Picture yourself this past weekend at the Mohegan Sun Casino in Uncasville, Connecticut. You kicked off Friday night by celebrating Brody Jenner’s birthday at Avalon and then made a preemptive strike against a Patron-induced hangover at Bow & Arrow Sports Bar with some Philly Cheesesteak Egg Rolls dipped in chipotle ketchup. Maybe you had a lucky streak at the slots on Saturday afternoon and blew your winnings at Yankee Candle before an afternoon nap and a chance to see Black Sabbath as part of their “farewell, for real this time” End Tour. And to cap it all off, you watched 75% of Rage Against the Machine, Public Enemy’s Chuck D, and Cypress Hill’s B-Real do rap-metal retoolings of “Shut ‘em Down” and “Killing in the Name,” getting a chance to scream, “Fuck you I won’t do what you tell me!” with 10,000 others in Sun Arena before slumping back to work on Monday.
It does make Prophets of Rage come off as five guys turning some of the most incendiary music to ever hit the radio into a crass if not harmless nostalgia trip, so why not make some “more like profits of rage, amirite?” jokes and file it next to the CBGB Lounge and Bar in the Newark Airport, and the $225 *Unknown Pleasures *T-shirt at Barney’s? Because this would be a grave misunderstanding of Prophets of Rage. “Dangerous times demand dangerous songs,” their website declares, an admirable statement if Tom Morello had any new rage directed at any new machines that have arisen since his band’s 1992 debut. But despite pop music being politically weaponized to a degree unseen since the ’70s, it’s painfully clear that Prophets of Rage believe they alone can fix it. Their shockingly flimsy EP *The Party’s Over *risks nothing and hangs nobody. They’re either ignoring the past 23 years or even worse, they have nothing at all to say about it.
A generous reading of *The Party’s Over—*four reworks of the collective’s best-known songs and a barely-there title track—shows the timelessness of Public Enemy and Rage Against the Machine’s earliest works, music that felt truly dangerous when it bum-rushed MTV with Aerosmith and Meat Loaf videos still in heavy rotation. The systemic pathologies that inspired *It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back *and *Fear of a Black Planet *are still very much intact, and while Rage Against the Machine soundtracked more chest days than May Days, their visceral impact is still undeniable. These inflammatory times grant Prophets of Rage a tremendous opportunity to use their material as proxies for new discussions. “911 is a Joke” could be extended to implicate the utter failure of public services in the neighborhoods where they're needed the most; “Night of the Living Baseheads” might be reconfigured to tackle new forms of misunderstood drug addiction and price gouging; and what would be better than a Rage-style rework of “She Watch Channel Zero?!” a song that already samples Slayer?
But none of this would likely fly at Barclay’s Center, BB&T Pavilion, EagleBank Arena or any of the other monuments to financial oligarchy in which the band currently performs. On what essentially serves as tour promo, Prophets of Rage shut up and play the hits: The Rage songs don’t rage against any specific machine and the Public Enemy songs could pass for Rage songs. The title track and “Shut ‘em Down,” now fused with variations on “Guerrilla Radio,” could just as easily be shouting the praises of the Denver Broncos’ defensive line as shouting down Nike’s lack of investment in black neighborhoods. And while the black militant theater of the S1Ws and the Bomb Squad’s production conveyed a sense of clear and present danger to white America, they’ve been replaced by Dave Grohl giving the Black Power sign in a full-band portrait and Morello doing his “no keyboards, ma” routine. Two decades on, the once innovative guitarist becomes the sound of teens safely working out their angst in suburban garages.
*The Party’s Over *is unlistenable to anyone who has a meaningful relationship with the originals, either due to the suspect politics of Prophets of Rage, or the fact that they’re simply a bad cover band playing songs they actually wrote. Since it’s essentially the same format as Audioslave, one would assume Prophets of Rage would be superior to Audioslave on account of not being Audioslave. Whatever your opinions on the merits of “Cochise” compared to “Fight the Power,” Chris Cornell is more suited to the strengths of Rage’s rhythm section than Chuck D, B-Real or basically any rapper who isn’t Zach de la Rocha. While DJ Muggs and the Bomb Squad made memorable use of metal, Public Enemy and Cypress Hill’s music always came back to funk. Rage Against the Machine could never groove worth shit and everything here is subject to the same militaristic plod and pentatonic riffs that would actually make Prophets of Rage a pretty convincing Lex Luger cover band.
As such, Chuck and B-Real are both overworked and unchallenged, straining like people trying to jog as slowly as possible. Not even taking the shoddy recording of the live tracks into account, the bigger issue is that Chuck D raps like de la Rocha’s simplified sloganeering is beneath him, which it is. Meanwhile, at some point, B-Real figures he’s supposed to take on the Flavor Flav role and can’t seem to decide what to make of the situation. He makes a game attempt to slightly revise the second verse of “Killing in the Name” (“Some of those *up in Congress/*Are the same that burn crosses”), but mostly sounds uninterested in making another rap-metal album 16 years after his last one. No one sounds like they’re having any fun here—Chuck and B-Real can’t even muster a convincing “Motherfucker!” at the end of “Killing in the Name.”
The bigger issue is that while Morello claims, “We’ve come back to remind everyone what raging against the machine really means,” The Party’s Over has nothing to say about Black Lives Matter, Freddie Gray, Trayvon Martin, subprime loans, North Carolina law HB 2, continuing bloodshed in Chicago, or even Donald Trump (indications suggest their live show is no more revealing of their actual platform). The title track makes passing reference to the Illuminati and war machines and that's the only thing they've written in the 21st century. And while “No Sleep Til Cleveland” is indeed a “Fight the Power”/Beastie Boys mashup performed at the Republican National Convention, they didn’t even bother to change the actual hook to “no sleep til Cleveland.”
Mind you, that’s a Beastie Boys song from their Licensed to Ill* *days about drinking and fucking anything that moves while on tour—weirdly apt in this setting, seeing as how there’s far more “Fight For Your Right to Party” than “Party For Your Right to Fight” in Prophets of Rage. Consider that AWOLNATION is, for some reason, their opening act on their “Make America Rage Again Tour,” a meme so played out that the band Filter got to it first. But even if the message of Prophets of Rage is vastly different than Donald Trump’s, they’re engaging in the same exact form of communication—wielding both bullhorn and a dog whistle, yelling as loudly as possible only to people who are predisposed to hear it.
