Culture 4 min read By Lauren Baxter
Jack Black, DMC, Tom Morello Lead All-Star «Walk This Way» at Power to the People Fest
Tom Morello's Power to the People festival at Merriweather Pavilion in Columbia, Maryland, delivered a one-time-only rendition of Aerosmith's «Walk This Way» featuring Jack Black, Darryl «DMC» McDaniels, Cypress Hill, Chuck D, and Scott Ian.
Tom Morello's Power to the People festival has become a showcase for collaborations that exist for one night only, and the latest edition at Merriweather Pavilion in Columbia, Maryland, delivered one of its most crowded stages yet. Jack Black, Darryl «DMC» McDaniels, Cypress Hill, Morello himself, Public Enemy's Chuck D, and Anthrax's Scott Ian joined forces for a rendition of Aerosmith's «Walk This Way».
The performance placed DMC at the center of a lineup that spanned rap, rock, and metal, turning the 1975 Aerosmith staple into a cross-generational summit. The song has long served as a bridge between genres, most famously through Run-DMC's 1986 collaboration with Aerosmith, and the Power to the People version extended that lineage with a cast drawn from several eras of popular music.
Morello's festival has built its reputation on these kinds of pairings, bringing together artists who rarely share a bill, let alone a song. The Maryland date followed that pattern, with the «Walk This Way» performance serving as a headline moment for an event designed around unexpected combinations rather than standard festival sets.
The lineup reflected the overlapping worlds the song has always connected. Cypress Hill brought their West Coast hip-hop perspective, Chuck D represented Public Enemy's foundational role in politically charged rap, and Scott Ian added the metal weight of Anthrax. Jack Black, known both for his comedy and his rock performances with Tenacious D, supplied the theatrical frontman energy that has made him a fixture at events where rock and humor intersect.
DMC's presence gave the moment a direct link to the song's most famous crossover version. As one third of Run-DMC, he helped turn «Walk This Way» into a cultural reset in the 1980s, when the group's collaboration with Aerosmith introduced rap to a rock audience and rock to a rap audience on a scale that had rarely been attempted. Performing the track again, this time alongside Morello, Chuck D, Cypress Hill, Ian, and Black, placed him in a new configuration of that same exchange.
The festival itself takes its name from Morello's long-standing commitment to blending music with social and political themes, a thread that runs through his work with Rage Against the Machine, Audioslave, and Prophets of Rage. Power to the People has become a venue for those ideas in live form, with lineups that mix established acts and unexpected guests. The Columbia, Maryland, show added another entry to that list.
For fans in attendance, the value of the performance lay in its unrepeatability. Festival collaborations often come and go within a single evening, and the «Walk This Way» rendition was built on a combination of artists unlikely to appear together again in the same configuration. That transient quality has become part of the appeal of Morello's event, which trades on the idea that a festival stage can produce moments that no tour or album cycle could replicate.
The song's durability across five decades also underlined why it remains a natural choice for such a gathering. «Walk This Way» has moved through hard rock, hip-hop, and pop culture without losing its identity, and each new version tends to reveal something about the era performing it. At Merriweather Pavilion, the result was a snapshot of several musical communities sharing a stage, with DMC once again at the intersection.
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