Had a hard day? Let not your heart be troubled, intrepid reader. The comedy gods have smiled upon you and given Big Hollywood the sad, inevitable, hilarious zenith of the music world’s intersection with the Occupy movement.

After the pathetic Occupy-themed song of Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello, the political rap-rock band’s singer rhythmic vocalist Zack de la Rocha decided to honor the nationwide protesters, possibly to encourage them after a spate of crackdowns and evictions by local governments. Take a look and catch a glimpse of what may have been the tenor of Mr. la Rocha’s oft-promised but never-launched career as a solo artist:

Via Prefix:

The beginning spills through city veins
Into the arteries
And under powers poison clouds
We move like the shadows
Through the alley ways
Through nightmares bought and sold as dreams
Through barren factories
Through boarded schools
Through rotting fields
Through the burning doors of the past
Through imaginations exploding
To break the curfews in our minds

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Confession time:  I like Rage Against the Machine. Not liked, like. If an old single comes on the radio, I turn it up and tap my steering wheel to the beat. Writing this, I’ve made a Spotify playlist for them. At 12-years-old during the height of their fame, the band was a–dare I say it–intelligent alternative to the vapid, emo nu metal populating the rock airwaves.

Yes, their civic ignorance and major-label hypocrisy are both easy and fun to mock, but they still knew how to jam, and guitarist Tom Morello achieved some truly awe-inspiring results in his sonic experimentation. Regardless of his politics, I could always respect him as a human and as a musician.

But oh, how the mighty have fallen. Here’s Morello before performing at Occupy Wall Street last Friday:

The crimes committed by Wall Street are just that–crimes. And if Barack Obama doesn’t have the courage to shut down Guantanamo Bay, then perhaps he can fill some of those animal cages with the Wall Street criminals who torpedoed our economy. And if Barack Obama doesn’t have the courage to do that, we may have to drag those sons of bitches off to jail ourselves. Perhaps we’ll put ‘em in those little orange jumpsuits with the black hoods over their heads and crank Rage Against the Machine 24 hours a day.

To the left, there’s nothing worse than getting a one-way ticket to Guantanamo Bay. Even terrorists don’t deserve such a fate. Yet bankers sure do, because some animals deserve cages more equally than others. (more…)

“They come from the bright light cities…They come from a one horse town…But if they’re coming for you boy…Ya better know they ain’t messin’ around” ~ Madison Rising

As we gather with loved ones this Labor Day weekend to officially bid farewell to another all-too short summer, we should take a moment to remember those who are serving overseas and unable to be with us to enjoy those BBQs, cold beers, pool parties, and such.   Here to remind us of their sacrifices, with a brand-spankin’ new rock tribute entitled Soldiers of America, is the very hot new conservative rock band, Madison Rising.

YouTube Madison Rising - "Soldiers of America"

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“Madison Rising, named in honor of James Madison, the fourth President of the United States and author of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Federalist Papers, is a new rock band best described as a conservative version of Rage Against The Machine” according to President and CEO of Purple Eagle Entertainment (and fellow BigDawg’er), Richard Mgrdechian, who formed the band.  He further states:

The band provides guitar-centric, pro-American rock music to a market completely devoid of anything similar.  The band expects to become the face of patriotic rock and roll.  Madison Rising is expected to perform at major campaign events, military bases, NASCAR events and other pro-American venues, establishing itself as a major political voice in this country during the 2012 election cycle and beyond.  The band’s first single, Soldiers of America, was released on September 1st, 2011 and the album itself will be available on September 30^th.

BigDawg Music Mafia is honored to introduce the very talented members of Madison Rising:

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With the spotlight on Wisconsin’s union thugs rampaging across the state, one wonders why it took propaganda filmmaker Michael Moore so long to put himself in front of the news cameras to take some of their publicity for himself. But this weekend, Moore finally glommed onto the cameras making himself out to be a great supporter of the union’s efforts in the Badger State. Once again, though, Moore proves to be a hypocrite. It was Moore, after all, that excluded using union workers in one of his recent films. Some supporter of unions!

Filmmaker Moore attend a recent Wisconsin pro-union rally and regaled the crowd with an address saying, “Madison is only the beginning.”

“We’re going to do this together. Don’t give up. Please don’t give up,” Moore told the protesters, who have swarmed the Capitol every day for close to three weeks.

Oh, he’s a great supporter, right? But let us drift back only a few years to 2009 when he was filming his last bomb, Capitalism: A Love Story. During that production we found that Moore didn’t hire union stagehands (the IATSE) for his film.

According to his agent, Ari Emanuel, Moore claimed that he used non-union labor because the stagehands union doesn’t “respect documentary filmmakers” or some such thing.

It made the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) mad enough that they refused all the free tickets Moore tried to offer them when the movie debuted. Yet here are these teachers in Wisconsin now falling all over themselves because Moore came publicity seeking in front of them. For shame that their institutional memory is so shallow, eh?

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[Ed. Note: Please welcome Ezra Dulis to BH. He will be covering the music beat for us, commenting on the personalities, business, and doing an occasional review -- all from the unique point of view of a right-of-center thinking young man who's both passionate about music and a musician himself.]

Concerning actors and artists, “Shut up and sing” has become a conservative cliché long since due for retirement.  For one, we’re inconsistent.  We can’t applaud Jon Voight speaking his mind one day and then decry Sean Penn for speaking his the next day.  Sure, we can point out how much his thoughts lack basic self-awareness, but to suggest that he should just do his job and not voice his opinion is a totalitarian thought.  To entertain it is to betray our own principles and become exactly what we hate.

Today, though, I can’t help but entertain it. 

Zack de la Rocha, the lead singer of Rage Against the Machine (who came crawling back to his band once it was clear his career as a solo artist was DOA), has organized a boycott of Arizona’s new immigration law, convincing plenty of well-to-do leftist bands to skip on performing in the state.  Now, there’s nothing wrong with bands deciding where they’re going to play.  The issue is the principle behind the decision, exploiting a cause célèbre to frame themselves as righteous racial crusaders. (more…)

So a new Gallup poll just came out, reporting that socialism was viewed positively by more than one-third of Americans. That’s a lot of people, if you could call them that.

But I’m not surprised.

Think about it for a second. Since when has socialism ever been accurately portrayed in American pop culture or academia? I’ve never seen it covered in “Facts of Life,” and I’ve watched every episode. And Rage Against the Machine, one of the most successful leftwing buckets of noise on the planet, never really explained how they spent their millions. Although I’m guessing it’s not just on Rogaine and trucker hats.

Fact is, because socialism is a lie, people have to keep pushing the lie. When someone says, “Hey, my brother is a socialist,” they never follow it with, “you know, that ideology based on envy that’s responsible for the deaths of millions.” No instead it’s, “He sells Che shirts out of hemp, when he isn’t recycling sex toys for the homeless. God he’s so caring.” (more…)

From the “Truth is Stranger Than Fiction” files:

Rock bands including Pearl Jam and REM have joined a coalition of musicians to support the US president’s efforts to close the Guantanamo Bay prison.

The National Campaign to Close Guantanamo, which also includes former military officers, launched on Tuesday.

Many of the artists who have signed up are angry that their music was used as an interrogation tool in the jail.

But CIA spokesman George Little said music was used only for security, rather than “punitive purposes”. (more…)

Michael Moore is a big fat idiot — or, is he?  Actually, he is a big fat Academy-Award winning capitalist who is making a movie sarcastically called “Capitalism: A Love Story.”  In it, he’ll use his magical megaphone to expose, in his words, “an economic system that is unfair, it’s unjust and it’s not democratic. And now we’ve learned it doesn’t work.”   So… will he also park his little white ice cream truck in front of movie theaters and chastise patrons who wish to pay for a ticket?  Will he offer the film for free — perhaps even share part of the proceeds with all of us? Of course not, he’s a millionaire.

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We’ve seen this film many times before from Mr. Moore. The Bush years were kind to him as he tapped into the fears of Americans as they questioned the post 9-11 world, or worried whether there were bogey men hiding in the front offices of America. Now, he’s able to exploit the recession and all the hardships we endure in one great big Mike Moore spectacular! In Moore’s world, free enterprise is unfair, health care is unfair, the 2nd amendment is unfair, life is unfair, paychecks, layoffs, mortgages and democracy itself is unfair — and America is the bad guy.  (more…)

Unfortunately, when people recall Charles Hardin Holley, aka Buddy Holly, many think first of the plane crash in which he, the Big Bopper, and Richie Valens died, fifty years ago today. That’s a shame because Buddy’s music was about life, about living bigger than a Cadillac. Buddy’s Sound was not about death. Nor was Buddy about “raging against the machine.” Buddy said, “move over, give me the keys to that machine, I want to see how fast I can make it go.” Buddy’s music is a Yes, not a No. 

Perhaps more than any other fifties rock and roller, Buddy displayed a capacity for growth, for pushing the boundaries of The Sound. At the time of Buddy’s death he was living in New York City, married to a young woman born in San Juan, Puerto Rico and hanging out in coffeehouses, where he listened to beat poetry and flamenco guitar; at the same time he had booked a steel guitar player for the recording session that he didn’t survive to attend. Buddy was both growing in new directions and sinking his roots deeper into that fertile American earth from which The Sound had sprung. Who knows what great music this restless creative spirit would have brought forth in the sixties and seventies? Maybe in Heaven Buddy will play us all a new song. (more…)