The Rude Mechanical Orchestra is ten years old. Well, ten and a half, if you want to be precise.
The spring of 2004 was a really raw time in America. The drums of war, amplified by the lockstep assent of the media and political establishments, drowned out any whisper of dissent. We felt ourselves trapped inside a machine dealing out death and torture abroad and doping us at home with nationalistic rah-rah, waving giant foam Number One fingers in our faces to distract us from the images streaming back from Abu Ghraib -- and from the plutocrats picking our pockets, thieving our wages, cutting our hours to keep us off balance in the brave new economy that benefited only them.
Right-wing triumphalism was at a fever pitch. They’d won it all! Stolen the presidency fair and square. Launched a splendid little war or two when fate (and blowback from earlier imperial adventures and their own myopic neglect of anything that didn’t enrich oilmen and Sun Belt homebuilders) handed them the perfect pretext. Our dude-ranch dauphin of a president wore his best shit-eating grin and gloated about “hitting the trifecta” while the world burned.
Here in NYC, we were still choking on the psychic dust kicked up from when those towers fell. We still felt it like a kick to the gut when, every September 11, all the warmongers with their American flag lapel pins gathered around a mass grave-cum-construction site downtown to beat their chests and cry their crocodile tears. And we were bracing ourselves for the Republican National Convention, when the same greedheads and haters that had told Gotham to drop dead in the 1970s would gather here to exult in their plunder of the symbolic capital of an America they despised, an America queer and colorful and bound in Martin Luther King’s “inescapable network of mutuality,” woven from many different fabrics, cultures, tongues, skins, circumstances and origin stories. America the rainbow polyglot.
We felt like a conquered people. We were heartsick. We were pissed. We were powerless, but we did have some rusty, dent-addled horns, woodwinds and drums. A few of us, some of us musicians, some of us activists, some of us members of the Infernal Noise Brigade and the Hungry March Band, decided to get out in the streets and make some noise, and took our horns and drums to the March for Women’s Lives in Washington, DC. And then we took our new band to protest the Republican National Convention in our hometown. And we were reminded of the incredible power of music –- even if the people playing it are a little out of practice and their horns a little out of tune –- to change hearts, change the weather, change the world.
So we kept playing. We got better. We got bigger. We got sparklier. We scored front-row seats to some of the most exciting movements for social change of our time. We’ve had the privilege of playing for striking fast food workers, domestic workers, migrant tomato pickers, Walmart cashiers and greeters. We’ve played for an end to stop and frisk, an increase in the minimum wage, a ban on fracking and countless other causes. We’ve won some of those battles –- enough to know deep in our trombones the truth of Frederick Douglass’ words that without struggle there is no progress, and power concedes nothing without a demand.
And sometimes, the struggle goes ever so much easier with a radical marching band.
