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Tom Morello has never been one to mince words when it comes to his thoughts on Donald Trump. The firebrand Rage Against the Machine guitarist and solo star joined his friend and fellow rock agitator Bruce Springsteen over the weekend in giving a NSFW salute No. 27 from the stage.
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Performing at the Boston Calling 2025 music festival on Sunday (May 25), Morello took the stage in front of a towering backdrop that featured a series of images of the president amid a sea of oversized buttons that spelled out “F–K TRUMP.” If that message wasn’t clear enough, at one point during his set, Morello flipped his instrument up to play with his teeth and revealed another pointed message aimed at the current administration taped to the back of his guitar that read “F–k I.C.E.,” in seeming reference to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the federal agency charged with implementing Trump’s aggressive deportation policy.
Introducing a cover of Bruce Springsteen’s “The Ghost of Tom Joad,” Morello dedicated the track to The Boss, noting that the rocker has been “in a tussle with the president lately” after the Jersey giant recently dubbed the current administration “corrupt, incompetent and treasonous,” a broadside that raised the ire of the commander in chief.
“Bruce is going after Trump because Bruce, his whole life, he’s been about truth, justice, democracy, equality,” Morello said. “And Trump is mad at him because Bruce draws a much bigger audience. F–k that guy.” According to Boston.com, at the top of his set, Morello invited fans to enjoy “the last big event before they throw us in jail.”
In the midst of the Trump administration’s attack on universities it claims are not doing enough to combat antisemitism, Morello also mentioned his alma mater, Harvard University, which has particularly drawn Trump’s ire. In its latest actions, the administration has threatened to strip the school of more than $3 billion in grants following Trump’s order to freeze more than $2.2 billion in federal funding grants for the university and threats to revoke its tax-exempt status. Morello praised Harvard’s recent decision to offer a free online course called “We the People: Civic Engagement in a Constitutional Democracy.”
Morello, who graduated with honors from Harvard in 1986 with a B.A. in political science, described the class as a primer on “basic U.S. government, understanding the Constitution, and how to recognize a dictatorship takeover of your country.”
The lash out against Trump by Morello amid the president’s slash-and-burn reshaping of democratic norms came after Springsteen kicked off his Land of Hope and Dreams tour in Manchester, England on May 14 by lambasting the blitz of strong-arm actions that many political pundits have deemed authoritarian.
“In my home, the America I love, the America I’ve written about, and has been a beacon of hope and liberty for 250 years, is currently in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent and treasonous administration,” Springsteen told the crowd. “Tonight, we ask all who believe in democracy and the best of our American experience to rise with us, raise your voices against the authoritarianism, and let freedom ring.”
As is his wont, Trump replied to Springsteen’s harsh words with one of his all-caps Truth Social disses, calling the Rock and Roll Hall of Famer “highly overrated” and “dumb as a rock.” The president continued, “Never liked him, never liked his music, or his Radical Left Politics and, importantly, he’s not a talented guy — Just a pushy, obnoxious JERK, who fervently supported Crooked Joe Biden, a mentally incompetent FOOL, and our WORST EVER President, who came close to destroying our Country.”
On the precipice of what many financial experts say could be a ruinous global recession sparked by Trump’s unpredictable, see-saw tariffs, the president continued his attacks on Springsteen over the ensuing days, adding in another of his favorite targets: Taylor Swift. On May 16, the 78-year-old leader of the free world wrote, “Has anyone noticed that, since i said ‘I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT,’ she’s no longer ‘HOT?‘”
While Swift has not responded to the unprovoked attack to date, Springsteen was unbowed, doubling down on his disdain for Trump on May 17, telling a crowd in Manchester, “Things are happening right now that are altering the very nature of our country’s democracy, and they’re too important to ignore… In my home, they’re persecuting people for their right to free speech and voicing their dissent. That’s happening now… In America, the richest men are taking satisfaction in abandoning the world’s poorest children to sickness and death. That’s happening now. In my country, they’re taking sadistic pleasure in the pain they inflict on loyal American workers,” calling Trump an “unfit president” who is running a “rogue government.”
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Nancy Black might not be a name known to many outside of the Roma community, but the rapper is using her voice and platform to call out the injustice faced by her people. In a new profile, Nancy Black is using Hip-Hop as a vehicle for change and to support the recognition of all Roma people.
Nancy Black, real name Gilda-Nancy Horvath, was featured in a profile from the AFP centered on her still-growing career as a rapper and the motivations behind her art.
Horvath first began her rapping career about eight years ago, creating what the profile referred to as an “angry rap” song or protest song titled “Trushula,” which has a video with English subtitles where one can read exactly who she is targeting with her bars.
The profile goes on to note that Horvath was inspired by the development of far-right groups across Europe, especially in her home country of Austria. There, the Freedom Party (FPOe), which reportedly had Nazi ties, led in polls for the country’s national elections and this has Horvath’s attention.
Beyond tackling anti-Roma racism in verse form, Horvath also raps in Romani in part to keep the language alive and to “stop the suffering” as she told the outlet.
“With the death of this language we are also forgetting a large part of our history,” Horvath said.
The Roma people, who number around 14 million, are burdened with discrimination across the realms of education and employment, along with struggling with poverty per the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA).
Check out Nancy Black’s “Trushula” track below
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Photo: AFP/Getty
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Source: Al Bello / Getty / Protestor
We heard of climate activists chaining themselves to trees, but one protestor decided to take things to another level by gluing his feet to the floor.
Coco Gauff and U.S. Open attendees had to wait a bit to see Gauff advance to her first U.S. Open Final when climate activists decided to use one of professional tennis’ biggest tournaments to get their message about fossil fuels destroying the planet out.
One of the four protestors let the world know how serious he was about protecting the planet by gluing himself to the floor.
Per NBC News:
The match between Gauff, of the U.S., and Muchová, of Czechia, was delayed for 49 minutes, the U.S. Tennis Association said. Gauff would go on to win and seal a place in the final on home soil, though fellow American Madison Keys later lost her semifinal.
Thursday’s disruption — claimed by the group Extinction Rebellion — follows several protests by environmental activists from other groups, including one that recently blocked the route to the Burning Man festival in Nevada and others that have targeted famed works of art.
Stacey Allaster, the tournament director, notes the protestors were in the upper area during an interview during tournament coverage, NBC News reports.
“When security got there, they found that one of the protesters had physically glued themselves in their bare feet to the cement floor,” said Allaster.
According to the U.S. Tennis Association, three of the four protestors escorted out were women, and the fourth took more time because they “affixed their bare feet to the floor of the seating bowl.”
Extinction Rebellion took responsibility for the protest, saying, “No tennis on a dead planet,” and writing in a statement, “Tennis-as-usual won’t be possible on a planet in which humanity fails to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius. If activists don’t disrupt these games, the climate will.”
Coco Gauff Took It All In Stride
Gauff didn’t let the protest get to her and also didn’t have any issue with the protestors because she said it was done in “a peaceful way.”
Per ESPN:
“I always speak about preaching about what you feel and what you believe in,” Gauff said. “It was done in a peaceful way, so I can’t get too mad at it. Obviously I don’t want it to happen when I’m winning, up 6-4, 1-0, and I wanted the momentum to keep going. But hey, if that’s what they felt they needed to do to get their voices heard, I can’t really get upset at it.
Coco Gauff looks to win her first U.S. Open Final when she takes on Aryna Sabalenka tomorrow, you already know who we’re rooting for.
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Photo: Al Bello / Getty
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Coldplay‘s version of “Baraye,” a soft-spoken Iranian revolutionary anthem that recently landed its singer in state detention, was not just intended for the crowd at the EstadioMâs Monumental in Buenos Aires last month.
Amid weeks of street protests in Iran over the Islamic Republic’s policing of dissent and violent treatment of young women, the stadium singalong went viral, landing in worldwide news reports and generating hundreds of thousands of YouTube views.
Shervin Hajipour crowd sourced “Baraye” with lyrics he collected from tweets from Iranian protesters. The hymn is “like a Joan Baez song, not a Rage Against the Machine song,” says Sam Zarifi, the Tehran-born secretary general of the human-rights group International Commission of Jurists.
It quickly became an anthem for the protest movement, which was triggered when police arrested a 22-year-old Kurdish woman, Mahsa Amini, for allegedly wearing her state-mandated headscarf not tightly enough. Three days later, Amini died at a police station — beaten to death, according to her family, although the government cited a heart attack — leading to the mass street protests.
Since her death on Sept. 16, street protests have resulted in dozens of deaths and hundreds of arrests, according to news reports.
“The constant refrain of the protesters right now is ‘be our voice,’” says Zarifi. “What they really want is to not be forgotten. Attention must be paid.”
Hajipour, a 25-year-old pop artist from northern Iran, posted his version of “Baraye” on social media on Sept. 28. It includes the verse “because we want to be free to dance outside in the streets/because we feel terror when it’s time to kiss.” The track hit 40 million Instagram views in one day, according to the Washington Post and others. Since then, it has streamed 3.2 million times globally, according to Luminate, which doesn’t receive data on streams within Iran. The track has also sold 2,500 downloads, hitting No. 4 on Billboard‘s World Digital Song Sales chart last month.
The Iranian government quickly arrested Hajipour and the song vanished from his Instagram. But it was too late to prevent “Baraye” from turning into a worldwide anthem supporting the protesters. The Coldplay version in Argentina was a duet with a guest, Iranian actress Golshifteh Farahani, with verses sung in Farsi. Last month, Iran released Hajipour from detention, and he appeared in an Instagram video to say “Baraye” contained no links to a “movement or organization outside the country.”
The song’s worldwide attention is “huge,” says Zarifi, an American living in Switzerland who grew up in Iran listening to rock ‘n’ roll on headphones to avoid punishment from a government opposed to western music. He cites Baez’ 2009 version of “We Shall Overcome,” including a verse sung in Persian, as particularly inspirational for Iranians at the time.
“Nobody saw it, but it meant a lot,” Zarifi says. “This protest is absolutely the desire of a generation of Iranian kids just to be part of the regular world — if you see some of the people who were killed, they’re just kids who want to do TikTok videos and listen to music on the street. They’re being bullied by backward-looking old mullahs.”
Iranian protests have a history of music and verse going back centuries to the 13th-century Persian poet Hafez, who commented on political instability and religious hypocrisy, according to New Lines magazine. More recently, Iranian leftists retrofitted Chilean singer-songwriter Victor Jara‘s anthem “El Pueblo Unido” into an inspirational theme for Iran’s 1979 revolution, according to Zarifi, who says that the revolutionaries gave little thought to the repressive regime that would follow Mohammad Reza Shah, Iran’s last Shah (king).
Negar Mottahedeh, a Duke University literature professor who teaches gender and feminist studies, says “Baraye,” which translates to “because of” or “for” in Persian, is “wholly new and grounded in the conditions, desires and demands of the present.” She adds that the song is both relevant and flexible, recently landing in video versions by English-language interpreters, a Dutch dance troupe, worldwide animators and Swedish Eurovision stars.
“It’s a very gentle and soft song, but it’s full of mourning and grief,” says Mottahedeh. “Someone asked me about the raging anger that is beneath that — of course it’s there, but there is also a sadness about this moment.”
Or as Coldplay’s Chris Martin told the crowd in Argentina on Oct. 29: “Young women and young people are fighting for their freedom — for the right to be themselves.” Then he added, “You may not know this song, but we’re going to give it everything.”
Chris Martin of Coldplay performs at Estadio Mâs Monumental Antonio Vespucio Liberti on October 25, 2022 in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Santiago Bluguermann/GI
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