(Credits: Fender)
Thu 21 August 2025 12:00, UK
Music has never been about a catchy melody all the time. The whole point of all great songs is to have people feel something whenever the singer opens their mouth, and while Tom Morello did more than his fair share of talking with his guitar, he knew nothing could beat the kind of wordsmiths of old who spoke truth every time the red light came on.
And looking at some of the biggest lyricists of days gone by, all of them seemed to have a fire in their belly, the same way that Morello does. Bob Dylan was seething with anger when he talked about the horrors that were going on in the world, and since Patti Smith always identified more as a poet rather than a vocalist, hearing her inhabit her songs on albums like Horses made them iconic for their time and absolute masterpieces to look back on.
But Morello didn’t really need to worry about lyrics when he had Zack de la Rocha in his band. From the minute that Rage Against the Machine burst onto the rock and roll scene, no one had heard anything like it. Everyone knew that punk could be political when it wanted to be, but ‘Killing in the Name’ was a vicious attack on police brutality and the corrupt practices that they take part in, and while it might not have sat well with parents, every teenager with a pulse could relate to the frontman’s screams of ‘Fuck you I won’t do what you tell me’.
The guitar effects were a nice touch that put them in the rock conversation, but by that time, the biggest names in lyricism weren’t even coming from rock stars anymore. Kurt Cobain and Chris Cornell helped kick down the door for something more abstract, but in the generation before, where everyone focused on hair-metal, the biggest names in hip-hop were slowly taking over the mainstream.
It wasn’t clear for a while if the genre was a passing fad or not, but the 1990s saw everyone branching out into their own categories. You had De La Soul paving the way for alternative hip-hop, Run-DMC were still resting on their thrones as the kings of the genre, but whenever Public Enemy came on, it wasn’t just another song. It was a manifesto on what the genre could be if it took on real topics.
And when listening to albums like It Takes a Nation of Millions and Fear of a Black Planet, Morello knew no one could compete with what Chuck D could do, saying, “If Public Enemy records had no words on them, they would still be politically revolutionary. That said, Chuck D is one of the great poets of the 20th and 21st centuries. His lyrics are incendiary and smart, and they dissect American racism with wit and a laser-like precision. He should definitely be on the Mount Rushmore of rappers, and I put him in the pole position.”
Everyone might remember hearing a song like ‘Bring the Noise’ and thinking that it was one of the hardest hip-hop songs ever, but the real lyricism comes in the deep cuts as well. When listening to everything from ‘She Watch Channel Zero’ to ‘Rebel Without a Pause’, you’re hearing the sound of someone taking the bones of hip-hop and using it as a means of restructuring the entire music industry.
Because if hip-hop was the next incarnation of punk rock in some respects, then Chuck D was Public Enemy’s resident Joe Strummer. He had the booming presence to his voice, and even if he was playing off the court jester comments from Flava Flav, every line was another little nugget of wisdom for everyone to take to heart.
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