Prophets of Rage incite a rock ’n’ roll uprising

As he played guitar with his teeth, he revealed whom he was siding with in this most turbulent of election years, flipping his instrument upside down, voting with an Ibanez.

“Nobody for president.”

The words were scrawled in black ink on a white sheet of paper attached to the back of Tom Morello’s guitar, which he was in the process of making shriek like something caught in the maw of a predator.

The song being played was a hybrid, as was the band performing it.

Prophets of Rage, a hard rock/hip-hop supergroup consisting of members of Rage Against the Machine, Public Enemy and Cypress Hill, were gene-splicing the Beastie Boys’ “No Sleep ’Til Brooklyn” with Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power,” P.E. frontman Chuck D rhyming the lyrics of the latter over the revved-up riff of the former.

“Freedom of speech is freedom or death,” he thundered, his booming voice thoroughly enfeebling the megaphone he gripped intermittently throughout the night, rendering it redundant.

“Dangerous times require dangerous songs,” noted Cypress Hill rapper B-Real, Chuck D’s partner in rhyme, explaining the Prophets of Rage’s methodology later in the show.

And that’s what this night was all about: Provocation. Incitement. Rock ’n’ roll. Fun.

With sirens blaring, the band took the Mandalay Bay Events Center stage with fists clenched, held aloft, hurling themselves into songs that were the musical approximation of said gesture: defiant, aggressive, white-knuckled, unflinching.

Though the 20-song set list, which included a medley of hip-hop hits, spanned the catalog of all three acts that the Prophets of Rage are culled from, it largely mined Rage Against the Machine’s discography, that group making up the core of this one, sans frontman Zack de la Rocha.

Throughout the night, B-Real and Chuck D took turns taking the place of de la Rocha, Chuck D commanding the mic on vehemently delivered calls to arms like “Guerrilla Radio” and “Testify”; B-Real handling those tunes that were sung as much as rapped, like a suitably inflamed “Sleep Now in the Fire” and a bullying “Know Your Enemy.”

Occasionally they’d tag-team a tune, swapping verses like a couple of street brawlers trading blows on a room-quaking “Bulls on Parade,” their voices contrasting well: Chuck’s D stentorian bark provided the bass that balanced all the treble supplied by B-Real’s more nasally whinny.

No matter if they were playing a Rage song, teasing a soulful menace out of Public Enemy’s “Miuzi Weights a Ton” or rendering Cypress Hill’s “How I Could Just A Kill A Man” a shoulder-rolling, head-bobbing funk workout, everything became Rage-ified, anchored by one of hard rock’s premier rhythm sections.

Linebacker-sized bassist Tim Cummerford looks exactly like he plays: muscular, commanding and assertive, yet light on the feet. Locking in with drummer Brad Wilk, the two generated rhythms that were lumbering yet tensile, abetted by Morello’s inimitable guitar playing.

Morello’s solos are onomatopoeic in nature, approximating the sound of blaring sirens and turntable trickery — to wit, during “Shut ’Em Down,” he engaged in a heated back-and-forth with DJ Lord, with Morello mimicking the DJ’s machine-generated sounds with his fingers. Through it all, he continually pistoned his leg up and down wildly, as if attempting to kick-start the revolution that so many of his band’s songs are posited upon.

All together, the Prophets generated a righteous, business-minded fury that culminated with a climactic “Killing in the Name,” a song akin to a stick of dynamite with an especially long, slow-burning wick. It eventually detonated in a flash of adrenaline and intense physical exertion, with Chuck D spinning himself in circles, middle finger extended, as the crowd members on the floor hammered themselves into the barrier before the stage with such force, for a moment there, it appeared that steel might give way to flesh.

It wasn’t all rock bluster, though.

“Hip-hop is also aggressive and in your face,” B-Real announced midway through the show, and to demonstrate as much, he and Chuck D climbed down into the crowd, swarmed by fans, where they performed a medley of Public Enemy and Cypress Hill favorites backed only by DJ Lord, with the rest of the group leaving the stage. The two became one with the crowd, which was the point of the whole show, really, with Chuck D snapping selfies with fans and B-Real surfing atop the audience’s outstretched arms in one of the most frenzied mosh pits ever seen at the venue in question.

Though there was no overt politicking on this night — this was much more of a thumbing of the nose at the powers that be than any kind of partisan lobbying — the evening did have the feel of an especially heated campaign rally, with a sizable portion of the crowd sporting red hats similar to the ones favored by a certain presidential candidate, the difference being that theirs read “Make America Rage Again,” which doubled as both the name of this tour and the underlying theme of the night.

“The world is not going to change itself. That, my friends, is up to you,” Morello said at one point. “Aim for the world you really want. Aim for that world without compromise or apology.”

Where to begin?

“You stand up,” Morello instructed.

To this end, the crowd was all-in: For a little under two hours Friday, they never left their feet.

Read more from Jason Bracelin at reviewjournal.com. Contact him at jbracelin@reviewjournal.com and follow @JasonBracelin on Twitter.