Street Sweeper Social Club’s stated message is to:
1) Feed the poor
2) Fight the power
3) Rock the [EXPLETIVE DELETED] out
Respectable things, sure, and when delivering a radical message, it’s always good to deliver them with a spoonful of sugar. Thing is, the sound of Tom Morello’s guitar is like a bug zapper for bros, who are more or less only interested in #3. By making that reckless, sweeping generalization, alls I’m saying is that’s a lot of sugar for this particular message; so much so that it probably would have been entirely obscured had Morello not stopped the show to lay out the aforementioned three-point plan.
During that show stoppage, Boots asked everyone in the audience to lift their phones in the air. I half-expected him to tell everyone to smash ‘em, but, instead, he took advantage of a captive audience to add a bunch of contacts to the band’s marketing list in a brilliantly crass way.
He and Morello asked everyone to text a certain number to find out how to feed the poor in their area, to get some free music, and to get access to an afterparty. This is definitely better and mostly more noble than the things you usually get in exchange for an email address or a cell phone number, but if they don’t also use the information they collect from that text message to market to fans about tour dates and new releases, I’ll be shocked. Sadly, because of patchy cell coverage in the area (i.e. anyone who uses AT&T or has an iPhone is almost completely sans-connectivity), this probably wasn’t as successful as it could have been.
That said, Morello’s guitar playing is bonkers in a great way, and Street Sweeper Social Club got the still-sparse early afternoon crowd moving. To answer the inevitable question, Boots Riley is a much better and more interesting rapper than Zach de la Rocha, making this semi-supergroup perhaps more interesting than any potential Rage reunion would be.
– Jeff Reguilon
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