On Saturday August 22, 1987, 75,000 metalheads undertook a pilgrimage to Donington Park for the eighth staging of the annual Monsters Of Rock competition.
The day was notable for a number of causes. The invoice – Bon Jovi, Dio, Metallica, Anthrax, WASP and Cinderella – was the one all-American lineup within the occasion’s historical past. The organisers misspelled the competition website as ‘Donnington’ on the stage banners. And Iron Maiden’s Bruce Dickinson gave a none-too-subtle clue as to the identification of the next 12 months’s headline attraction when, on the climax of his visitor spot with Bon Jovi, he advised the rain-sodden crowd, “See you subsequent 12 months.”
Amid the denim, leather-based and spandex-clad hordes gathered within the East Midlands that weekend, one man’s sartorial style drew a lot remark. In selecting to put on a Public Enemy T-shirt onstage, Anthrax guitarist Scott Ian might hardly have stood out extra had he appeared earlier than the Donington devoted in a tutu.
Whereas Slayer guitarist Kerry King’s cameo on the Beastie Boys’ No Sleep Until Brooklyn and Aerosmith’s collaboration with Run-DMC on Stroll This Means had achieved a lot to interrupt down limitations between the worlds of hip hop and steel, Ian’s public endorsement of the Lengthy Island rap crew was controversial. Not like the cartoon menace of the bratty Beasties and their Adidas-wearing brethren from Hollis, Queens, Public Enemy have been considered as radical, subversive and genuinely revolutionary.
Many media commentators checked out Public Enemy’s brand – a silhouette of a black man framed in a sniper’s crosshairs – their (pretend) Uzi-wielding S1W posse and their uncompromising, militant lyrics preaching resistance and riot and wrongly concluded that Chuck D’s prophets of rage had arrived to soundtrack a race struggle. What was a pleasant Jewish boy like Scott Rosenfeld doing pledging allegiance to such a bunch?
In reality, at the same time as steel followers within the UK have been largely preoccupied with their very own Thrashers vs Poseurs civil struggle, hip hop was already profitable hearts and minds within the continent to the left. Public Enemy and their West Coast compatriots NWA and Ice-T weren’t singing about avenging Satanic goblins or the upcoming menace of nuclear Armageddon.
As an alternative, their songs laid naked the tough realities of life on the streets of inner-city Amerikkka in graphic, unflinching element. That middle-class suburban white youngsters from Lengthy Seashore to Lengthy Island would by no means expertise racial profiling, police brutality or drive-by shootings was largely irrelevant: hip hop sounded explosive, regarded harmful and felt actual.
The brand new technology of hip hop artists got a visible identification by LA photographer Glenn E. Friedman. Having begun his profession photographing ‘Dogtown’ skate boarders and the primary wave of Southern Californian hardcore bands, Friedman was instinctively drawn in direction of rebels with a trigger (his first hardcover photograph guide was titled Fuck You Heroes), and in hip hop’s new breed he noticed the identical fearlessness, centered power and punk-rock perspective that impressed the skater and hardcore communities. His iconic portraits of Def Jam’s rising artists have been daring, stark and ‘heavy’ in ways in which completely eclipsed the posturing machismo of the steel acts of the day. Quickly sufficient, their distinctive stylings – Adidas tracksuits, baseball caps and basketball sneakers – have been de rigueur for angst-ridden adolescents in search of to make rebellious statements of their very own.
Whilst Friedman’s images delineated the frequent floor between skate, punk rock and hip hop tradition, a brand new band emerged to make the synthesis full. Rage Towards The Machine mixed the adrenalized rush of skating, the kinetic ferocity of punk rock, the brooding menace of hip hop and the brutish energy of 70s laborious rock in a single inflammatory bundle.
Articulate, intense and confrontational, the multi-racial LA collective’s thrillingly apoplectic guerrilla manifestos owed as a lot to Public Enemy as The Conflict, Dangerous Brains and Led Zeppelin, and frontman Zack de la Rocha’s outsized, dishevelled streetwear enabled him to imbue their incendiary performances with an exhilarating physicality as fluent as his livid, flowing rhymes. Right here, really, was the sound of liberation and a blueprint for the longer term.
No sooner had Rage’s self-titled debut album hit the streets than their report label start corralling laborious rock and hip hop artists collectively to report collaborations for the soundtrack to the 1993 motion thriller Judgment Night time. Reviewing the ensuing 11-track album, Rolling Stone journal commented: “Judgment Night time’s bracing rap rock is like the marriage of hillbilly and ‘race’ music that began the entire thing within the first place… It’s an aspiring re-birth.”
RATM guitarist Tom Morello famous: “I’m fairly assured that on the similar time, report firm executives in boardrooms throughout the nation have been saying, ‘If solely we will discover a Rage Towards The Machine that will make 5 movies per report and have songs about chicks and exhibit.’”
They wouldn’t have lengthy to attend.

“When Rage Towards The Machine got here out in 1992, that was fucking big for me,” admitted Limp Bizkit frontman Fred Durst. “I got here from this breakdance and hip hop background so to see this band put a variety of hip hop into this heavy rock was actually inspiring.”
“Everybody in our circle was listening to a variety of West Coast hip hop, and a variety of that stuff was actual minor key and darkish anyway,” Korn bassist Fieldy added. “For those who might take that to the subsequent degree, you might make it heavy steel.”
It will have been ludicrous for a bunch of white suburban metalheads to tackle the gangsta posturing of 90s hip hop, however simply as hip hop DJs developed a eager eye for pilfering musical sources from throughout a broad spectrum of a century of recorded music, so a brand new technology of hip hop-loving rockers sampled fragments of rap tradition with unselfconscious glee, placing new twists on already iconic symbols, as with Jonathan Davis’s determination to bling out his Adidas tracksuits with pretend fur and metallic sequins, and even conventional steel bands like Machine Head and Worry Manufacturing facility donning sports activities clobber.
It set the tone for the remainder of the 90s and into the 2000s, the place for the higher a part of a decade, denim and leather-based have been left lifeless within the dust and heavy steel clichés appeared to be gone endlessly. Korn and Limp Bizkit not solely borrowed hip hop’s aesthetics and sonic template, however cannily appropriated its savvy cross-brand advertising and marketing methods too, inviting the likes of Eminem, Dr. Dre, Methodology Man and Ice Dice to make cameo appearances each on report and in promotional movies.
At a time when the kings of steel, Metallica, have been rebelling in opposition to their very own success, fucking with their alpha male picture by embracing metrosexuality, excessive artwork and ‘different’ tradition on Load and Reload, steel’s nu breed have been drawing upon the power, soul and color of city road life to carry the noise in more and more flashy and provocative methods. Out of the blue, the old-fashioned regarded like outdated hat, and nu steel promised the true sound and elegance of youth music with perspective.
A decade on from Public Enemy infiltrating steel’s hallowed turf at Donington, a brand new technology had the style’s outdated gods of their crosshairs.
Initially printed in Metallic Hammer Presents The Story Of Nu Metallic, January 2014