Beg, Borrow or Steal a Ticket to Roger Waters Us + Them Tour

July 29, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

From a reader:

OK, well don’t steal, but short of anything unethical or illegal try to get your hands on a ticket to this show. I haven’t been to a concert this good since Janis Joplin! And I wasn’t even high.

“Come out of the cupboard, you boys and girls” (from “London Calling” by The Clash)—they were there at this show. Multi-generational, many ’60s people, mainly white and probably a lot of people from the suburbs. And, of course, tons of Pink Floyd fans. But this experience wasn’t just reliving the ’70s. The crowd was really in tune (sorry for the pun) with the love for humanity that pulsated from the stage leading up to a resounding, scorching musical and visual denunciation of Trump. The show lives up to its billing as an immersive sensory musical journey. The music and the visuals soar and fill the stadium, bringing to life the beauty of the planet/cosmos and people from all over the world. At the same time, it jars you with the contrast of children working in garbage piles, homeless sleeping on the street, drones blowing away villages. The show and the music summon people to resist: images of people protesting in the streets against immigrant- and woman-bashing, against police brutality and for Black Lives Matter. “The Wall,” the iconic song the entire arena sings, features children lining the stage dressed in orange jumpsuits which, halfway through, they strip off to reveal T-shirts that say RESIST! as they careen happily to the music.

The song “Pigs (Three Different Ones)” is 12 minutes, and a visual curtain wall runs the length of the arena flashing pictures of Trump as an egotistical baby tyrant, Trump in a KKK hood, Trump as Hitler. The giant painted pig floats around the stadium denouncing the military and Trump. The song ends as the words “TRUMP IS A PIG!” fill a screen couple of stories high the whole length of the arena. (This is also the message on the back of some of the official concert T-shirts.)

The amateur videos at YouTube like this one give a taste.

This tour is heading to Detroit, Cleveland, and the East Coast. If you are with Refuse Fascism or the revcoms, be outside if you can with huge visuals to take the message to this audience. It is a chance to reach people who are part of the millions who hate the direction of the country and who will be challenged by Roger Waters.

Roger Waters, in an interview with Greg Kot of the Chicago Tribune, says, “This a bit more radical than ‘The Wall’ is, but it’s pointing in the same direction philosophically and politically. With the nincompoop president, we’re building a nation with walls. You can’t be a nation without walls? Yeah, you can. We haven’t arrived at the end of the story.... This is what you find, if you ever have the opportunity to travel the world. You discover what the show is about: We’re all the same. No matter what color or religion, we’re all in this together. This is a small, fragile place, we’re in rough waters and we can’t navigate it without doing it together.”

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