Live Concert Review: The Public Service Announcement Tour with Rage Against The Machine in New York City

Madison Square Garden, NYC – 11 AUG 2022

All of this is an American Dream

2 years, 5 months and 27 days.  That’s how long I waited to get inside the most famous arena in the world to see Rage Against The Machine.  COVID delays pushed the 2020 tour into 2021, before kicking ticketholders when they are down and further delayed until Summer 2022.  Summer 2022 is here and I can finally say I was able to experience RATM in a live setting. 

Granted I’d blown a few opportunities in the 90’s but I was older, wiser and knew not to let another chance slip through the cracks to see one of the most culturally relevant artists of my generation… plus the tickets came as a gift from my wonderful partner.

The wait was more than worth it. 

Opening act Run The Jewels opened up the night and got the vibe way up, blending politics, humor, and killer flows. The duo, consisting of Atlanta’s Killer Mike and Brooklyn’s El-P have been crafting in your-face tracks of power and protest, calling out systemic injustices for about a decade now, bringing the same sort of social awareness to hip hop that Rage brought to rock 20 years earlier.

Creating the hype right from the jump the pair kicked down the door with “Legend Has It.” RTJ followed it up with the first track off their latest album, “Yankee and the Brave,” along with RTJ4’s big single “Ooh La La” and the classic “Blockbuster Night Pt. 1.”  

The energy on stage was palpable, as Killer Mike high-stepped back and forth across the stage and El-P bounced and spun. It’s a shame the crowd filled out the Garden so slowly, because they missed out on a performance and a half from the north-south connection. The pairing added in a DJ Shadow cover (“Nobody Speak”) along with the poignant “Walking In The Snow.”  The crowd began to fill in to the “World’s Most Famous Arena,” able to catch fading glimpses of what should be their new favorite act. Closing out with “A Few Words For The Firing Squad (Radiation)” Run The Jewels unleashed one last blast of enthusiastic zeal, getting the entire arena on its feet bouncing to the beat.  I felt a few pangs of disappointment that “Close Your eyes (and Count To Fuck)” didn’t make the setlist, those pangs quickly vanished as I realized it was almost time for Rage Against The Machine.

A quarter century of anticipation was about to find closure, and the cynicism gnawed at my skull like a dog with a bone.  Frontman Zack De La Rocha, had, after all, been injured at an earlier performance in Chicago.  A torn Achilles had taken his legs away from the vocalist and my l

selfish concern was that without the ability to move, the performance might fall flat.  Holy shit, was that a bad take.

It’s true a pair of crew members did carry De La Rocha to the stage, setting him gingerly down upon a monitor center stage.  As soon as the riff broke in from opening track “Bombtrack” though, it didn’t matter that he was relegated to a seat, the man owned the fucking room.  The pit undulated and opened up, crowd surfers floated across the floor and the sing-alongs came with the conviction of a choir and Rage made no effort to slow any of it down.  The crowd’s reaction to “People of the Sun” and “Bulls on Parade” leads me to believe I was not the only one who had been waiting for this chance for decades. 

De La Rocha was not hindered by being stationary.  Sure, he wasn’t able to use his one leg, but that didn’t stop him from posting up on the speaker stack to punch and kick the air along with bangers like “Bullet in the Head,” “Testify” and “Take the Power Back.”  It was at this point that all negativity was washed away as El-P and Killer Mike were beckoned back to the stage as they absolutely crushed “Close Your eyes (and Count To Fuck)” with Rage, Zack taking on his feature spot to hype the song along.  My seat in the nosebleeds quaked to the rhythms of “Guerrilla Radio” and “Without a Face” thanks to crowd engagement.  

Every track that made up the setlist brought me back to my time in high school, when I thought my enemy was a science teacher that expected me to do my homework or my father taking away my illegally purchased cigarettes stuffed of various leafy ingredients.  The tracks were a perfect assortment from the band’s three original albums, with only one track from Renegades, but RATM took the Springsteen gem “The Ghost of Tom Joad” and performed it better than the Boss ever could. 

I came in expecting a lot more chatter from the stage, the band’s politics being such a centerpiece to the songs but it was minimal.  They didn’t need to waste their time or energy on breaking down each track the way they did on the Live and Rare LP.  If you were there, if you were singing along and if you were paying the slightest bit of attention you didn’t need the lecture.  The band’s sing-alongs are their Gospels.  

Closing out with “Killing in the Name Of,” I half-expected the entire building to collapse the way Rage brought the house down and the crowd to their feet.  The crowd roared along to the bridge of “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me,” the rafters shook and the foundation bounced to every word.  When it was over, the band huddled together and basked in the moment as they took over the Garden and made it theirs for the night.  This may have been the third of a 5 night stint, but the band’s appreciation for the gravity was not missing.  The crowd chanted and pleaded for an encore, but there would be no on stage peekaboo tonight.  The crew members came over, lifted De La Rocha and carried him off stage as the house lights turned on.

There was no need for an encore as the set proper was more than any of us could have hoped it would be.  A moment nobody in that building is capable of forgetting.