Street Sweeper Social Club - Promenade

What this video is

Released in late 2009 against the backdrop of the global financial crisis, 'Promenade' emerged as the second single from Street Sweeper Social Club's debut album — a supergroup project combining Tom Morello's heavy guitar legacy from Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave with Boots Riley's Oakland-rooted, Marxist-inflected hip-hop from The Coup. The video arrived at a moment of acute class anxiety in America,…

Why it matters

A key artifact of the post-2000s rap-rock revival that distinguished itself from late-1990s nu-metal by grounding its sonic fusion in explicit political philosophy. The track and video document a deliberate bridging of Tom Morello's guitar-hero arena-rock lineage with Boots Riley's leftist hip-hop…