerence of the world’s haves with an equally emphatic show of musical force. The still-wiry de la Rocha spits and shrieks out lyrics that concisely condemn the militarism of the Right (“They rally ‘round the family/With a pocketful of shells”) while stalking the stage as if he’s been mainlining Red Bull, and occasionally leaping in the air like a frizzy haired Jack in the Box.

Do all the shirtless Rage fans care about the band’s politics? Some do, undoubtedly. But though the scene at Rock the Bells resembled a Nuremberg Rally in its fist-pumping intensity during Rage’s closing set, that wasn’t unified political passion on display. It was collective enthusiasm for the return of a great live band, a hip-hop infused rock powerhouse that, after eight years in exile, is back at full strength, and ready for the here and now.