Anthrax invited the Public Enemy legend Chuck D onstage to perform their classic cover of ‘Bring the Noise’. The band had been playing in Los Angeles at the Hollywood Palladium on Friday night.
Scott Ian, Anthrax’s guitarist, screamed into the mic, “Imagine if you guys could fucking yell so loud, it could fucking conjure Chuck D on this stage. Let me ask you again Los Angeles… can you bring the noise!?”
Conjure Chuck D the crowd did, with the politically charged MC appearing alongside Ian before the band began playing their metal cover version of Public Enemy’s famous track.
Public Enemy released ‘Bring the Noise’ in 1987 on the soundtrack of Less Than Zero before it was re-released as a single later that year. In 1991, Anthrax covered the track using Chuck D’s original vocals. Anthrax released the cover as a single, and it became well known amongst new fans of the band and serves as one of the first instances of rap-metal, a genre that would take full flight later in the 1990s.
Ian once spoke of the collab and said, “By that point, there was a new audience, and we certainly reached a lot of new people with that Public Enemy track,” Ian said. “People who maybe weren’t into what we’d done before, or who weren’t metalheads. So that track crossed over for us and took us into a new zone. But it’s funny, because we haven’t done anything rap or crossed over since ‘Bring the Noise,’ yet people once again still talk about it, which shows me how special it was.”
He added, “People still want to hear it and people still reference it all the time, and it’s almost 25 years old. And sometimes we’re categorized as a ‘rap metal’ band, when we only ever did the two songs — other then maybe screwing around with ‘Looking Down the Barrel of a Gun’ with the Beastie Boys as a B-side — but yeah. People still talk about it as if that’s what we do.”
