10 Perfect Rap Songs For Rock Music Fans
2. Bring the Noise - Public Enemy
In the early days of hip hop, rap was still a long way from getting its hardened credentials. When you go back and listen to something like Rapper's Delight or even the old stuff from RUN-DMC, most of these tracks felt more like party songs with a beat under them than the kind of militant style stuff that we have today. We needed someone to wake us up and show us what's going on, and you couldn't ignore the voice of Chuck D if you tried.
Throughout most of Bring the Noise, Chuck D is not looking to take any prisoners, playing off of Flavor Flav perfectly while spitting rhymes that felt like he had you plastered up against the wall. This wasn't just intense rapping for the hell of it either, almost using the titular noise as a resistance to the other injustices in the world. Coming from a hip hop group, this feels like a message that's ripped out of the punk rock playbook, with Chuck D being the clearest successor to Joe Strummer if only for how uncompromising he is whenever he's behind the mic.
If you took away the hip hop production, this would work just as well as a hard rock song....and it actually was eventually. Just a few years shy of the record coming out, Anthrax approached Public Enemy about redoing the song, with the horn line samples being replaced with the massive stomp of Scott Ian's rhythm guitar. These genres may feel like two different sides of the fence, but there's a ton of overlap if you really look for it.