“Rep a stutter step then bomb a left upon the fascists,” sang Zack de la Rocha 25 years ago on Rage Against the Machine’s all-powerful debut. It bears mentioning that Prophets of Rage still think it’s cool to punch a Nazi. The rap-rock supergroup unites members of some of the most radically militant bands ever to claim regular rotation on MTV, including the rhythm section of Rage Against the Machine, Public Enemy’s Chuck D and DJ Lord, and Cypress Hill’s B-Real (who, while never as manifestly political as his bandmates, shares a certain street-fighting-man ethos.) There was a time when all of these artists felt genuinely dangerous, and on Prophets’ first album of original material, they set out to prove they haven’t lost that edge. “We goin’ Molotov,” raps Chuck D, in one of the album’s dozens of lines about resisting, fighting back, or weaponizing music. Prophets of Rage aren’t just a band, they insist. They’re a counteroffensive.
Prophets of Rage came together not because de la Rocha was disinterested and this new lineup might sell a lot of tickets, but because the times demanded it. “Here we had, sitting dormant in the garage, these 20 kilotons of explosive rock’n’roll music of the Rage Against the Machine catalog,” guitarist Tom Morello said in a recent interview. So they heeded the call: If they don’t play the old hits, and now new songs that sound an awful lot like those old hits, who will?
Between the battering-ram rhythms and Morello’s volatile guitars, Prophets of Rage’s originals land with the brute impact of the RATM classics. Without de la Rocha leading the charge, though, it’s harder to humor the fantasy of this lineup on the frontlines. Their physically demanding music needs a singer with stamina and titanic lung capacity—the kind of dynamo frontman you picture spending most of their concerts midair. Due respect to Chuck D, even in the prime of his youth he wouldn’t have fit that bill. Though his voice retains its hallmark boom and he acquaints himself better to these originals than the winded covers of the group’s debut EP, he stick-and-moves with all the dexterity of the Kool-Aid Man. Scorchers like “Radical Eyes” and “Unfuck the World” call for a singer with pipes. Prophets of Rage don’t have one.
For artists who’ve tightly woven politics with their identity, Prophets’ songs are bizarrely light on specifics. The lyrics read like they were pieced together from headlines they never bothered to click on. Even the album’s great gimmie, “Hail to the Chief,” a takedown of a president who gives his critics so much to work with every single day, is inexplicably vague. In his heyday, Chuck D didn’t just drop slogans; he gave dissertations—Public Enemy’s lyric sheets used to read like pamphlets or manifestos. Now he strains to maintain simple lines of thought. On “Legalize Me,” he rattles off enormities like Michael Stipe channel surfing through “It’s The End of the World As We Know It”: “Young widows candles lit/Teenagers blown to bits/Unfriendly radio hits…”
If nothing else, Prophets of Rage washes down the sour aftertaste of their opportunistic EP, which introduced a band seemingly less interested in justice than a quick buck. Here, there’s no questioning that their hearts are in it—hearing Chuck D snarl “We fucking matter!” on “Who Owns Who,” even if it is over Rebirth-caliber rawk riff, is the album’s great thrill. Good intentions are a low bar for an album, though. Activist music is less of a commodity today than it was during the formative years of Rage Against the Machine and Public Enemy. Good art doesn’t need the word “political” appended to it. Good art is dangerous, radical, and inherently political. It says something new, persuasive, or inspiring. It lays out an actual vision for unfucking the world.
Prophets of Rage don’t do any of that. Everything about the project’s packaging, from its Shepard Fairey artwork to its Michael Moore-directed music video, feels pat and past its expiration date, relics of a previous revolution copy-and-pasted onto the current one. The band hasn’t done themselves any favors by sticking so closely to the sounds of their youth, either—not that they were ever going to top the pipe-bomb intensity of their earliest recordings, anyway. Run the Jewels have proven it’s possible to make relevant political music after 40, but their music works because their ideas are fresh, and their anger is calibrated for now. It speaks volumes that Zack de la Rocha is more interested in moonlighting with RTJ than reliving past glories with his old bandmates.
