If you were sitting at an outdoor café in Oakland on Saturday wondering with the rest of your colleagues why the smell of ganja rolling off of San Francisco and onto the rest of the East Bay was more pungent than usual then that means you missed the biggest hip-hop event of the new millennium: Rock the Bells. With more than 16,000 in attendance, this year’s experience brought with it the biggest names in rap, heat seeking up-and-comers and underground Bay Area favorites.

After Immortal Technique and Jedi Mind Tricks, Pharaoh Monch astonished everyone and replaced the DJ booth with a full band, complemented with a male and female choir. Pharaoh resisted the temptation to hog the show and allowed his backup singers a chance for the spotlight and the band to add more of their own musical improvisations. This approach to performing PM’s new combination of soul, gospel and hip hop from his most recent album, Desire, yielded results that put his act as one of the best for the day.

On the second stage, Sage Francis came out in a dreadlock wig and Groucho Marx sunglasses and announced that all he had to offer was to us was his goofiness. With that, he did karaoke to bad 80’s hits, danced worse than a white boy, spoke about the “shit parties” in the port-o-potties and then danced some more. Though his lyrical content is serious and often irate with a production to match it, he managed to be the “funny man.”

After Mos Def and Talib Kweli were done defining and redefining, The Roots, arguably the best and most instrumentally-talented group present, also cut the DJ out of the equation and brought out three brass players and their conventional rock band setup. They humorously covered such hits as “This is why,” “Say He’s Just a Friend” and “Push it Real Good” in addition to all of their original works. They kept their integrity and musical proficiency on par.

Masked Guerillas came out with raised fists to introduce the first headliner, Public Enemy. Chuck D’s eloquent delivery, Flava Flav’s hype machine tactics and Terminator X’s DJing are all that is needed for an amazing old school performance. But PE took it a step further by teaming up with Anthrax guitarist, Scott Ian, who appropriately added his own edge of thrash metal guitar grinding and vocals and 80’s nostalgia to PE’s hits.

The visceral, political and generally pissed off Rage Against the Machine arrived twenty minutes stylishly late to close the day. Zach de la Rocha walked to the mic, while the rest of the band did their last minute sound check, introduced the band with “Hi, we’re Rage Against the Machine from Los Angeles.” Then the entire city shook as RATM hammered out jazz bass lines, pile-driving hip hop drums, space guitar screeches and scathing, intense flows and hooks. The crowd jumped, jostled and bounced like frenzied atoms, and no one was left untouched by the sheer ferocity as RATM shoved politics and rapcore down everyone’s parched throats. The night ended with “f*@^ you I won’t do what you tell me” and it was glorious!