It might be one of the bitterest ironies of the entire 80s that this song coincides almost exactly with the launch of Gold radio in the UK, a cynical (and massively commercially lucrative) imitation of the US radio format which had made millions playing up to public nostalgia for a simplified and sentimentalised version of the 50s and 60s. This aspect of the nostalgia industry requires a complete blinding to the realities of the past, where rock'n'roll is articulated as though it was always as cosy, as assimilated and as unstartling as it has become after (up to this point) three decades of repetition. Chuck D has never denied his ideological and spiritual debt to rock'n'roll before it had been appropriated by white mainstream artists, and his disgust at how its true origins had been systematically papered over by the repackaging business - hence the line "Beat is the father of your rock'n'roll". And that's only an incidental moment - significant for me but not, I suspect, for most of PE's audience - in Chuck's most succinct summation of PE's position in America as the Reagan era struggled to its close.
Bring The Noise was never PE's anthem, but it was their introductory statement, their opening shot, the song which set out their position, defined who they were. In the UK, it was a consolidatory single released only seven weeks after the indescribable impact of Rebel Without A Pause (http://www.elidor.freeserve.co.uk/e1.htm), as if to tell us: yes, this band is real, it exists, the world has suddenly changed without a moment's prior warning.
13 years later, hearing Bring The Noise still sounds like being compelled to movement. There's a celebration in its physicality - the "riff" has an infectious quality which moves it a long way from the utter, vicious, unbridled rage of Rebel Without A Pause, but you literally can't stop moving. And if PE hadn't compelled us to do that first, they couldn't have got us running scared in the first place.
Robin Carmody, 14th August 2000
http://www.elidor.freeserve.co.uk/80s.htm