Rage Against the Machine rap-rocks on

I saw a couple of wild-eyed and wickedly intense rock bands this weekend, on opposite ends of I-95. One was the White Stripes in Wilmington on Friday night (reviewed in yesterday's Inquirer).

The other was Rage Against the Machine, the rap-rock headliners at the Rock the Bells festival at Randalls Island in New York on Saturday, playing their second gig since reuniting at the Coachella Festival in April.

Rock the Bells is the biggest hip-hop tour of summer 2007, though it's not coming to Philadelphia, or D.C., for that matter. In most cities, the Wu-Tang Clan, who have a new album due this fall, are the headliners. But on five dates - two in New York, plus shows in Chicago and California - the reunited members of Rage (front man Zack de la Rocha, guitarist Tom Morello, bassist Tim Commerford, and drummer Brad Wilk, who played together in the forgettable Audioslave) top the bill.

Along with the Che Guevara and Bob Marley shirts at the festival - where almost all the guys on stage, but hardly any of the guys in the audience, were black - I saw people wearing shirts that read Hip Hop Is NOT Dead.

That's a response to the rapper Nas, who stated the opposite in the title to an album last year. (He joins Rock the Bells in Atlanta today.) While it was nice to see rap fans acting proud of their culture, a more accurate and to-the-point T-shirt would have read Hip Hop Is OLD.

Taking a look around made that unequivocally clear, and argued that the hip-hop concert business is becoming more and more like the rock concert business: The young bands have the hits, while the old bands sell the tickets.

Everybody I saw on the main stage - more than seven hours of what had to be the dirtiest music festival I've ever been to (with an absurd shortage of trash cans, fans had no choice but to toss their overpriced beer and water bottles on the ground) - had been around and then some.

Most of the headliners go back to at least the early '90s - from the Wu-Tang, whose first album came out in 1993, to proud pot smokers Cypress Hill, to Philadelphia's the Roots, who sounded as vital as ever, playing a set that was partly a show-stopping display of the hyper-speed rhyming skills of rapper Black Thought, and partly an old-time soul revue.

There was also a second Paid Dues stage at Rock the Bells, devoted to alt-hip-hop that, alongside the Roots and Rage, provided the best evidence of creative life.

De la Rocha and Morello's band has always shouted out from the left. They're ardent supporters of Mumia Abu-Jamal, and back in 1993, when the Lollapalooza tour played South Philadelphia, they protested censorship in music by appearing on stage naked with duct tape over their mouths and the letters PMRC (for Tipper Gore's Parents Music Resource Center) scrawled across their chests.

So it's not surprising that the re-united Rage have come out swinging politically in their post-Sept. 11 incarnation. At Randalls Island, de la Rocha said President Bush "should be brought to trial as a war criminal and hung and shot" and called Bush and Vice President Cheney "the real assassins." That's one sure way to get on Bill O'Reilly's dark side.

Whatever you think of their politics, there's no denying the power of Rage's music. Whether he's making his guitar sound like a scratching-DJ or a helicopter or firing off spiraling call-the-ambulance leads, Morello is a genuine innovator on guitar.

Do all the shirtless Rage fans care about the band's politics? Some do, undoubtedly. But though the scene at Rage's closing set resembled a Nuremberg Rally in its fist-pumping intensity, that wasn't unified political passion on display. It was collective enthusiasm for the return of a great live band, a hip-hop-infused rock powerhouse that, after eight years in exile, is back at full strength and ready for the here and now.