At the Echoplex, Tom Morello lashes out at ICE raids: ‘No one's coming to save us except for us'

Los Angeles Times

5 hours ago

Around 3 p.m. Monday, outside the coffee shop Picaresca Barra de Cafe in Boyle Heights, singer-songwriter Tom Morello backed a dozen local kids and families up against a wall.
'You are witnesses to the crimes being committed against immigrants in L.A.,' he said, asking them for straight-ahead, fearless expressions while he played guitar and sang beside them. Morello, in sunglasses and an outlaw's bandanna under the brutal afternoon sun, was shooting a music video — one he cast very intentionally in the heart of the community most brutalized by recent ICE raids against immigrant families in Los Angeles.
'Pretend you'll remember me,' he sang, flanked by kids who, over the last few weeks, stood a good chance of watching someone they love get shoved into a van and disappeared.
'I wanted to humanize the terrible ICE sweeps that are going on now. We are in really, really dangerous times,' said Morello, the longtime guitarist for the leftist rock group Rage Against the Machine. He spoke to The Times backstage at the Echoplex, where in a few hours he'd headline a benefit show for the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights.
'I think that Saturday's ['No Kings'] protests showed that every act of joy is an act of resistance in this time,' he continued. 'You saw thousands of people on the streets celebrating resistance and saying that 'You picked the wrong city to try to occupy.''
For decades, Morello's been a fixture in left-populist movements in his adopted hometown of Los Angeles, spanning his time in the now-dormant Rage Against the Machine, as a solo artist and as a left-labor activist. His agitprop punk-funk and pavement-pounding advocacy work are, to him, part of the same practice.
But the events of the last few weeks — in which masked and badge-less federal agents have violently searched, detained and deported working-class immigrants across Los Angeles and the country — shook him deeply. Under the second term of President Trump, the most dire warnings of his music seem to have arrived.
A few days working to pull together a benefit for CHIRLA — a California-based policy organization and rapid-response network that's become a front line of defense in the recent ICE raids — cohered in Monday's show, which sold out in minutes. He was joined by B-Real of Cypress Hill, Pussy Riot, K.Flay and the San Diego rap-metal group the Neighborhood Kids.
'There has never been a successful social movement in this country that has not had a great soundtrack,' Morello said. 'I have to find a way to weave my convictions into my vocation. What can I do? Well, I can make a sign and go out. I can text my friends who happen to be in town. It lets people know that they're not alone.'
'The idea for [ICE] is to try to crush us where we are strongest,' Morello said. 'L.A. has just said hell no to that.'
Monday's show hosted by comedian George Lopez and DJ'd by visual artist Shepard Fairey, kicked off early with the Neighborhood Kids, whose churning rap-metal brimmed with conviction and lived detail as young people of color watching their government lash out at their families.
'Get them kids up out them cages!' they howled, as guitars and electronics chugged and squalled around them. If a young band can meet a grim moment like this, the Neighborhood Kids did their damnedest on Monday.
The Russian activist rock group Pussy Riot has some experience living under authoritarian governments. 'I spent two years in jail. Let me tell you, it sucks,' singer Nadya Tolokonnikova said onstage, face obscured by a pink balaclava while flanked by a hardcore-punk backing band. Pussy Riot's songs about desiccated pollution and ironic euro-rave breakdowns were dispatches from a possible near future for America — one where bleak humor is a survival mechanism under constant threat.
Lopez's between-set riffing embodied the sold-out crowd's sentiments: 'There are more people here tonight than at Trump's little birthday party. If he didn't like immigrants, he wouldn't have any wives,' went one milder quip. He teed up sets from the punky rapper K.Flay and Cypress Hill's stoner savant B-Real, who embodied the two strains of L.A.'s response now — righteous fury and indefatigable confidence.
Morello's closer set of solo material was more communally inspirational than furious. He read a message from his 101-year-old mother imploring the crowd to 'become soldiers in the army of love,' played Bruce Springsteen's 'The Ghost of Tom Joad,' honored his late Audioslave bandmate Chris Cornell and stirred a circle pit during Woody Guthrie's 'This Land Is Your Land.'
Speaking to The Times earlier, when asked if this dire moment might call for Rage's return, Morello was circumspect about the band's future. 'Don't wait for any other bands,' he said. 'This is your time. If you don't like what you see, write your song, join a union, get in the street, make a sign, do a protest.'
But he did get a riotous response when he told the Echoplex crowd that 'we learned an old Indigenous fighting song for you tonight,' only to kick into an instrumental version of Rage's 'Killing in the Name,' where his backing band let the crowd yell its infamous, profane lyrics of uncompromising resistance.
The right to scream those lines back at him, Morello said earlier, is not guaranteed. It's fought for and won every generation.
'People should realize like that artists that make music, and audiences listen to music, may soon be censured. You can be imprisoned, thrown into a gulag. You cannot take those freedoms to be able to say what you want, sing what you want, listen to what you want for granted,' Morello told The Times. 'They're not carved in stone. They are in peril, right now, today. No one's coming to save you, except for you. No one's coming to save us right now, except for us.'