RELATED: These are all the arena, amphitheater and stadium concerts happening in Milwaukee in 2022 RELATED: From Kendrick Lamar to Mötley Crüe, these are the 20 top concerts in Milwaukee this summer But they channeled their fury through their visceral music, which sounded as urgent as it ever has - despite the fact that none of the 18 songs touched on Saturday were created in the 21st century. No one in the band made any speeches across their 90-minute set.
It was the most specific political statement the band made Saturday. “Forced birth in a country where gun violence is the number one cause of death among children and teenagers.”Īnd then, in all caps: “ABORT THE SUPREME COURT.” As they left the stage, the speakers in the arena began pumping Bobby McFerrin’s “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” - a bit of irony, a bit of nihilism, a bit of revolutionary optimism.“Forced birth in a country where Black birth-givers experience maternal mortality two to three times higher than that of white birth-givers,” the captions continued. At the show’s end, the house lights went up, and the group members hugged for a long stretch, then faced the crowd and gazed upon them like long-lost family members they’d just reconnected with. That said, Rage is not wholly without a sense of humor. For them, American dystopia is tragicomedy for Rage, it’s a call to arms. The duo dedicated “Walking in the Snow” to people who have lost their lives “at the hands of people that were paid to protect them.”īut there is a wryness to Run the Jewels, even at their most impassioned. “It’s always us against them, us against the oligarchs,” Killer Mike warned. Their words poured out in fusillades that were sometimes hard to parse in the cavernous space, but protest manifests in myriad ways - the production that’s both nervy and nervous, the light sense of mayhem and mischief that coats all of their songs.īoth outfits have aligned politics. Its set was chaotic fun, jittery and rambunctious. Run the Jewels - the duo of El-P and Killer Mike - is the opening act on this tour, making for a bill that pairs different generations and philosophies of agit-rap. When de la Rocha released his first solo single in 2016, “Digging for Windows,” it was produced by El-P, who had been a stalwart of New York’s independent rap scene in the mid- to late 1990s and also produced scabrous, industrial hip-hop for others, including the Atlanta sage Killer Mike.
(Fear not, though - it was advertising the stridently independent punk label Dischord.) His only ostentation was a fuschia-ish T-shirt. His rapping was more liquid than it was at the outset of his career, finding cleaner pockets and also utilizing the spaces between syllables as effectively as the syllables themselves.
Morello occasionally displays flash on the guitar, like the D.J.-esque filigree on “Bulls on Parade,” and the combined rhythm section of Commerford and Wilk build a dense, rollicking foundation.Įven sitting down, as he did for the majority of the show, de la Rocha remained magnetic. But there is a polished fervor to them now. In its early days, it could at times be blunt and inelegantly dogmatic. Underneath the maelstrom was a certain smoothness, underscoring the ways in which the band, still in its original lineup - de la Rocha, Tom Morello on guitar, Tim Commerford on bass and sometime backup vocals and Brad Wilk on the drums - has matured in the three decades since its debut album.
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