Public Enemy And Anthrax Plan A Smash-Bang Concert Package

Look out, America. Two of rock's angriest forces, rap and heavy metal, have joined forces.

Public Enemy, the most incendiary rap group, and Anthrax, the loudest and fastest of the thrash metal bands, have put together the concert package of the year, following their success with "Bring the Noise," the PE tune the two bands recently recorded together. The "Bring the Noise Tour," which also includes hot San Francisco band Primus and rap vocal group Young Black Teenagers, hits the Paramount at 8 p.m. Wednesday.

The pairing of PE and Anthrax is a natural, even though the audiences for the two bands would seem diametrically opposed. Rap is the sound of the inner city. Metal is largely a suburban phenomenon. But the music of both genres expresses the frustration, restlessness and pent-up energy of a large segment of young people. Intensive dance rhythms are also central to both styles, with thrash inspiring slam-dancing and stage-diving and rap inducing many new ways to shake it, including breaking, popping and hip-hop - which should make for a variety of interesting moves in the audience.

Public Enemy is rap's premier group. It's the most political, most radical, most in-your-face band in rap. Its influence is widespread and so is its popularity, which extends far beyond the inner city. Its new album, "Apocalypse 91 . . . The Enemy Strikes Back," this week jumped into the No. 4 position in the Billboard 200 Top Albums chart - the week of its release. That automatically makes it one of the biggest hit albums of the year; it's also the highest charting of any of the band's four LPs.

Like all PE albums, it is an experience in sensory overload. They put everything in the mix, including movie dialogue, TV news sound bites, street racket, sirens, pounding rhythms, scratching, samples from other records, and lead singer Chuck D.'s snarling, sneering raps. As usual, much of his message is jumbled and contradictory, espousing both the nonviolence of Martin Luther King and the violence of Malcolm X, both integration and segregation, both tolerance and intolerance.

Some raps are self-serving, such as attacks on The New York Post and Jet magazine for reporting on band member Flavor Flav's charge of wife-beating. Others are socially responsible, like "One Million Bottlebags," which deals with the merchandising of malt liquor to the black community, and "Can't Truss It," about the legacy of slavery. The words are part of the music, important as much for how they work in the rap as what they say. And Chuck D. is the cleverest wordsmith of all the rappers.

He's also a preacher who subjects his audiences to long diatribes. This time he is sure to let us all know what he thinks about Hill vs. Thomas (like most everything else, he'll probably attribute the whole thing to the shadowy conspiracy he claims rules the whole world and is out to get blacks everywhere).

Anthrax's association with PE has given the band its highest profile ever. Since the mid-1980s, it has been a major act in heavy metal but little known outside the genre, mostly because its songs are too fast and furious, and often too foul-mouthed, for radio airplay.

But Anthrax's association with rap goes way back. It was the first metal band to record a rap song, "I'm the Man," in 1987, not long after the first rap-rock alliance, the Run-D.M.C./Aerosmith landmark hit "Walk This Way." A new version of "I'm the Man" is on Anthrax's latest album, "Attack of the Killer B's," a collection of B-sides, previously unreleased material and newly recorded songs, including "Bring the Noise."

The album shows that while Anthrax's muscular thrashing can be intimidating, the band also has a strong sense of the absurd. The wild humor in some of their songs mitigates the harshness of most of their material.

Primus is a fascinating San Francisco power trio that has a punk image but is far more talented that most punk bands. The three - singer-bassist-lyricist Les Claypool, guitarist Larry LaLonde and drummer Tim Alexander - are all talented musicians with an almost minimalist approach to their weird, eclectic music. Primus is the latest band to cross over from the alternative scene to the mainstream. There are laudatory feature articles on the band in the current Rolling Stone and in Musician magazine.

Young Black Teenagers, a favorite group of Chuck D.'s, opens the show with a short set. The evening ends with Public Enemy and Anthrax doing their "Bring the Noise," with members of Primus and Young Black Teenagers joining in.