In the immortal words of Rage Against the Machine’s “Guerilla Radio”: “It has to start somewhere/ It has to start sometime/ What better place than here, what better time than now?”
For the first official show of their Make America Rage Again national tour, Prophets of Rage brought the ruckus to Cleveland on Tuesday night (July 19). And while the Republican faithful a few miles down the road from the Agora Theatre probably couldn’t hear the righteous rock noise, the hip-hop/rock supergroup tried their best to shake the walls and make their message clear.
“F— what’s happening in Quicken Loans Arena,” said Public Enemy leader Chuck D mid-way through the 90-minute agitprop counterprogramming to the Trump coronation at the downtown RNC headquarters. “Let’s take the f—ing power back. Put your middle finger in the air. We got to take it back all the way back … Take that power back… You know what happened downtown. F— that Trump s—”
Led by vicious verbal attacks from Chuck D and Cypress Hill’s B Real, the band bolted out of the gate with their new self-titled single, “Prophets of Rage,” with Rage trio guitarist Tom Morello, bassist Tim Commerford and drummer Brad Wilk locking into the kind of pummeling groove that made their band one of the most politically and emotionally powerful acts of the 1990s.
Maybe it was the proximity to the heavily fortified convention zone, the sound of black helicopters periodically buzzing overhead or the palpable sense in the air of a city on lockdown, but on this night the lyrics to decades-old songs took on a freshly urgent tone and context.
The collective hewed pretty much to the set list they’ve played in a series of well-received warm-up gigs, but over and over new meaning seemed to leap from those chronicles of injustice from a quarter century ago. From Rage’s “Bombtrack” to PE’s “Miuzi Weighs a Ton” and landslide attack of “People of the Sun,” both Chuck D and B Real seemed newly energized by the thundering tracks, with the 55-year-old PE frontman hopping around and dancing in circles like a man half his age as he pointedly aimed a finger gun to his head during the Rage stomper “Bullet in the Head.”
Morello brought his usual arsenal of guitar pyro, with what sounded like a stuck power drill on “People of the Sun,” grinding away as a large backdrop featuring a mob of fist-raising revolutionaries dropped mid-song behind Wilk’s kit. As speaker after speaker pledged to “take America back” over the first two nights of the convention, Chuck and Real talked straight, rhyming: “We need a movement with a quickness/ You are the witness of change/ And to counteract/ We gotta take the power back.”
In addition to D’s youthful rebirth, B Real also showed a new, more focused side during the show, acting as the perfect foil to the PE frontman, less Flavor Flav-like jester and more sober, truth-dropping equal. They both paid fitting tribute to missing Rage singer Zack de la Rocha’s tricky, testy cadence on “Testify,” while Morello tapped out a science fiction solo on the palm of his hand using just his guitar chord.
The fired-up, revolutionary vibe at the show capped a day when some protesters clashed with security on the city’s streets, some delegates refused to fall into line when the nominating process got underway and earlier in the day the avenues near the “Q” arena featured their own kind of system-bucking theater. Hours before the show, a riot of conflicting megaphone noise from a group of evangelical Christians shouting down a small contingent from the notorious Westboro Baptist Church kept dozens of armed bicycle-mounted cops on edge.
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