Rage show exhilarating, educational

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    ALISHA HAMILTO

    Lifestyle Editor

    Utah youth were herded into the Spanish Fork Fairgrounds Wednesday night to let out some aggression — and that’s exactly what they did.

    Rage Against the Machine only played for an hour because of an agreement with Spanish Fork to end by 10 p.m., but it was long enough to get the crowd rockin’.

    Rage Against the Machine played many crowd-pleasing hits, including their popular song off of their “Evil Empire” CD, “Bulls on Parade.” Zack de la Rocha, the band’s vocalist, just had to yell, “let me see some fists up in the air,” and thousands of fists flew up in unison.

    Because of all the rumors that had surfaced, there was extra security at the show, and according to a Payson police officer, “everything went very smoothly.”

    Rage Against the Machine was very upset by the rumors that had engulfed the Spanish Fork community, but the group attributed the fault to the wrong people — the police.

    Then Rage Against the Machine did a cover of a certain controversial, anti-police Public Enemy song. The crowd went crazy.

    The one thing about Rage that scares a lot of parents is their anti-authoritarian, anti-oppression political viewpoints. It can be very empowering for youth to listen to Rage and sing along, “I won’t do what ya tell me.”

    But most of the things they inform the youth about are positive. de la Rocha often speaks of female oppression. Wednesday night, the crowd got a lecture on not harassing women.

    de la Rocha said, “Women walk on our campuses and have to fear men … women walk in our communities and have to fear men … women come to a Rage Against the Machine concert and have to fear men … well cut it out.”

    Rage also sell merchandise that teach these principles. On one t-shirt they were selling, information is quoted from a 1980 United Nations Report, “Women constitute half of the world’s population, perform nearly two-thirds of its work hours, receive one-tenth of the world’s income and own less than one-hundredth of the world’s property.”

    In addition to their own distribution of information, there were also information booths set up by groups like Industrial Workers of the World, Food Not Bombs, and the Salt Lake Committee for Solidarity with Chiapas.

    Rage Against the Machine are strong supporters of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, or EZLN, a group of mostly Mayan residents of Chiapas.

    According to a pamphlet, this group began their uprising Jan. 1, 1994 and continue still “to proclaim their resistance to the North American Free Trade Agreement and other mechanisms of neoliberalism which threaten to destroy the indigenous peoples of Chiapas, and to demand democracy, justice, and liberty for themselves and the rest of Mexico.”

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