Analysis: For a rock group whose songs have been idolized in the media as the millennial incarnation of political rock, and whose just-completed American tour incurred the wrath of the country's powerful police lobby, Rage Against the Machine's tour-closing show at the Great Western Forum in Los Angeles on Monday night (12/20) was musically stale and anticlimactic.

Unlike police in Worcester and Nashville, who demonstrated outside venues to protest the band's support of convicted Philadelphia police murderer Mumia Abu-Jamal, Inglewood police lounged outside the venue before the show and seemed downright bored afterwards. (Police arrested two people for drunkenness and one for allegedly assaulting an officer.) Their routine presence only underlined the fact that the Fraternal Order of Police's agitprop, seized upon by local media hungry for controversy, doesn't blow past the Mississippi.

Inside the venue, the Forum's hired StaffPro security guards, posted in every aisle above and below the loge sections, were mainly calm, save one incident: in Loge 9 on the east side of the venue, seconds after Rage took the stage, approximately 50 fans rushed the guards at the wall above the show floor in an attempt to dive into the restricted-access floor area.

For the next five minutes, guards cleared the area by pushing fans back up the stairs. In two cases, an overly aggressive guard roughly shoved two individuals, but they neither fell nor appeared injured. The mild frenzy was no more brutal than the mosh pit, where circling, bare-chested alpha males performed their customary ritual of shoving and throwing elbows into rib-cages. Although singer Zack de la Rocha warned male fans in the pit that he would have security throw them out if they fondled any women, he wasn't concerned about crowd-surfing and moshing, practices which Fugazi frontman Ian MacKaye routinely stops shows to criticize.

As for Rage's one-hour set and customary encore, all the elements that might make rock interesting--novel sonic textures, interplay, dynamics, contrasts that last longer than short introductions--were as absent as homeless people in wealthy suburbs. Guitarist Tom Morello's song riffs are a pastiche of earlier rock styles; though he produced some unique feedback and white noise in his solos, those moments were too brief and never required the rest of the band to change its pre-set forms. Bassist Tim Commerford hasn't yet discovered that a song can change keys, and jackhammer drummer Brad Wilk was heavy-handed and rhythmically boring. Wilk would do well to study the drumming of Elvin Jones, who accompanied John Coltrane on "A Love Supreme"--which was used as "filler" music in between sets by opener Gang Starr and Rage.

De la Rocha's lyrics, zeroing in on police violence, media manipulation, government control and corporate globalization, are unusual animals in the corporate rock landscape. And it's laudable that the band gives table space at its concerts for political activists who oppose sweatshop labor, the Mexican government's past massacres of campesinos in Chiapas, and Occidental and Shell Oil's plan to exploit oil reserves in the Andean U'wa people's ancestral lands. As de la Rocha said in his prepared speech before playing the encore song "Freedom," the police (and powers that be) aren't afraid of "revolutionary music." They're afraid of arena-sized crowds of young people around the country becoming "informed and involved" in the political process.

While political change begins with the type of consciousness-raising that de la Rocha aims for, it takes more than spending $30 for a four-hour concert, or giving the middle finger to the police, which Gang Starr lead the crowd in doing. De la Rocha may be doing his part by driving political criticism into the mainstream, but turning youthful rebellion into political resistance ultimately requires action on the part of fans. Whether large numbers of fans--not just a committed core of activists--take that step remains to be seen. And if they do, it's a development that the media, the record companies and the concert industry have no interest in.