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http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/06/arts/music/06rage.html?ref=us
ST. PAUL — On Wednesday night, Republican delegates fresh off Gov. Sarah Palin’s vice presidential nomination speech at the Xcel Energy Center here formed a conga line of taxis, buses and private cars to Minneapolis, where post-convention parties were firing up. At almost the same time, a huge crowd was emptying out of the Target Center after a political show of a different sort — a concert by the band Rage Against the Machine.
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Robert Stolarik for The New York Times
Protesters facing off with the police in Minneapolis.
A small fraction of those people, perhaps 200, decided to take over the intersection of First Avenue North and Seventh Street. Traffic snarled, and delegates watched in waiting traffic as riot-clad police pushed the spontaneous, vocal protest up Seventh Street. A delegate from Texas said, “Those guys, again?”
Yes, again. For two weeks straight, both in Denver and in Minneapolis, Rage Against the Machine, a rap-metal band formed in 1991 and known for its big noise and ferocious politics, formed an ad-hoc convention in opposition to both major parties. Although the band has been a significant commercial success — three of its albums in the 1990s attained multiplatinum status — radical politics have always been baked into their music.
The band members’ notoriety grew in 1996 when they tried to hang upside-down flags on their amps during a two-song set on “Saturday Night Live” — a performance that was cut short, and became something of a theme. Shortly after a concert at the Democratic convention in Los Angeles in 2000 that ended in clashes with the police, the band broke up, then reunited in 2007 at the Coachella music festival.
At both the Democratic and Republican conventions this year, Rage led marches, performed through megaphones when prevented from taking their stage, and generally agitated against the politics of convention and the conventions themselves.
None of this would be especially noteworthy — cause musicians reflexively congregate around political events — but Rage has millions of fans whose ardor has not been diminished by the band’s not putting out a record in eight years. The group’s insistent calls to action, in song and from the stage, still fall on receptive ears. Some of its hard-core fans are less prone to buying T-shirts than engaging in the kind of civil disobedience that sometimes ends in tear gas.
The Democratic convention opened with a free Rage show at the Denver Coliseum in support of Iraq Veterans Against the War, with the band’s lead singer, Zack de la Rocha, kicking into “Guerilla Radio.” “It has to start somewhere, it has to start sometime,” he sang, “What better place than here?”
The building all but tipped on its side and bucked throughout the frantic, politically framed set, which included a guest spot by Wayne Kramer of the MC5, reprising the song “Kick Out the Jams” from an appearance during the mayhem of the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago. When the band finished at the coliseum, most of the 9,000 people who were present followed a march led by the veterans down to the Pepsi Center.
Many contemporary musical acts have lined up behind the Democratic candidate for president, Senator Barack Obama, while the McCain campaign has put some country music firepower behind it, but Rage Against the Machine and its legions regard donkeys and elephants as the same species.
“The only difference between the two parties is marketing,” said Adam Jung, a youth organizer who was interviewed during the Rage concert in Denver. “Electing Democrats to end the war is like drinking light beer to lose weight.”
Still, Republican Party officials here and in Minneapolis this week reacted to various Rage endeavors as if a sleeper cell were in their midst. A concert sponsored by the Service Employees International Union at Harriet Island on Monday, the first day of the convention, had its permit revoked and then restored after Rage was placed first on and then off the bill.
On Tuesday a five-band protest concert was scheduled on the lawn of the State Capitol above St. Paul. Near the end of the day the four members of Rage pulled up and were immediately surrounded by the police. The band members were told that they were not going to take the stage because they were not on the bill — but there were no bands listed on the permit. And so the four members of the band walked out into the crowd, which was chanting, “Let them play!,” and someone handed them a megaphone. With the guitarist Tom Morello vocalizing instrumental interludes, Mr. de la Rocha did two songs: “Bulls on Parade” and “Killing in the Name.” The crowd surged around the band and filled in the musical gaps.
After Mr. de la Rocha suggested that the assembled police were “not afraid of four musicians from Los Angeles, they are afraid of you!,” Mr. Morello took the megaphone.
He said: “I suspect that the cops have much more in common with this band, with you people. Before this weekend is over, they may turn their batons, rubber bullets and their tear gas against us, but it is our hope that one day they turn those batons and rubber bullets and the tear gas against” the people assembled at the Xcel Center, whom he described in colorful language.
It did not turn out that way after a few of the more fleet-footed protesters began running through the streets of St. Paul. Windows were broken, chemical agents were deployed, and arrests were made.
Later that night, Mr. Morello, who like Mr. Obama is the son of a Kenyan father and a white American mother (and who went to Harvard), stood in an alley behind the Parkway Theater in Minneapolis, tuning up for a hootenanny with Billy Bragg hosted by the Minneapolis musician and writer Jim Walsh. Neither he nor the other members of the band were granting interviews, however. Mr. Morello, who performs solo as the Nightwatchman, was talking to the songwriter Ike Reilly, and said the day had been a busy one.
“When we got to the capitol, we were surrounded by cops, and they asked, ‘Are you in Rage Against the Machine?,’ ” Mr. Morello said. “And I didn’t know what the right answer was, so I just said, ‘I don’t know.’ They blocked us from even approaching the stage, saying they’d arrest us if we played. So we went into the middle of the crowd and began to improvise.”
The Rage show at the Target Center on Wednesday night was a commercial concert, not a protest rally, with proceeds going to benefit various antiwar causes, according to Mr. Morello. But the political backdrop had hardly disappeared. When the lights came up at the start of the set, the band was clad in orange jumpsuits and black hoods, with hands behind them, an image that seemed to shout “Guantánamo Bay” without ever saying the words. Still, the rhetoric from the stage was more nuanced than that of the previous shows.
“I hope you all leave peacefully, but you don’t have to be passive,” Mr. Morello said. “Don’t let anyone put their hands on you.”
Thousands took that advice, and a few took it a step further, refusing orders to disperse at Seventh Street and Second Avenue.
Arrests, a mainstay of the latest Rage shows, quickly ensued
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