 I'm Steve Haydn, Cultural Critic for Uproxx, and I am joined today by two music icons. Chuck D, Tom Morello, Prophets of Raid. I feel like the entire nation right now is trying to figure out why our president seems so reluctant to call out racist neo-Nazis and white supremacists. We should be totally pissed off by what happened in Charlottesville and what our president's saying. He's clearly on record who he's representing. He knows damn well that there's a contingent out there that he inspired and made rise with all the rhetoric he was spitting on that campaign. I know the original idea was that you felt like rage songs, public enemy songs, that these songs were needed, that they needed to be played. What are you hoping that people, if they come to see your show, I know you probably want them more than just to have a good time, that you want them to have a deeper experience. What is, I guess, in your heart of hearts video of course? First of all, it is very important that they have a good time. The reason why I picked up a guitar and why Chuck picked up a microphone and why we play music is because of the visceral feeling of rock and roll, hip hop, punk rock satisfaction that we had. If we can't convey that on a record or at a show, then nobody cares what you're talking about. I love Noam Chomsky, but he's not going to rock a field of 80,000 people in Belgium. That's what we do. So first and foremost, the message is in the mosh pit. This was a band that didn't just happen, we didn't put together and play some festival shows. We came together during the tumultuous electoral season of 2016 because it felt like it was a chaotic political time where Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders were being described as candidates that were raging against the machine. We're like, hold on. I may not have trademarked the phrase, but we have an opinion about what that really means. We felt that it was not enough to hashtag about what was going on or tweet about or Instagram what was going on. I mean, those are small arrows in the quiver, but there's a big arrow in the quiver and that's rock and roll music, which can steal the backbone of those who are fighting injustice and put wind in the sails of a movement that will hopefully lead to a more just and sane United States of America. I mean, do you think it's morally right just to punch a Nazi in the face? Are you fucking kidding me? Resistance to injustice happened before Donald Trump. It'll happen during Donald Trump and after Donald Trump. So it's like, can it get worse? Of course it can get worse. The Nazis and the KKK have unhooded themselves because they've taken off the hoods in the Oval Office so they feel more comfortable taking off the hoods on the streets. It's very important that culture and music speaks as loud as being a voice because we can't rely on government. Things don't fix itself. You've got to make it happen. It seems like you guys put together songs like pretty quickly. I mean, is it intimidating at all, though, when you have the kind of legacies that you guys have to create something new that you know people are going to compare to what you've already done? To me, always. But that's the challenge. You've got to go. I mean, every time we stepped on the stage, you're going up against Mount Everest here and the Himalayas over there, you know? So, I mean, look, man, it's no gray area. You have to come and win. You have to win. I mean, give me a sense of how unique that is because you both have worked with a lot of different musicians. I mean, is it hard to find that kind of thing? I mean, there's no crystal ball I could have looked into with my tennis rack and my kiss posters that I would be in Rage and Audio Slave and Providence Rage, three different bands that somehow have managed to kind of find their own version of greatness. And it's, I just feel like Public Enemy and Cypress Hill were the two principal hip-hop influences on Rage against the machine. And those were the, the PE was in our DNA and the Bomb Squad production and Terminator X were huge influences on me as a guitar player, you know? Like the sound collages and the rhythmic stuff. I tried to think less Chuck Berry and more Terminator X in, you know, the beginning days of Rage. And in Cypress Hill, that was the record that in Soundgarden's Bad Motorfinger were the two records that were on nonstop repeat when we wrote the first Rage record. And somehow I'm in a band with Be Real and Chuck D. Like, there's no, it's like, it's outrageous. And I've never been in a, I've never been in a failing band. And this idea like iconography and music and how that can be used to package ideas that are very powerful for people. How does that inform what you're doing now with Prophets of Rage? I mean, do you feel like that combination can really galvanize people when they hear it? And like, why does that work so well, you think? It's been our experience over the course of some decades now that that is, can be a very impactful experience. From my, the first time I put on a PE cassette or a Clash record, that is the experience that seems to happen with the number of the records we made. We hope it happens with this one too. Here's the, if you're a band, if you're any of you in a band out there in TV land, either fucking mean it or don't do it, you know? And we've never not meant to play as if everybody's soul in the room is at stake, you know? If you do that, it's gonna resonate.