Fear Of A Black Planet

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The third album from Public Enemy is a dispatch from chaos: A portrait of a fraying band at the height of its influence and infamy, and an aural bombast that reflected not only the tumult of their organization, but the tumult of America. If <i>Fear of a Black Planet</i> was nothing more than a venue for closing track “Fight the Power”—easily the greatest protest song in rap history, arguably the greatest protest song in the history of popular music itself—it would go down as a historic moment, the place where the voices of a hip-hop generation brought their noisy, corrosive collage-work to the bleeding edge. But there’s so much more going on with <i>Fear of a Black Planet</i>, both on <i>and</i> off the record. Not long before its 1990 release, Professor Griff, the group’s Minister of Information, made anti-Semitic comments to <i>The Washington Times</i>, resulting in months of press scrutiny, and enough turmoil to cause the group to briefly disband. Griff was eventually ousted from Public Enemy, a situation Chuck D addresses on “Welcome to the Terrordome.” But the disorder that had become a normal part of Public Enemy’s world is best captured by the Bomb Squad, the production team that turned <i>Fear of a Black Planet</i> into a 63-minute hailstorm of colliding samples and media snippets. On claustrophobically dense songs like “Terrordome,” “Brothers Gonna Work It Out,” and the Flavor Flav classic “911 Is a Joke,” barbed shards of funk and soul elbow for space, packed tighter than ever before (or would ever be again). Songs like “Power to the People” and “War at 33 1/3” blur by at tempos better suited for mosh pits than dance floors. Elsewhere on <i>Fear of a Black Planet</i>, Chuck rages under walls of noise like a hip-hop Sonic Youth, waging war on America’s racist institutions. He rages against stereotypical portrayals in movies (“Burn Hollywood Burn”), exploitative record labels (“Who Stole the Soul?”), the police (“Anti-N****r Machine”), and the deeply embedded hatred that keeps it all spinning (“Fear of a Black Planet”). And while Flavor Flav provides his famed comic relief on “Can’t Do Nuttin’ For Ya Man,” his solo turn on “911 Is a Joke”—a commentary of the emergency hotline’s response time in Black areas—is as cutting as any of Chuck’s more stern critiques. Chuck D had wanted the “pro-Black radical mix” of 1988’s <i>It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back</i> to be the group’s version of Marvin Gaye’s <i>What’s Going On</i>. And with <i>Fear of a Black Planet</i>, he aimed for the heights of the Beatles’ <i>Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band</i>. The result is an absolute high-water mark for furious rhyming, a defining moment for the nexus of pop and politics, and a frenzied peak for sampledelic experimentalism.

via Apple Music