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Public Enemy at 25
MARTYN GOODACRE/PHOTOSHOT/GETTY IMAGES
Public Enemy performing live in December of 1990.
Public Enemy was founded back in 1982, at the beginning of the golden age of hip-hop. Def Jam Records and budding producer Rick Rubin wanted to mesh the rap style of Run DMC with a political sensibility that addressed the issues facing inner-city and black youth. A Long Island, NY college student, Carlton Ridenhour, a.k.a. Chuck D, was the man to do it. He recruited Flavor Flav and DJ Terminator X along with Professor Griff and the Bomb Squad (Eric Sadler, Hank Shocklee, Keith Shocklee) to be his production team. They hit the road as the opening act for the Beastie Boys, exploding onto the scene with Yo! Bum Rush the Show in 1987.
The group features two very different vocalists: Chuck D raps about anti-establishment concerns in a booming, authoritarian voice, while Flavor Flav serves as hype man — interjecting with taunts and questions. “We’re the Rolling Stones of the rap game,” Chuck D recently told Rolling Stone. “We’re ‘rolling stones’ — we go around the world, over and over again. It’s really a point back to the Muddy Waters song ["Rollin' Stone"], as opposed to just the group . . . although I don’t know if I’m Keith or Mick or Flavor [Flav] is Keith or Mick. We probably switch and flip them.”
(MORE: Public Enemy Still Fighti...till Fresh)
But unlike the Rolling Stones, Public Enemy is no longer affiliated with a major label, having split with Def Jam in the late ‘90s. The group’s latest albums, The Evil Empire Of Everything and Most Of My Heroes Still Don’t Appear On No Stamp (both of which were released digitally last month and are out physically today), were made without the support of a record label and without a traditional studio. Yet they prove that the legendary group has lost none of their spark or spit — not least because the political issues that ticked them off so many years ago remain even in these supposedly post-racial times.
Album: Yo! Bum Rush the Show
Public Enemy’s terse, hard-edged Yo! Bum Rush the Show introduced the world to the new and smoldering hip-hop group with a cohesive and effective album. The album seamlessly blends Chuck D’s spit-fire delivery with Flavor Flav sizzle, Terminator X’s scratching and Vernon Reid’s hard-rock guitar. The band’s producers, the Bomb Squad, build irresistible hooks out of harsh, even irritating sounds, scratching noise out of seemingly nothing, layering sirens, car alarms and spoken word samples into the music. Not that the pioneering skill was appreciated at the time. Joe Brown of The Washington Post wrote that “Public Enemy’s mean and minimalist rap is marked by an absolute absence of melody — the scary sound is just a throbbing pulse, hard drums and a designed-to-irritate electronic whine, like a dentist’s drill or a persistent mosquito.”
Album: It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back
There was political rap before Public Enemy (see also: Grandmaster Flash’s “The Message” and “Street Justice” by The RAKE), but when Public Enemy’s second album, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, was released in 1988, it felt both groundbreaking and incendiary. The group’s ability to blend the burgeoning hip-hop sound with incisive political commentary, frank discussions of race relations and indestructible beats made them a group unlike any other. With songs like “Don’t Believe the Hype” and “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos” they defended the dispossessed and called for action. (From “Bring the Noise”: “On the strength the situation’s unreal / I got a raw deal / So I’m looking for the steel.”) Public Enemy embraced controversy and imagery that made people uncomfortable. This is, after all, the group that chose be a black man in the cross-hairs of a rifle sight as their logo. And they didn’t shy away from publicly claiming their idols: Nation of Millions opens with a sample of Malcolm X, namechecks Martin Luther King, Jr., and endorses Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan.
Album: Apocalypse 91… The Enemy Strikes Black
In a 1991 interview with Melody Maker, Chuck D explained: “‘Can’t Truss It’ is about how the corporate world of today is just a different kind of slavery. We don’t control what we create. And because of the media, we don’t control the way we think or run our lives. We’ve got to limit working for a situation that’s other than ours. We have no ownership of anything. If you don’t own business, then you don’t have jobs.”
It’s a message that Chuck D took to heart. In “Can’t Truss It” off Public Enemy’s fourth album Apocalypse ’91…The Enemy Strikes Back, Chuck D. compared the plight of modern-day blue collar workers with that of slaves coming over to the New World.
Album: Most of My Heroes Still Don’t Appear on No Stamp
“Harder Than You Think” appeared online five years ago as a stand-alone single, garnering more than 500,000 views on YouTube. Then the song was featured in UK promos for the Paralympics in 2012 and landed at #4 on the UK singles chart—an impressive feat for a song that was made without major label backing and distributed digitally.
The song has been released on Public Enemy’s new album Most of My Heroes…. As the album’s title suggests, the album is filled with Public Enemy’s gimlet-eyed views on social issues paired with aggressive beats and blustery rhythms. But instead of aiming their jabs exclusively at race relations and the corporate world, the group takes a sharp look at the blinged-out and opulent lifestyles of their fellow rappers. On “Catch the Throne,” which nails Kanye West and Jay Z’s luxury rap masterwork, Watch the Throne, Public Enemy rails against elitism in hip-hop and out-of-touch rappers. Chuck D rhymes: “Against those standing in mansions/ Spittin’ at us from up that higher ground/ Feed the people/ Fight the power/ Fix the poor / But that 1% done shut the door.”
Next “Fight the Power”
Album: Fear of A Black Planet
Public Enemy’s 1990 album Fear of a Black featured memorable raps like “Brothers Gonna Work It Out,” the Flavor Flav feature “911 Is a Joke” and the brazen “Welcome to the Terrordome,” but the song that would become the group’s greatest hit—reaching No. 1 on Billboard’s rap chart in 1989—was “Fight The Power.”
Originally conceived by Spike Lee for the soundtrack for his seminal film Do The Right Thing and with a title taken from The Isley Brothers, the song became emblematic of everything that Public Enemy stood for: inequality, injustice, and an unabashed call to arms. In the opening stanza Chuck D roared, “Now that you’ve realized the pride’s arrived / We’ve got to pump the stuff to make us tough / From the heart / It’s a start, a work of art / To revolutionize.” The song was not without controversy—Chuck D goes on to rap: “Elvis was a hero to most / But he never meant sh*t to me / Straight up racist, the sucker was / Simple and plain”, with Flavor Flav answering, “Muthaf**k him and John Wayne!”
Next “Welcome To The Terrordome”
Album: Muse Sick-N-Hour Mess Age
Public Enemy’s underappreciated fifth album was greeted with lukewarm sales and critical derision when it arrived in 1994—the group’s sound criticized as dated, especially when compared with the big albums of the ‘90s such as Dr. Dre’s The Chronic and Snoop Dogg’s Doggystyle. On the album, the group takes aim at a wide range of societal problems, including the hypocrisy of Columbus Day and other holidays (“Hitler Day”), the problems of drugs in the black community (“Live and Undrugged”) and the drama of the music industry (“Living in a Zoo”), but the real target is the then massively popular gangsta rap. In “So Whatcha Gonna Do Now,” Chuck D bemoans “rap, guns, drugs, and money” and raps: “Where I come from / The brothers aren’t dumb.”
Yet the gangsta rap of artists like Ice T, Notorious BIG and Tupac Shakur proved to be far more commercially viable, and Public Enemy was pushed to the sidelines both on the radio and within the rap community itself. “Public Enemy were always the outcasts of Hip Hop. It’s been a long and crazy relationship through the years,” Chuck D told Big Takeover. Frustrated by the reception of the album, he briefly disbanded the group, taking the time off to release a solo album, Autobiograhy of Mistachuck.
Next “He Got Game”
Album: He Got Game
Public Enemy reunited in 1998 to once again soundtrack a Spike Lee joint, He Got Game. The title song, which has Chuck D and Flavor Flav delivering laid-back rhymes over Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth,” showed that the band could update their sound without sacrificing their hard-hitting style.
The album was the last the group would make with Def Jam. They split with the label after 12 years and six studio albums. While there was speculation at the time that Public Enemy gotten too political for Def Jam, the true reason turned out to be much less high minded. In an interview with Perfect Sound Forever. Chuck D explained that the split was financially motivated. “One of the things that made me want to leave was the fact that Def Jam went from Sony to Polygram, they were sold. I thought that Public Enemy and LL Cool J were integral parts of Def Jam’s existence and that we at least deserved 2 1/2 points of the deal. We didn’t get it and all that talk of us being family was just bullshit. I said ‘f*** that, I’m outta here. Find me a taxi and execute this contract.’”
The band has, more or less, been on their own ever since. They signed briefly to the Atomic Pop label, where they were on the vanguard of the digital-only format, releasing their 1999 album There’s a Poison Goin’ On online. Public Enemy then released three albums on Chuck D’s label, Slam Jamz, including 2007’s loud, charming How You Sell Soul to a Soulless People Who Sold Their Soul???
Now, after 25 years, Public Enemy is still finding new topics to rail against. “Every record that Public Enemy has done is different from one another. We’re always going to try to be topical so we always pick topics that are going to be different,” Chuck D said. “There’s different topics for every album and different sounds on every album. It’s inevitable. The larger detail remains the same though — I’m always fighting something.”
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