On the sliding scale of surreal rock collaborations, it isn’t quite up there with Motörhead and The Nolans. All the same, eyebrows were raised in both thrash metal and hip-hop circles when word broke of the 1991 hook-up between the puerile, comic-obsessed party boys of Anthrax, and Chuck D and Flavor Flav of militant rap firebrands Public Enemy.
It was certainly news to Anthrax singer Joey Belladonna. “Scott Ian never even told me,” he says of his guitarist’s under-the-counter approach to Chuck D. “I remember we were rehearsing for Persistence Of Time when he played this riff, and I’m like: ‘Wow. What’s that? That’s pretty cool.’ Scott just says: ‘Ah, that’s just something we’re working on.’ Okay, no problem. But the next thing you know, Chuck D and Flav are in the studio. I was kinda in the dark with it all. That part of it did suck, but the outcome was great.”
By all accounts, Chuck D took some convincing. “You’ve got these rock guys, speed metal cats, doing a rap cover,” he told the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame in 2015. “So number one, they’re gonna face their audience, who’s like, ‘That’s some bullshit. But then again, Public Enemy? We’re kinda scared of those motherfuckers. That might work!’ Me and Scotty and Charlie [Benante, Anthrax drummer], we’re like, ‘Fuck, we’re gonna bring our crowds, and we’re gonna go for it.'”
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“Scott contacted Chuck, and one thing led to another,” says Belladonna. “I don’t know about rap, so I wouldn’t be the one to choreograph that. I’d never even heard Bring The Noise. I only heard it after.”
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As a concept, the rap/rock cross-pollination of Bring The Noise wasn’t quite revolutionary. Five years earlier, Aerosmith and Run-DMC’s retooling of Walk This Way had been a crossover smash. Anthrax had already touched on rap-rock with 1987’s I’m The Man, and Scott Ian insisted it was genuine.
“We all enjoyed hip-hop, and that’s what we were listening to,” he told The Silver Tongue. “Public Enemy was our favourite band at that time. All we did, or Run-DMC and Aerosmith did, we were just dabbling and treading lightly in it. We weren’t a crossover group.”
At the turn of the decade, Anthrax and Public Enemy convened at Conway Studios in Hollywood to sniff each other out. “We hung a lot,” recalls Belladonna, “We’re rock’n’roll, they’re rap; we were bringing more amps, guitars and drums, and they’re doing more singing and the DJ thing, but that’s the only difference that I saw. Chuck D was cool, but he’s one of those guys where I didn’t want to bother him. Flav was more easy-going. He’d float from side-to-side, room-to-room. They wanted to know how we rolled. We had plenty of things in common.”
Not least a taste for schoolboy mayhem. “We had our moments,” Beladonna recalls. “There was a lot of horsing around. I remember Flav had this BB gun, and we all had paint guns, and when he saw those he’s like: ‘Man, I gotta get me one!’ We were doing some pretty good damage with those things, blasting them all over the place, splattering paint, breaking light-bulbs…”
The two bands even found themselves trading outfits. “Flav always loved my [Native American] headdress,” the Anthrax singer grins. “He thought it was blessed or something. He got a big kick out of it. I actually borrowed his clock necklace, his hat, his pants and his glasses. When I came out and joined him [wearing that], he was laughing so much he had a hard time singing. I laughed a lot with them, man. Just busting balls all night. But then talking about life, too.”
Musically speaking, Bring The Noise was hardly complicated. “The riff came in and we built it around the song,” Belladonna explains of the process. “You find a way to put the guitar in the midst of it all, then you put the drums and bass on top. That’s us doing all the instruments, but I didn’t sing anything. I can rap, but it’s not my favourite thing to do. I’d rather be singing notes and harmony. Spitting out a lot of words and rhyming, it’s like… let someone else do that. Chuck can spit out all those words, and he’s got that cool tone. On that song I was just DJ-ing. I used to mix records, do my own demos, play at colleges.”
From the moment they shot the video to Bring The Noise in downtown Chicago – in front of a united crowd of white and black kids, both metal and hip hop fans represented – the hybrid group knew they were onto something. “Nobody even had an idea that stuff could happen, and the next thing you know, we’re doing it,” says Belladonna. “It was a cool surprise. I loved that. That song was strong, it was heavy, it had a neat vibe, and it sure took off.”
“The video we shot was significant, because there was an equal chance that both bands would lose audiences,” Chuck D later told Metal Hammer. “The hip hop audience could have said, ‘Public Enemy sold out to these metal guys,’ and the metal crowd could have said, ‘What are you doing, messing with this hip hop music?’ There was a possibility of loss. It challenged us.”
In July 1991 the people spoke, propelling the Anthrax version of Bring The Noise to No.14 in the UK charts and prompting a double-header tour that has gone down in history – and taught Public Enemy how to go even harder on stage than before.
“We go and do our thing, make sure we’re hardcore,” Chuck D told The Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame. “Fucking Anthrax commenced to destroy, slaughter and wipe the stage with our blood. Destroyed us! It was merciless. Our thing compared to their thing was not as strong.
“We said, ‘We gotta double our intensity,'” he added. “Every night, the intensity… nobody had seen anything like that before. You’re seeing a hardcore rap group, you’re seeing a hardcore thrash metal group, and at the end of the day we’re both doing Bring The Noise together? It’s fucking over. There hasn’t been anything like that since.”