Prophets of Rage - Prophets of Rage

For such an anti-capitalist-fronting project, this Rage Against the Machine / Public Enemy coattail-riding album sure seemed like it had this year’s most expensive hype train behind it. Just about every metal publication I follow seemed to be even more eager for this thing than for Emperor of Sand. I’ll say that I have never found Rage Against the Machine to be the poignant revolutionaries a lot of music writers and fans make them out to have been. I gave their self-titled release a re-listen after years of not hearing it in preparation for this and came away thinking even less of it than I previously did on a lyrical level. While I do disagree with some of the unnecessarily-far-left stances they take, it’s not my stance that gives me a distaste for the lyrics (plenty of bands with ideologies near mine have written some equally dumpy lyrics and music). I can appreciate music from a different angle from my own, in fact I love hearing new, convincing ideas that make me challenge my own. That’s the key word though, “convincing”. Nothing Zack de la Rocha rapped, was anywhere above the ground floor or anything I hadn’t heard before from a college freshman with a Bob Marley poster who loves talking about the only two Kendrick Lamar songs he likes like a deeply invested fan of his music.

What glaring flaws I found deal-breakers in Rage Against the Machine’s music (the combination of simplistic and edgy lyrics, repetitive structuring, minimal expansion) are amplified on this short debut full-length, and what redeeming factors the elder group was able to conjure (catchy hooks, simple but groovy riffs) are absent on this new album. For starters, the chemistry between the Rage Against the Machine instrumentalists and B-Real and Chuck D is barely cohesive and often awkward. At least Zack delivered his 14-and-deep bars with charisma and convincing energy, but Chuck D and B-Real sound restrained, potentially hindered by the neutered backing music. Tom Morello’s primitive guitar contributions to this problem are largely unimaginative and the few pedals-and-pull-off solos he throws in are merely gagged breaths of fresh air.

On the lyrical front, this thing is somehow even more unoriginal and basic than any Rage Against the Machine album. From the canned Black Lives Matter and “hands up, don’t shoot” references (because that’s all they are, just slogan statements) to every dread-locked stoner “revolutionary” catchphrase littering the album with no substantiation, the album makes no original statements anywhere. It’s not that the band needs to drop some facts or statistics in the lyrics to argue their point, and it’s not that they even need to offer up a logical, cohesive, rhetorical statement about any of these issues. The impact of art on an issue is hardly ever through primarily one artist, and I don’t expect even these professed activists to hold the key to the problems they sing about. But they need to at least give a unique perspective to justify entering the discussions as “revolutionaries”. They’re like the short comments in already messy and heated YouTube or Facebook threads that just smack a “fuck Trump” or “Bernie 2016” in all-caps. I literally didn’t hear anything on this album that I haven’t heard chanted at a protest, stated (and then actually elaborated on) on another artist’s work, or seen misspelled hundreds of times on Facebook. The lyric sheet just reads like a bullet-point list of generic pro-this/anti-that political stances. Even if they just want to make some simple protest tunes and don’t want to get to heady or bogged down in the nuances of the issues or even if they didn’t feel confident and capable of expressing their reasoning on the subjects (which I know isn’t the case), I would think that they could at least find some way to give what they’re saying a unique spin and make some protest tunes that haven’t already been made. But instead, the band applies a lazy and dated style of “fighting the power” through music to a dated style of music.

While the goofy turntable-scratching interlude “The Counteroffensive” took just half of a minute to put both my palms on my forehead, the crown jewel of this tin foil hat has to be the the pointless marijuana-legalization anthem “Legalize Me”. I don’t really want to use this word because its trendiness and it’s being tossed around like a hot potato has lessened its meaning, but I don’t think this song deserves any description besides cringey. I mean, approaching the issue from the medical standpoint has its merits (even though its proponents seem to exaggeratedly advertise it as the most miraculous drug known to man), but the band just talks about smokin’ up and the titular refrain in the chorus is one of the most laughably delivered vocal moments of anything I’ve heard in a few years. Shit, they could’ve gone after the mass incarceration issue related to drug-possession crimes, but the self-described radical revolutionaries just indulge in what sounds like it would have a maybe spot on a 90′s frat party soundtrack. That song is definitely the hardest moment to sit through and honestly, picking a runner-up is so difficult I don’t want to do it because that would mean having to revisit this album again, and none of my visits to it have been pleasant up to this point.

From a more cynical standpoint, the “profits off rage” pun referring to the band trying to ironically capitalize on the notoriety of Rage Against the Machine has been beaten to death, but the pun does kind of hold another meaning as they could be seen as profiting from a different rage: ours. Without a doubt the political climate these days is more hostile, toxic, and astoundingly volatile than any time I can remember experiencing, and Prophets of Rage aren’t the only artists hopping aboard the pot-stirring, view-reaffirming bandwagon in a time when people seem angrier than ever. I can’t imagine that wasn’t at all a factor motivating this group’s formation, and with so many artists only worsening the societal divisiveness right now, I can’t help but muster up a little bit of the same distaste for Prophets of Rage, even if they didn’t even do a very good job at it.