The Black Lines Tour 2017-2018

Lore & Background

Rage Against the Machine and System of a Down have a shared DNA that goes beyond genre. Both bands were forged in the late 1990s, both drew on Armenian-American cultural identity, and both built their stagecraft around the idea that a rock show could function as a political assembly. When the two were announced as co-headliners for a 2017 North American run, the announcement landed less like a booking and more like a reunion of a movement that fans feared had quietly dissolved.

The tour leaned into that shared vocabulary. Stage design on both halves of the show emphasized stark, industrial visuals; lighting rigs pulsed in sync with the bass; and the setlists favored the anthemic, sing-along material that turns a concert hall into a chant. Between songs, the bands' frontmen delivered the kind of pointed, unscripted commentary on policing, immigration, and corporate power that has been a signature of both groups since the mid-'90s.

For the audience, the experience was less a concert and more a collective exhalation. The overlap between the two fanbases meant that when SOAD closed their set and RATM walked out, the energy never dropped. The tour became a touchstone for fans who had followed both bands through hiatuses, lineup changes, and the long gap between the original era and the post-2007 reunions.

In Their Own Story

The house lights kill and the first chord hits like a door slamming in a sealed room. Forty thousand people inhale at once. The bassist plants his foot, the guitarist drags a chord that sounds like a chain dragging across concrete, and somewhere in the third row a kid who was twelve in 2004 is suddenly twenty-six and screaming a line he's known by heart for fifteen years. The drummer's fill rolls into the chorus and the entire floor becomes a single chest cavity, expanding and contracting. When the last note rings out and the silence holds for one full second before the roar, you can see it in the faces around you: this is not entertainment. This is the thing they came to do. The thing the song was built to do. And for the next two hours, nobody in the building is going to leave until it's done.

Reader's Guide

The Black Lines Tour paired Rage Against the Machine and System of a Down as co-headliners across a series of North American stops in 2017. The booking was a natural fit: both bands share LA roots, a late-'90s origin story, and a stage philosophy that treats the concert as a political act as much as a musical one.

Setlists on both halves leaned heavily on the anthemic material that defines each band's live identity. RATM's set cycled through the core catalog of the 1990s era, with the crowd singing every chorus back at the band. SOAD's set carried the same energy, and the transition between the two halves was seamless enough that many audience members described the night as one continuous show rather than two.

Stage moments that stood out included the frontmen's between-song commentary, where both groups used the microphone to address policing, immigration enforcement, and corporate accountability in language that was direct, personal, and unapologetically confrontational. The political statements were not rehearsed or scripted in feel; they landed as the kind of off-the-cuff, heated observations that fans of both bands had come to expect.

Audience reception was overwhelmingly positive. Reviews and social-media posts emphasized the energy, the sing-along density, and the sense that two bands who had defined a particular moment in alternative music were still capable of filling a room with the same urgency they brought in 1997 or 1998. The tour became a reference point for fans who had waited years for a live event that matched the intensity of the recordings.

Did You Know?

• Both Rage Against the Machine and System of a Down trace their origins to the late-1990s Los Angeles scene and both have strong ties to Armenian-American cultural identity, making the shared bill feel almost like a homec
• The tour name references the RATM track "Black Lines" from 1999's The Battle of Los Angeles, a song that has become a near-universal live closer and a symbol of the band's confrontational ethos.
• RATM's original run ended in 2000 and their reunion began in 2007, so by the time of this tour the band had been active for over a decade but had never toured with SOAD in a co-headlining capacity before.
• The overlap between the two fanbases meant that many attendees had followed both bands since the late '90s, turning each show into a multi-decade reunion as much as a concert.