Muhammad Idrees Ahmad

On Saturday I saw Rage Against the Machine who were both poetic and prophetic.  I’ve been a huge fan of Rage for the last ten years, both myself and fellow Fanonite blogger Idrees originally found inspiration in their lyrics which led me to scholars such as Noam Chomsky.  Needless to say the path of my life has completely changed since: moving from an interest in IT to radical politics.

I was rather surprised by the level of rage literacy among the crowd, with some reciting songs before the show and a buzz of bets as to which track would be first – Testify, Bulls on Parade and Bombtrack were favourites.  The atmosphere was palpable as the band were fashionably late building anticipation which climaxed with a bomb raid siren and Zack cutting in with his signature ‘good evening, we are Rage Against the Machine from Los Angeles California.’  The crowd went absolutely mad as Testify began, I wasn’t the only fan who had waited a long time for this gig, everyone around me was bordering hysterical.

Rage performed excellently, like a fine whisky they’ve only improved with age and I can safely say it was by far the best live music event I’ve ever been to.  Their radical poetry struck a nerve and with a crowd numbering tens of thousands their anti-war message was more effectively driven home than any Stop the War rally I’ve been at – they are still the spearhead of western resistance culture.

Not only do their lyrics contain powerful ideas, the crowd chanting ‘nothing proper about your propaganda’ and ‘destroy all nations’ but before the ending chorus on Wake Up Zack spoke more freely, with the band continuing to jam in the background.  He criticised the Iraq war explaining that he had been misquoted by Fox News, they had claimed he called for Bush to be assassinated when in actual fact he had said Bush should be hung as a war criminal under Nuremberg principles.  I couldn’t agree more and would love to see the fucker and his cronies drop.  Analysing what made Fox feel they had to discredit Rage he asked the crowd ‘what is Fox afraid of?’  A band from Los Angeles?  No ‘they’re afraid of you!’  They’re afraid you’ll go to the US Embassy and burn the fucker down.

Zack elaborated further saying ‘this is a war system, the whole global economic system is a war system and unless we break that down, for every generation, we will always see war. so wake up.’  Then the final chorus to drive the message home ‘wake up, wake up, wake up, WAKE UP!’  I thought it was a very clever to amplify what he was saying by fitting it inside one of their most popular tracks.

Before the encore they played a recording of the internationale, finishing on Freedom and Killing in the Name of.  Hearing the intro bass line to Killing in the Name of was something special.  They closed as they started with the crowd at fever pitch.

Introduction and Testify

Wake Up and Anti-War Message

More T in the Park youtube videos