Public Enemy

100 Best Albums

Essential Albums

  • Fear of a Black Planet
    Fear of a Black Planet
    Fear of a Black Planet

    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 organisation, but the tumult of America. If Fear of a Black Planet 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 Fear of a Black Planet, both on and off the record. Not long before its 1990 release, Professor Griff, the group’s Minister of Information, made anti-Semitic comments to The Washington Times, 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 Fear of a Black Planet 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 Fear of a Black Planet, 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 It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back to be the group’s version of Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On. And with Fear of a Black Planet, he aimed for the heights of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. 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.

  • It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back
    It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back
    It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back

    100 Best Albums By 1988, hip-hop was already a decade and a half old. Still, even as certain artists or groups made great strides in breaking through industry barriers and into the mainstream consciousness, the genre remained largely misunderstood by outsiders as something other than the potent and meaningful art form it truly was. Thankfully, Public Enemy were ready, willing and able to take on that fight. Dogmatic MC Chuck D and rapping hype man Flavor Flav had already delivered a devastating opening salvo with 1987’s unambiguously confrontational debut Yo! Bum Rush the Show, putting Black nationalist politics and imagery at the forefront. By comparison, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back felt like a veritable firebombing—a rap blitzkrieg led by a boisterous lyricist with a defiantly militant mindset. That revolutionary energy was palpable on “Bring the Noise” and “Don’t Believe the Hype”, seminal songs with hooks that sounded more like marching orders. Even further down the tracklist, cuts like “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos” and “Rebel Without a Pause” hit as hard as what came before, the messaging as provocative and righteous as any on the album. Despite showcasing only Chuck and Flav on the front cover, the album truly represents a group effort. Hank and Keith Shocklee and the rest of The Bomb Squad bolster the vociferous vocals with their radical, sample-spattered productions, both on the hits and standouts like “Cold Lampin’ With Flav” and “Prophets of Rage”. Professor Griff joins the thrash-rap throwdown “She Watch Channel Zero?!” while Terminator X pushes the turntables-as-instrument to new heights on his namesake “To the Edge of Panic”, which showcases his transformer scratch among other then-nascent DJ tricks.

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About Public Enemy

No act embodies the rebelliousness and ferocity of hip-hop like Public Enemy. The Long Island group built the foundation for politically charged, pro-Black rap while simultaneously demolishing the sonic status quo with an artfully noisy, experimental sound—in short, they completely revolutionised the genre. Formed around a preexisting DJ crew in the early ’80s, they earned a rep for expanding minds with the trend-setting college radio Super Spectrum City Mix Show before catching Rick Rubin’s ear and signing to a then-building Def Jam. The crew: Chuck D, whose booming voice and convictive rhymes made him a civil rights leader on wax; Flava Flav, the flamboyant hype man; “Minister of Information” Professor Griff; their surgical DJ, Terminator X; and The Bomb Squad, a production crew whose layered, chaotic soundscapes matched the havoc of the crack- and racism-plagued era. An Afrocentric, media-skeptic ideology wasn't exactly welcome in the mainstream, but their confrontational approach proved impossible to ignore: first came PE’s aptly titled 1987 debut Yo! Bum Rush the Show, and then 1988’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, a masterpiece of bleakly clanging beats and uncompromisingly radical lyrics. The following year, Public Enemy released their greatest contribution to hip-hop: “Fight the Power”, a raucous anthem of Black angst—from the soundtrack of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing—that became an inextricable part of America’s language of protest. The group continued its run into the early ’90s, but Public Enemy would change over time, with revolving members and spinoff ventures. Still, despite breakups, makeups, and hiatuses, they've released music with relative consistency. In 2020, they performed a new rendition of “Fight the Power” with an era- and style-spanning array of guest MCs at the BET Awards, against the backdrop of worldwide protests against the police killing of unarmed Black man George Floyd. As long as there's change to fight for, Public Enemy will have something to say.

FROM
Garden City, NY, United States
FORMED
1985
GENRE
Hip-Hop/Rap

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