Outernational

Outernational acting like the rock stars they are...

Sorry for my tardiness this week. The sad news is that I'm back from a funeral. The good news is that before that, I was doing childcare and traveling with members of FUREE, ReadNex Poetry Squad, Make the Road by Walking, and Fair Food NYC to join the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) in Chicago to end their succesful "Truth Tour 2007" against McDonald's...Next Stop: BURGER KING!

The webmaster for Encuentro NYC and I teamed up to publish 10,000 bi-lingual (Spanish/English) copies of the zapatistas' Sixth Declaration...3,600 of which I delivered to the CIW on Saturday at their "Concert for Fair Food" in Chicago's House of Blues. Seven years after the break-up of Rage Against the Machine, Zach de la Rocha and Tom Morello briefly reunited to continue their solidarity with the CIW and close out the show.

Speaking of Tom Morello and copies of the zapatistas' Sixth Declaration...
The revolutionary rock (+hip-hop, punk, reggae, ska, afrobeat, bhangra...) band Outernational is touring with another thousand copies of the aformentioned Declaration right now on a brief stint opening for Ozomatli. It's a brief stint because soon they will be headed to Cali to go into the studio to record their first album with former Rage guitarist, now The Nightwatchman, Tom Morello on production!

Having been friends with their trumpetist, vocalist, dhol and bongo player, Sonny Suchdev, for years now, I waited an unacceptably long time to see them live. I finally caught up with Outernational earlier this month at Manhattan's Knitting Factory where they tore the place up with a packed crowd moshing, stage diving, and -yes- BALCONY DIVING...it was a hot show to say the least. Also hot was that they made room for Left organizations such as Left Turn, the War Resisters' League, and perennial Outernational tourmates, the RCP-USA, to table and distribute their own media. Band members' politics span a spectrum from anarchist to communist and things all around and in between so the decision to bring the zaps' "Sexta" on tour could only complement the revolutionary pan-leftist mix.

What's on the horizon? It's not unlikely that one day soon the zapatistas will get to return the act of listening with the sounds of Outernational blasting over the radio waves of Radio Insurgente...and the next batch of bi-lingual Sextas coming out of NYC will be in English and ARABIC! Why? Well, that's another story, for another time, so stay tuned! And thank you for your patience...in the meantime, check out Outernational on tour...