Power to the People Festival, Merriweather Post Pavilion, Columbia, MD, 10-3-2026, Part 1 - The Early Acts

I write this on October 20, 2026. Two weeks ago, on October 3rd, there was a big rock festival designed to get people excited to vote out the Republicans across the United States. It was organized by Tom Morello, former lead guitarist for Rage Against the Machine who has often been part of Bruce Springsteen's back-up band in recent years. In two weeks, on November, 3rd, that election is due to happen. I am hopeful there will be a big blue (Democratic) wave that starts turning the country away from Trump-led insanity. To help with that effort, I am posting this entire festival. Maybe this will help inspire you to vote, since much of the music here has political themes. (And if you're a Republican supporter, please go away, this music blog is not for you. And what the heck is wrong with you, sticking with him after his approval ratings are near historic lows for any modern president? Sheesh!)

Anyway, the reason I can post this is because video footage of the entire festival was broadcast for free on YouTube. I haven't seen it shared on any of the music sharing sites I visit though, probably because it's a really big pain in the butt to break it up into songs, or even individual acts. It's over nine hours long, so that's a lot of splitting to do.

In fact, it was a bit too much splitting for me. The first three and half hours of the festival consists of eight relatively little known music acts. I listened to all of them, twice. Some were okay, but none of them really grabbed me. So I decided to split the music into individual songs for the last five and half hours of music (with the bigger name acts, like Bruce Springsteen, Dave Matthews, and the Foo Fighters), but not this first three and half hours. For these, I only broke them into the sets of each act. If anyone wants to further split some or all of these sets into individual songs, I would love that. Send that to me and I'll repost this that way.

However, I did grab all the set lists for these acts from setlist.fm. So you can follow along with them in the song list below.

Probably the best known act of these early acts is Cypress Hill. They sold millions of albums, especially in the 1990s. But they're a rap group, and I'm just not that into most rap, so I didn't feel inspired to split their songs into individual mp3s. Sorry.

Many if not all of the music acts here have leftist political songs, sometimes pretty radical. So if you're one of those people still part of the Republican clown car driving off the cliff, and still reading this, the odds are pretty good you will not want to hear this.

This album is 3 hours and 29 minutes long. 

01 Neighborhood Kids

Biddi Bomb
Brainwash
Third World Problems
Kids in the Cages

02 Last Internationale
 
Kick Out the Jams
Animals
Wanted Man
Hard Times

03 State Radio

Democracy in Kind
CIA
Revolutionaries
Calling All Crows
Cry Out
Gang of Thieves
Camilo

04 Kneecap

Unconquered - with Tom Morello

05 grandson

Autonomous Delivery Robot
Bury You
We Did It!!!
Oh No!!!
Self Immolation
Masters of War
Blood // Water

06 Linda Lindas

Gotta Get Out
Oh!
Burning Out
Blood on Our Hands
Closer
Nothing Left
Everybody Told Me
Racist, Sexist Boy

07 Killer Mike

Down by Law
Shed Tears
Never Scared
Never Scared [Second Version]
Kryptonite [I'm on It]
Slummer
Reagan
Yes!

08 Cypress Hill

When the Shit Goes Down
Real Estate
How I Could Just Kill a Man
Hand on the Pump
I Ain't Goin' Out like That
Bombtrack
[Rock] Superstar
Insane in the Brain
Jump Around - with Flavor Flav

https://pixeldrain.com/u/83kfvDae

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/tpJpNS5ssS7ueFH/file

The cover image is from this exact concert. Rather than show an image of one of the early acts in favor of all the others, I wanted something that represented the festival as a whole. So this is from the finale, with lots of people on stage, highlighting the large "Power to the People" sign. The text at the top is taken from a poster promoting the concert. I then used the same font when writing the text at the bottom.