Tom Morello of NZ-bound Prophets of Rage has real political cred

Tom Morello’s latest band is also political but hasn't forgotten the first order of business.

Tom Morello is one of the few politically motivated musicians. When he says he wants to “rock the world”, he isn’t just talking about stadium-sized drum beats, heaving mosh pits and screaming guitar solos.

Sure, this is a man who’s filled arenas as part of Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band and rock supergroup Audioslave – but he’s also a Harvard political science graduate whose father was a Kenyan delegate to the United Nations. Morello brought socially aware, anarchist lyrics to his 90s band Rage Against the Machine, his Dylan-esque folk persona the Nightwatchman, and his present-day outfit Prophets of Rage, which also feature Chuck D and DJ Lord from Public Enemy and Cypress Hill’s B-Real.

Although PoR was formed specifically as a reaction to Donald Trump’s 2016 election campaign, Morello – who was equally outspoken about Barack Obama – says he’s not ring-fencing the band to protest this specific presidency.

“There’s no end – as soon as I get off the phone to you, I’m heading straight to the studio where we’re working on the next Prophets of Rage album right now,” he says.

“When we formed the band, it was an all-hands-on-deck emergency, but we’ve also discovered that we love playing together. We’ve been in a band less than two years and played to 2.5 million people after having just one record out – so for me it feels like a beginning.”

Morello sees PoR as “links in a chain” that goes back to “slave hollers”, turn-ofthe-20th-century US labour activist Joe

Morello sees PoR as “links in a chain” that goes back to “slave hollers”, Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, punk bands and Public Enemy.

Hill, Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, punk bands MC5 and the Clash, and more recent outfits such as Public Enemy and System of a Down.

“The reason we formed the band is that that lane was wide open,” he says. “There’s no one on a big stage in popular culture with the radical response that we felt was needed in this time – so instead of tweeting about it, we put Prophets of Rage

together to do something about it.”

Not that, you understand, going to a PoR gig is going to be about sitting back and nodding sagely to excerpts from the Bolshevik Manifesto.

“The first order of business is to rock you mightily – that’s the spoonful of sugar that helps the medicine go down,” he says.

“I went to Harvard with a commitment to intellectually arm myself for the coming revolution, but while there, I fell in love with the electric guitar and punk rock and heavy metal and that felt like a real religious calling. And since I was 19, I’ve found it works best when I’m doing them together.

“Because Prophets of Rage is a political band, most questions tend to revolve around that, but first and foremost I want to go out there and play solos that will blow your mind and rock riffs that make people jump up and down and connect on a very caveman level.”

Prophets of Rage play at Spark Arena, Auckland, on March 20.