The revolution has been a long time coming.
It has been over thirty-five years since Anthrax ode to the Beastie Boys ‘I’m The Man’ laid the foundations for the much more widely celebrated and successful crossover collaboration with Public Enemy, ‘Bring The Noise’. Since then, integration of beats, metal, black and urban musical cultures has been threatened, and, despite a burst in the nineties (Pitchshifter, Atari Teenage Riot, et al, as well as the appropriation of The Prodigy into our world, and releases like Nine Inch Nails’ Fixed – all on a much more mainstream and palatable style than the hardcore destruction of Ho99o9), and sporadic standalone artists in between, it is only as we stumble through our modern-day hell with albums like Code Orange’s Forever and acts like Backxwash that it seems that the ideas and opportunities of such fusion are being revisited with violent intent.