It was 1988, I was fourteen in my second year of high school and the one other metalhead/comics reader in my class brought in Among the Living: “look they’re doing a song about Judge Dredd”:
That day we poured over the liner notes in which the band members put shoutouts to their then favourite authors and characters: Stephen King, Frank Miller, Daredevil, Batman, Alan Moore, Judge Dredd, all of which was catnip to me, a nascent comics geek. The late eighties was when American comics, mostly American superhero comics became salonfahig in the Netherlands, or maybe it was just me having discovered them roughly a yaear before. In any case seeing my own interests shared by sucha cool band made me an Anthrax fan.
Among the Living has always been my favourite Anthrax record for these reasons, but that whole run from Fistful of Metal to Sound of White Noise is essential thrash metal. That last one was the first with Jon Bush as lead singer instead of Joey Belladonna and also was somewhat more …experimental and I lost interest in their later albums to be honest. Persistence of Time was the last Anthrax album with the classic lineup and it speaks to the band’s broadmindness that one of the lead singles was a Joe Jackson cover (which came as a real shock decades later when I first heard the original…)
Anthrax also introduced me to Public Enemy thanks to them touring together and doing collabs like “Bring Tha Noize”. It may seem weird, but metal and hip-hop after all were both outcast music back in the eighties, equally reviled by the moral majority and Tipper Gore’s crusade to clean up music.
So long live the greatest of the Big Four of Thrash Metal!
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