"Bring the Noise" is a song by the hip hop group Public Enemy. It was included on the soundtrack of the 1987 film Less Than Zero and was also released as a single that year. It later became the first song on the group's 1988 album It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back. The single reached #56 on the Billboard Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart.
The song's lyrics, most of which are delivered rapid-fire by Chuck D with interjections from Flavor Flav, include boasts of Public Enemy's prowess, an endorsement of Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, retorts to unspecified critics, and arguments for rap as a legitimate musical genre on par with rock. The lyrics also have a remarkable metrical complexity, making extensive use of meters like dactylic hexameter. The title phrase appears in the chorus. The song includes several shout-outs to artists like Run-DMC, Eric B, LL Cool J and, unusually for a rap group, thrash metal band Anthrax, allegedly because Chuck D was flattered about Scott Ian wearing Public Enemy shirts while performing Anthrax gigs. Anthrax would later collaborate with Chuck D to cover the song.
The song's production by The Bomb Squad, which exemplifies their characteristic style, features a dissonant mixture of funk samples, drum machine patterns, record scratching by DJ Terminator X, siren sound effects and other industrial noise.
Music essayist Robert Christgau has described the song as "postminimal rap refracted through Blood Ulmer and On the Corner, as gripping as it is abrasive, and the black militant dialogue-as-diatribe that goes with it is almost as scary as "Stones in My Passway" or "Holiday in the Sun". "Bring the Noise" was ranked #160 on Rolling Stone's list of the 500 greatest songs of all time.
Read more about Bring The Noise: Samples, Anthrax Version, Charts, Remixes, Other Versions
Famous quotes containing the words bring and/or noise:
“Our children will not survive our habits of thinking, our failures of the spirit, our wreck of the universe into which we bring new life as blithely as we do. Mostly, our children will resemble our own misery and spite and anger, because we give them no choice about it. In the name of motherhood and fatherhood and education and good manners, we threaten and suffocate and bind and ensnare and bribe and trick children into wholesale emulation of our ways.”
—June Jordan (b. 1939)
“It is as real
as splinters stuck in your ear. The noise we steal
is half a bell. And outside cars whisk by on the suburban street
and are there and are true.
What else is this, this intricate shape of air?
calling me, calling you.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)