... The roots of the effort to join culture with the battle to end poverty can be seen in the family tree of Zack de la Rocha, singer for Rage Against the Machine. Zach's grandfather fought in Sinaloa during the Mexican Revolution before emigrating to the United States, where he worked sixteen-hour days as a farm worker in California's Silicon Valley. Zach's dad is a well- know L.A. muralist who, Zach recently told a Mexican interviewer, "tried to build bridges between the artists in Los Angeles, the workers, and Chicanos against the war in Vietnam."

As for de la Rocha the younger, this summer he made his fourth trip to Chiapas in southern Mexico to work with the Zapatista rebels. "Our music has become a bridge," he explained. "Rage Against the Machine has become an alternative medium of communication to spread the ideas of the Zapatista movement in relationship to the poor, the young, the excluded, and the dispossessed in the United States." Those ideas can be summarized in de la Rocha's declaration that "We are for a different world where money is not the only exchange value."

Those words find a north-of-the-border echo in the slogan of the Kensington Welfare Rights Union (KWRU): "We have a right to thrive--not just barely survive." The KWRU, a multi-racial organization of 4,000 poor and homeless people in North Philadelphia, will host a meeting this fall that will be a golden opportunity to build upon the work of Zack de la Rocha and Rage Against the Machine.

From October 9-11 at Temple University, KWRU will host a Poor People's Summit that will bring together over one hundred poor people's organizations and their allies to plot a strategy for the next year in the battle to end poverty. One of the Summit's most important elements will be a culture workshop--a brainstorming session where musicians, journalists, graffiti writers, poets, web masters, filmmakers, and others will begin to define their role in the battle to end poverty including, quite obviously, their own. Artists will be able to walk out of the workshop, go down the hall, and immediately begin to build alliances with America's poor themselves.

The possibilities? RRC was able tohelp facilitate a meeting of KWRU with Steve Earle in July and with Missouri country- rockers the Bottle Rockets in September (an August meeting with Rancid got lost in the communications abyss of the Warped Tour). These comminglings of music and street struggle left everyone involved eager to work together in the future. As Earle put it, "One of the things that makes KWRU so special is that it's a real live honest-to-goodness people's revolution." As for the Poor People's Summit, Earle said: "What can we do? For the time being simply show up--with our eyes, ears, hearts, and minds open."

For more information on the culture workshop, contact RRC (310-398-4477; rockrap@aol.com) and for more information on the Poor People's Summit, contact KWRU (215-203-1945; kwru@libertynet.org).

Rock & Rap Confidential's web site is http://www.rockrap.com/rockrap/.