Deep Album Cuts Vol. 205: Public Enemy
Public Enemy's new album What You Gonna Do When The Grid Goes Down? is out today. It's their first album for Def Jam in over 20 years, with a million big name guests. And it caps a weird year when the group pretended to fire Flavor Flav as a publicity stunt, which was just embarrassing. But it feels like Public Enemy's legacy has reverberated in a lot of different ways of late -- the phrase 'Sister Souljah Moment' came back into use in the latest election, Nick Cannon had a Professor Griff moment with Professor Griff, and just a general political atmosphere that otherwise makes PE's old records feel as timely as ever.
2. Yo! Bum Rush The Show
3. Too Much Posse
4. Raise The Roof
5. Show 'Em Whatcha Got
6. Prophets Of Rage
7. Terminator X To The Edge Of Panic
8. She Watch Channel Zero?!
9. Party For Your Right To Fight
10. Security Of The First World
11. Power To The People
12. Burn Hollywood Burn (featuring Ice Cube and Big Daddy Kane)
13. Fear Of A Black Planet
14. B Side Wins Again
15. Who Stole The Soul?
16. Move!
17. How To Kill A Radio Consultant
18. More News At 11
19. Tie Goes To The Runner
20. Race Against Time
21. Whole Lotta Love Goin On In The Middle Of Hell
22. Unstoppable (featuring KRS-One)
Tracks 1, 2, 3 and 4 from Yo! Bum Rush The Show (1987)
Tracks 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10 from It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Me Back (1988)
Tracks 11, 12, 13, 14 and 15 from Fear Of A Black Planet (1990)
Tracks 16, 17 and 18 from Apocalypse 91... The Enemy Strikes Back (1991)
Track 19 from Greatest Misses (1992)
Tracks 20 and 21 from Muse Sick-n-Hour Message (1994)
Track 22 from He Got Game (1998)
My earliest memory of Public Enemy was I think my brother borrowed a cassette of Fear Of A Black Planet from a friend. I couldn't believe how long the album seemed to be, I'd never seen an album with 20 songs before (this was a couple years before I got into They Might Be Giants). So I remember a little of PE in their prime, which seems more and more like a remarkable and unique moment in hip hop history as time goes by. But mostly, I remember their decline, the endless procession of independent albums with bad production and awkward titles like New Whirl Odor and How You Sell Soul To A Soulless People Who Sold Their Soul? So I wanted to focus on their prime early era here.
What The Bomb Squad did is still really impressive to me, there's just so much going on in there. Even today in the time of Kanye West and Travis Scott songs with a small army of producers making songs with multiple beat switches and tons of samples, it doesn't feel like many people in recent decades have really risen to the challenge of making rap beats as layered and detailed as the PE classics. Yo! Bum Rush The Show is one of those debuts that I think was probably great at the time but sounds a little dated because of how big a growth spurt the group had on the next record, It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back is still just crazy from front to back.
Notably, Chuck D says "it takes a nation of millions to hold me back" on "Raise The Roof," a year before that became (sort of) the title of their greatest album. And of course Chuck later named another one of his groups after "Prophets Of Rage." But there's also the seeds for a lot of songs by other artists in these tracks. Madonna sampled "Security Of The First World" on "Justify My Love," Jay-Z sampled "Show 'Em Whatcha Got" for "Show Me What You Got" and used Chuck's "Prophets Of Rage" flow on "Some People Hate."
The odd thing about Sister Souljah's name becoming this huge symbolic thing in national politics is how low profile her role in Public Enemy was. She only released one solo album that had one Chuck D verse, and during her tenure as a member of Public Enemy, her musical input on Apocalypse 91 was pretty minor -- she has a feature credit on "Move!" which I can't even identify her role in (the female vocal on the chorus that sounds like a sample?) and an audible cameo on the preceding track "By The Time I Get To Arizona" (which makes me wonder if her credit on "Move!" was a misprint that was meant to appear next to "Arizona").
My weird personal run-in with PE was when Chuck D tweeted my name along with a bunch of other writers who contributed to a Rolling Stone year-end list of hip hop albums. I thought it was kind of funny because it was a really diverse list that had plenty of veterans, independent artists, and socially conscious rappers, but it didn't look that way to him I guess. He should probably be more offended by one of my first Pitchfork reviews, of his band Confrontation Camp.
Public Enemy released a Greatest Misses compilation of rare material (half outtakes and half remixes) over a decade before they released a Greatest Hits collection, and it went gold and had a charting single, so I wanted to include a deep cut from that. And I kept going on to the end of their original Def Jam run, I remember being 12 and seeing Muse Sick-n-Hour Message in a CD store and shaking my head at the title/cover, but "Race Against Time" is pretty awesome. And their reunion with Spike Lee to soundtrack He Got Game was kind of the group's last hurrah as a mainstream act, it's a spotty album but has some moments.
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