Anthrax & Public Enemy — Bring The Noise

JUL 01 1991 · 12:00

Anthrax & Public Enemy — Bring The Noise (1991) Director: Eric Zimmerman Era: Rap-Metal Genesis Era (1991) - The apex moment of cross-genre collision between thrash metal and hip-hop, arriving at the cultural inflection point where both scenes shared audiences, aggression, and anti-establishment energy in the early post-Cold War period. Exceptional. This video is a primary document of one of popular music's most culturally consequential collaborations — a moment that demonstrably altered the trajectory of rock and hip-hop for the following decade. The raw, handheld, under-bridge performance aesthetic, the hyper-rapid editing (0.80s avg shot length), and the deliberately unglamorous visual grammar all serve as counterpoints to the polished MTV mainstream of the era, encoding the transgressive, barrier-breaking intent of the collaboration into its very form. Tier 1 archival priority. Context: Released in 1991, this collaboration between thrash metal band Anthrax and hip-hop group Public Enemy represented one of the most significant cross-genre boundary transgressions in popular music history. While Run-DMC and Aerosmith had pioneered rap-rock fusion in 1986, the Anthrax/Public Enemy pairing brought together two sonically extreme, politically confrontational, and ideologically distinct subcultures — heavy metal headbangers and politically charged East Coast hip-hop — in a way that felt genuinely dangerous to both fan bases. The song and video arrived at a moment of profound racial and cultural tension in the United States, and the mere act of these two groups sharing a stage carried significant social weight. The collaboration directly seeded the conditions for the nu-metal genre explosion later in the decade, with artists citing it as a primary influence. Director notes: The video was produced in 1991 in support of the collaborative single released on Anthrax's compilation 'Attack of the Killer B's' (Megaforce/Island Records) and Public Enemy's 'Apocalypse 91...The Enemy Strikes Black.' Per IMDB, the video is set under a bridge where Anthrax performs on a staged platform. Rate Your Music credits Robert Brinkmann as director of photography. Chuck D later told Metal Hammer: 'The video we shot was significant, because there was an equal chance that both bands would lose audiences.' The single reached No. 14 in the UK charts in July 1991. The collaboration was preceded by a period in which Anthrax guitarist Scott Ian manually cut Chuck D and Flavor Flav's vocals from the original Public Enemy master tape word-by-word into the metal instrumental, without sampling technology.