Songs like “Don’t Believe the Hype”, “Prophets of Hype”, “Rebel Without a Pause”, and “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos” prove it. They were a media conscious movement mobilizing a generation to fight the war for the future of Black America. Public Enemy was an Afrocentric monolith, a group of grim-faced, clock-wearing militant motherfuckers who, like the Panthers before them, used America’s obsession with guns to threaten revolution by any means necessary. “Bring the Noise” was the rallying cry of the rebellion, siphoned through the angriest black man to hijack the mic since Huey Newton and the Black Panthers. “Bass! How low can you go? / Death row, what a brother knows / Once again, back is the incredible, rhyme animal, the thyme animal / The incredible D, Public enemy number one / Five-o said ‘Freeze!’ and I got numb / Can I tell ’em that I really never had a gun?” It’s four-plus minutes of squealing tires and lyrical bombast that explodes like a bomb blast over the staccato drumbeats that would define and dominate Public Enemy’s raw aesthetic (as defined by the Bomb Squad).įrom there, it’s on to the futuristic tone drone of “Public Enemy No.1” and choice cuts from the album that changed everything abruptly: It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back… Yo! Bum Rush the Show (1987) hit hip-hop upside the head with its political gusto, but this album starts with corny ass MCs glancing up to catch the front end of a ’98 Oldsmobile barreling down on them (“You’re Gonna Get Yours”). This collection wrests their revolution from yesteryear and condenses 12 years and seven albums into an 18-track manifesto of the sound that erupted from the underground.
#Public enemy power to the people full#
They packed a punch like water cannons fired at full force and unleashed a militant assault on the minds of those stuck in the rut of political apathy.
Public Enemy was the rap group of the late ’80s and early ’90s.
If you say you’re hip-hop, but never took the time to heed the sonic lacerations or the incite-a-riot rhetoric of Public Enemy, you’re not.
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