Public Enemy - The Black Panthers of hip-hop

Hip-hop culture and music were born in the Seventies in New York, out of that urban melting pot charged with the harsh contrasts between skyscrapers and the homeless, opulence and crime, rich whites and poor Blacks (or non-whites).

The era of founders like Dj Kool Herc, Grandmaster Flash and Afrika Bambaataa was driven by street block partys, and the first recordings arrived at the end of the decade, with “Rapper’s Delight” in 1979 marking the first major commercial success for this new music, at the time practically unknown in Italy, where it would take root a few years later and reach mainstream success well into the Nineties.

By the mid-Eighties that initial sound had become a starting point for new fusions, including those with rock music, so central to the music industry of the era: from LL Cool J and his muscular street rap produced by legendary producer Rick Rubin to Run-Dmc, who proclaimed themselves “King Of Rock” in 1985; the first white acts also arrived, for whom blending rap and rock was perhaps a more natural step, as shown by the Beastie Boys right from their debut “Licensed To Ill” (1986). Alongside this expansion toward rock, hip-hop also refined its sampling technique, thanks to the spread of increasingly capable equipment and the skill that came with intensive practice by producers.

The lyrics, too, initially focused on fun, gradually expanded toward socio-political commentary, street-level reportage, and introspective storytelling: from “The Message” (1982) onward, it became possible to at least imagine saying anything at all through hip-hop, making it a universal and flexible language.

This new school, as it would later be labelled to mark the distance from the old school more tied to dancing and partying, finds some of its defining traits in a new, more complex, aggressive and adrenaline-fuelled style, albeit with due distinctions. The very idea of the hip-hop album takes shape above all thanks to these new artists, another factor that makes some of the classics from the mid-Eighties onward among the first to enter the radar of rock music fans, for whom, especially at the time, the album still represents the ideal format for measuring an artist's stature.

Partly for this reason, a rapper like Kurtis Blow, despite having scored one of the genre's first mainstream hits, was never held in particularly high regard by rock-bred critics, the kind that had flourished from the Seventies onward: he wrote "The Breaks", hip-hop's first gold record, but none of his albums are particularly memorable.

The protagonists of this new school had a huge influence on the hip-hop of the following decades, but many of them never really took root in the hearts of rock fans, with rare exceptions including the aforementioned Beastie Boys and the subjects of this feature, the politicized and radical Public Enemy.

Public Enemy #1: Chuck D and Flavor Flav before Public Enemy

Carlton Ridenhour, born in 1960 in Long Island, New York, grows up listening to plenty of music, and after the historic 1977 blackout he starts writing his first rhymes. At Adelphi University, where he studies graphic design, he meets William Drayton. Ridenhour works as a host at the university radio station and helps organize a number of hip-hop events.

Drayton, on the other hand, is born in Roosevelt, New York, but grows up near Long Island, in Freeport. A self-taught piano player, he sings in the church choir and also dabbles in drums and guitar. He has some run-ins with the law, going in and out of jail several times. School doesn't go particularly well for him either, but he too ends up at Adelphi, working alongside Ridenhour at the university radio station.

Despite the various lineup changes, Ridenhour and Drayton will remain the only constant in every (or almost every) incarnation of Public Enemy: everyone will come to know them by their stage names, Chuck D and Flavor Flav. The former releases a tape titled "Public Enemy #1" to promote the radio station where he works alongside Bill Stephney, who will go on to put Chuck D in touch with a young producer on the hunt for new talent: the aforementioned Rick Rubin.

As a production team comes the Bomb Squad, featuring Bill Stephney himself, Hank Shocklee, Keith Shocklee, Eric "Vietnam" Sadler and Gary G-Wiz. Chuck D also contributes to production, though under the alias Carl Ryder. Professor Griff then joins the group as "Minister of Information", essentially a spokesman for the press who will go on to cause more than a few problems, along with the legendary deejay and turntablist Terminator X.

The choice of name is inspired by the aforementioned tape but also, says Stephney, by a series of news stories involving Black men as victims, singled out and demonized as though they were, precisely, public enemies par excellence.

"A superlative rock band": the debut and the masterpiece album

It is Simon Reynolds who, live on air, calls Public Enemy a superlative rock band on Melody Maker, in October 1987.

Eight months have passed since the group debuted with the album Yo! Bum Rush The Show, a collection of a dozen tracks also marked by stances tied to Black nationalism, committed to addressing racism and leaning toward radical political positions. In the Reagan era, Public Enemy present themselves on the cover as a group of militants ready to overturn the system. Even the band's logo couldn't be more provocative or outspoken: a gun-sight with the silhouette of a Black man at its center. Partly because of these incendiary socio-political stances, and the group's overall image, the album is largely ignored by radio despite achieving solid commercial results, reaching 300,000 copies sold by the end of 1988 and hitting half a million by 1994.

On closer inspection, the group's militant reputation lies more in attitude than in the actual content of some of this debut's tracks, like the one aimed with bitterness at a woman in "Sophisticated Bitch", or the party anthem "Too Much Posse"; but even when the message is further from a revolutionary anthem, what sounds genuinely new is the blend of tight, powerful rap with a complex puzzle of samples that weaves together funk, rock and heavy metal with real ease.

Adding further depth to some of the arrangements is a series of scratches (listen to "Raise The Prof" and Terminator X's closing solo) and sounds borrowed from urban chaos and other sonic sources, in a layering technique that acts as a counterpoint, at times cacophonous, to the verses rattled off by Chuck D and Flavor Flav.

The tracklist also includes "Public Enemy #1", a muscular rap over a jagged beat, driven by the overflowing energy of lyrics built mainly to showcase Chuck D, with Flavor Flav playing a supporting role: it's another example of how the band's formula was, at this point in their career, still incomplete, with the more politicized and barricade-storming side often kept in the background, though the framework of the songs is already recognizable as that of their mature work.

Certainly, then, on tracks like “Timebomb” and “Rightstarter (Message To A Black Man)” Public Enemy do very little to hide the group's political intentions, stacking up lines like “Panther power, you can feel it in my arm” and whole verses marked by the discrimination they'd suffered, yet also set ablaze by a sense of urgency and a desire for vindication:

Some people fear me when I talk this way

Some come near me, some run away

Some people take heed to every word I say

Some wanna build a posse, some stay away

Some people think that we plan to fail

Wonder why we go under, or we go to jail

Some ask us why we act the way we act

Without lookin’ how long they kept us back

In some cases, as in the title track, they seem to be playing deliberately with their aggressive image and their menacing edge:

Searchin’ my body for fuckin’ what?

My gun’s just for fun and my knife don’t cut

As much as Yo! Bum Rush The Show is already the blueprint for the group's sound, something is still missing to turn this new way of making hip-hop into something legendary. Mainly, what's still lacking is content that sounds as aggressive and powerful as their raps.

For the masterpiece It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back (1988), however, Public Enemy decided to go all out and let ambition carry them away: not only did they set out to build a record of social and political commentary like What's Going On (1971) by Marvin Gaye, but also to push their sound to a whole new level of density and energy.

If the debut had messages that didn't always match the power of its funk-rap-rock hybrid, for their second album Public Enemy made their amalgam faster, more chaotic and more unpredictable, then backed it up with explosive input. The result was something never heard before.

Success, too, was far greater, with over forty weeks on the “Billboard 200” and platinum certification at home in 1989, and above all with wider and more decisive recognition from rock critics.

Even on a macroscopic level, some differences from the debut are noticeable right from the opening “Bring The Noise”, the first track after the galvanizing, menacing intro of “Countdown To Armageddon”. The tempo has essentially increased and the arrangement is far denser than on the debut, with a constant interplay of voices, scratches, breaks and, above all, assorted cacophonies; the very concept of noise becomes central to the group's aesthetic, as they build the tracks of this masterpiece album in a constant search for innovative juxtapositions and unexpected fusions, reclaiming the term in a positive sense after it had been used by journalist John Leland to describe the group's first album. It's Chuck D himself who explains the concept in Melody Maker in 1988 (our translation):

Everybody uses noise now. […] Now to be different you have to commit to deeper things, different rhyme schemes, different rhyme styles, different speeds, pitch changes, different sounds. It's not that we hear some strange noise out there and say “Hey! Let's put it on record”, it's something much deeper.

The lyrics, moreover, are far more direct and provocative in their political message, with a Malcolm X quote placed at the opening as a statement of intent (“Too black, too strong/ Too black, too strong”), and they're rapped with a far more spectacular dynamic, with a perfected metrical construction.

The vocabulary has notably expanded, the flow has become more eclectic and memorable lines keep multiplying, pairing a far more layered message with an overall sense of adrenalized fun, an exhilarating verbal onslaught. Even just in the manifesto that is "Bring The Noise", there's a dizzying pile-up of references, including musical ones: from LL Cool J and Eric B. to Anthrax, by way of Sonny Bono and Run-DMC. Among the many themes is also the difficulty of being accepted as musicians on a par with their rocker peers: "Roll with the rock stars, still never get accepted as".

The album's importance in elevating hip-hop to music that could be considered on equal footing with other genres, even for a rock audience, is well illustrated by the fact that in 1991 they would perform a remix of it with none other than metal act Anthrax, proof that the bridge to that audience had been built, and that the connection — even the crossover between rap and metal so widely practiced at the end of the millennium — was made possible partly thanks to Public Enemy.

The observations made about "Bring The Noise" are, however, anything but an isolated case. The rest of the tracklist unfolds as a string of songs that reinvent the very approach to making hip-hop: from the proclamation of detachment from trends in "Don't Believe The Hype", which became a street anthem, to the extensive use of whistles and tape manipulation on "Terminator X To The Edge of Panic" and "Cold Lampin' With Flavor", all the way to the political and militant rap manifestos "Louder Than A Bomb" and "Rebel Without A Pause". The latter contains lines like:

The only party your body should be partyin’ to

Panther power on the hour from the rebel to you

In some cases it's the spectacular flair for the most eccentric juxtapositions that steals the show, as in "She Watch Channel Zero?!", which pilfers the riff from "Angel Of Death" by Slayer and fuses it with a more conventional sample of James Brown, but elsewhere it's the subject matter that stands out for its social commitment, as in "Black Steel In The Hour Of Chaos", which tells the story of a conscientious objector's escape (and which would later be covered by the famous Brazilian metal band Sepultura), or in the closing reworking of the Beastie Boys' motto with "Party For Your Right To Fight".

The influence on other musicians and the mark left on music history, not just hip-hop, by It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back is enormous. Alongside the glowing ratings and acclaim earned from virtually every magazine and webzine, from Robert Christgau to Pitchfork, by way of the hip-hop bible The Source, there is also the enthusiasm of fans and musicians, both of that era and after.

It's among the favorite albums of Kurt Cobain, as shown by his diaries, and it influenced both Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill and Busta Rhymes. The sheer number of tributes, samples and references confirms a widespread, visceral love and knowledge of this album: the website WhoSampled, which catalogs and counts song samples, records over 900 tracks that sample "Bring The Noise", including Eminem, Kanye West, Linkin Park and Kid Rock.

Fear Of A Black Planet: the end of the trilogy and of the golden age

The concerts of the period grow ever more spectacular and intense, with Public Enemy becoming a socio-political touchstone for young Black audiences. This overflowing energy, amplified by two successful albums and an ever-wider following, is only dented by some antisemitic remarks from Professor Griff and by the controversy surrounding the radical ideas expressed in the lyrics.

The goal of the third album is precisely to reflect these shows by building a listening experience meant to be ideally taken in as a whole, much like an aesthetic experience not unlike classic rock albums. It's Chuck D himself who tells PopMatters in 2011 that the inspiration behind It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back was Marvin Gaye's "What's Going On", while for its follow-up, titled Fear Of A Black Planet and released in 1990, the reference model is Sgt. Pepper's by the Beatles.

The key text of reference is the essay "The Cress Theory of Color-Confrontation And Racism (White Supremacy)" by Black supremacist Frances Cress Welsing, but Chuck D and Flavor Flav speak, more broadly, about the state of the contemporary Black community, continuing in their style rich with cultural references and rhymes as aggressive as they are inventive.

The sound is a further evolution of what was heard on the earlier albums, built around a new version of the wall-of-noise crafted by the Bomb Squad, now even more crowded and layered: the samples used number between 150 and 200, roughly double the total on the second album. This is still the era when the concept of legal clearance for sampling is unknown, so the production team's creativity runs free.

Across its twenty tracks, Fear Of A Black Planet is above all an incredible feat of assemblage, starting from the opening "Contract On The World Love Jam", and can be described as one long sonic flow, molten and hypnotic. That said, a few tracks stand out as new anthems, starting with "911 Is A Joke", which addresses the disparities suffered by Black neighborhoods even in emergency response. "Welcome To The Terrordome", meanwhile, is pure gasoline on the fire, a pointed response to members of the Jewish community who criticized the group following Professor Griff's statements, delivered to the listener as a towering sonic cathedral of samples inlaid with some of the most intricate, varied and complex verses of Chuck D's entire career, with dizzying passages like:

Snake bitten, been spit in the face,

But the rhymes keep fittin’

Respect’s been given, how’s ya livin’

Now I can't protect, a paid-off defect

Check the record and reckon an intentional wreck

Played, off as some intellect

Made the call, took the fall, broke the laws

Not my fault that they’re fallin’ off

Known as fair and square throughout my years

So I growl at the livin’ foul

Black to the bone, my home is your home

But welcome to the Terrordome

The explosive “Burn Hollywood Burn,” featuring a collaboration with Ice Cube and Kurtis Blow that was newsworthy at the time, is one of the fastest, most frenetic tracks hip-hop had known up to that point, and it attacks Hollywood for the way it stereotypes Black people; “Who Stole The Soul?”, meanwhile, targets the injustices suffered by black music and its artists with an amalgam of similar intensity.

The massive amount of socio-political messaging scattered throughout the album is given a fitting conclusion by the closing one-two punch: the thrilling Flavor Flav verse that closes “War At 33 ⅓”, and above all the single “Fight The Power”, chosen by Spike Lee for his “Do the Right Thing” (1989) and one of their biggest hits, as well as yet another anthology-worthy lyric of provocation and Black pride. In particular, even after more than three decades, the third verse still lands like a punch in the face, right from its incendiary opening:

Elvis was a hero to most, but he —

Elvis was a hero to most —

Elvis was a hero to most, but he

Never meant shit to me, you see, straight out

Racist—that sucker was simple and plain

Motherfuck him and John Wayne! ‘Cause I’m Black and

I’m proud, I’m ready, I’m hyped, plus I’m amped

Most of my heroes don’t appear on no stamps

Also thanks to a more aggressive promotional campaign, buoyed by an already well-established career and able to turn the echo of controversy and the momentum of cinema to their advantage, Public Enemy achieve strong chart results with Fear Of A Black Planet, selling over a million and a half copies at home within a few months (a figure that would surpass two million in the following years).

It is a bigger success than their first two albums, and it contributes not only to the fortunes of Rick Rubin's Def Jam, the label that has had them under contract since their debut, but also to carving out space for hip-hop on radio playlists, in in-depth critical coverage, and in the collective imagination.

The idea, widespread in the Eighties, that hip-hop was a passing fad destined to be reduced to just another commercial product, now has to contend with a group boasting an enviable career, consistent in its process of artistic maturation and innovation, open to cross-pollination and renewal, eclectic enough to take on film soundtracks without losing any of its combativeness or creativity.

The trilogy of Yo! Bum Rush The Show, It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back and Fear Of A Black Planet encapsulates the golden period of Public Enemy's career, the one in which their early youthful impetuousness, channeled into a new way of understanding hip-hop as political and complex music, was joined by an ever-growing self-assurance and the ambition to compete with the great classics of other genres.

Apocalypse, messages and poison: the rest of the Nineties

Apocalypse 91… The Enemy Strikes Black (1991, a double cinematic pun) had, according to the most widely told version, to forgo the layered production that had made the previous albums so thrilling, due to a theft of the musical material the band was working on. Digging deeper, however, it turns out the change in sound had quite different motivations.

The new effort, on which Bomb Squad is officially joined by the Imperial Grand Ministers Of Funk, is actually produced by Gary G-Wiz alone. To mask this solo handling of production, the credits throw in some fictitious names.

Be that as it may, the album sounds decidedly more funk-driven, built around geometric beats with the rap pushed to the forefront. Naturally, Public Enemy remain the same heavyweights who earned their place in the genre's pantheon with the trilogy that preceded this record, and they prove it with broadsides like the critique of Black people who harm their own community in "Nighttrain," the anti-capitalist charge of "Can't Truss It," and the pointed "By The Time I Get To Arizona," a response to Arizona voters' rejection of a state holiday honoring Martin Luther King.

These are all tracks that, parading through the first half of the tracklist, make it easy to overlook the fact that the arrangements are considerably simpler and the lyrics, though more refined and less visceral in their proclamations, continue along the same lines as what we'd already heard before, without that dose of innovation the group had accustomed its listeners to.

The second half of the album, precisely because of the lack of significant novelty and the shallower production, sounds less inspired. "Move!," for example, is another entry in their series of rousing charges, in the vein of "Bring The Noise" and "Welcome To The Terrordome," but without that revolutionary fire. Even the track addressing the problems of alcoholism in the Black community, "1 Million Bottlebags," seems to highlight the dip in inspiration, focusing on an issue far less ambitious than revolution itself.

The track most remembered, and by far the most streamed on Spotify among those from this fourth album, is the remix of "Bring The Noise" with Anthrax, a rap-metal crossover that would later be watched with great interest by much of the decade's metal scene.

Riding the wave of their previous successes, Apocalypse 91… The Enemy Strikes Black still achieves strong commercial results, charting impressively and selling over a million copies at home. It will, however, mark the beginning of a long period of decline, one from which they will never again return to these levels of fame and commercial success.

The fifth album, Muse Sick-n-Hour Mess Age (1994, a mondegreen in reverse), partly due to some issues with the label, sells roughly half as many copies and sees the first doubts emerge from critics: in light of hip-hop's new generation, are Public Enemy still to be considered relevant? 1994 is the year of genre-defining albums like "Illmatic" and "Ready To Die," and 1993 had already given us "Enter The Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)," in some ways the album and group that rendered Public Enemy obsolete. Not to mention what's happening on the West Coast, with Dr. Dre's "The Chronic," the debut of his protégé Snoop Dogg, Ice Cube's solo career, the iconic 2Pac and many others, as well as the imminent rise of the third school, the Southern one (see the likes of OutKast, Three-6 Mafia, UGK, Goodie Mob, etc.).

The impression is that they are no longer the ones to beat on the scene. They entertain with the crowd-pleasing party song "Give It Up," following a jazz-rap model akin to A Tribe Called Quest, but too often they simply rehash their classic style, smoothing out its sharp, deafening edges ("What Kind Of Power We Got?," "Race Against Time," "Live and Undrugged, Parts 1 & 2," etc.).

Only on "Hitler Day" can you hear a flash of their old roar again, amid an orgy of samples, scratching and pub-style chants.

Muse Sick-n-Hour Mess Age is a decent fifth album, but its role in the genre's history is nonetheless fairly secondary, unlike the first few records. Even "The Source" starts turning up its nose, swept up in the enthusiasm for the new rhyme champions who had recently arrived on the scene.

A period of crisis begins, during which releases also become sparser. Public Enemy return only in 1998 with the soundtrack to He Got Game, Spike Lee's film about basketball. They are now a less aggressive, less chaotic outfit, and find a new hit in the title track, helped in no small part by the central use of "For What It's Worth" by Buffalo Springfield, complete with a cameo from Stephen Stills.

Compared to the explosive anthems of old, but also to the deafening collaboration with Anthrax at the start of the decade, this new hit has something senile about it: they've gone from whiskey to chamomile tea in just a few years.

Although the rest of the tracklist is more energetic, helped along by appearances from KRS-One and Masta Killa, the impression is that the band has lost personality and power, settling into a hip-hop sound that compromises somewhat laboriously between the Eighties and Nineties, never once daring to sound truly original.

For their seventh album, There's A Poison Goin' On (1999, a play on words on "There's A Riot Goin' On"), they decide to release it through the Atomic Pop website, leaving Def Jam behind.

They offer up 14 tracks that sound intense to the point of drama ("Do You Wanna Go Our Way???," "41:19"), generally pervaded by a menacing aura and driven by hard, mid-tempo beats, always in service of the rapping duo who roar through (almost) the entire album, with only "World Tour Sessions," with its obsessive assonances, and the festive but dated "What What" preserving the more entertainment-oriented side of their sound.

For the first time the Bomb Squad isn't behind the production, and it shows.

The long crisis, the celebrations and the PE 2.0 spin-off

For Revolverlution (2002) Public Enemy lean heavily on their own past, padding out the tracklist with live recordings and numerous remixes, ending up imitating themselves and sounding both weathered and classic at once. They're squeezing out everything they can from a creativity that has dried up over the course of a decade, and none of the new tracks deserve a mention among their best.

It seems it's time to look back and cash in on what's already been done, feeding their own legend.

The band had already put out a collector's compilation back in 1992, Greatest Misses. A best-of had already come out in 2001 under the title 20th Century Masters – The Millennium Collection: The Best Of Public Enemy but it's Power To The People And The Beats: Public Enemy’s Greatest Hits (2005) that best and most thoroughly sums up their golden era and gets real attention from the press. Its release marks the ideal closing and crystallization of a career that seems to be in the grip of a long, deep crisis.

In 2006 comes a whole album of remixes, Bring That Beat Back, and in 2007 an archival video album like It Takes A Nation: The First London Invasion Tour 1987, the fourth release in this format in their career, but also the first to look to the past rather than promote music just released live, as was the case with Fight the Power… Live! (1989), Tour Of A Black Planet (1991), The Enemy Strikes Live (1992).

For three years they also put out live albums: the compact disc version of It Takes A Nation: The First London Invasion Tour 1987 (2005), but also MKL VF KWR – Revolverlution Tour Manchester UK 2003 (2006) and Fight The Power: Greatest Hits Live! (2007). This abundance of minor releases seems meant to make up for a creatively barren decade.

Studio production continues in the meantime with New Whirl Odor (2005), which features a collaboration with Moby on the noisy "MKLVFKWR", but struggles, across the whole tracklist, to leave a mark. When they try to recreate the rap-metal fusion of the Anthrax version of "Bring The Noise" with "What A Fool Believes", in particular, they sound like aging rappers who, in trying to seem current, come across as more dated than ever. When they return to politics, with "Revolution", they do so with a track that lacks any real verve.

To reignite the fire comes a collaborative album with Oscar Jackson Jr., aka Paris, a highly politicized hardcore rapper from San Francisco who made a name for himself with his debut "The Devil Made Me Do It" (1990) and "Sleeping With The Enemy" (1992) but who fell out of favor with the industry by the end of the decade and faded into obscurity.

Back on the scene in 2003 with another provocative album titled "Sonic Jihad", in 2005 he releases Rebirth Of A Nation together with Public Enemy, produced by Paris himself and put out on his own label, Guerrilla Funk. It's a chance for Paris to build a politicized hardcore hip-hop album, pay tribute to the group and gather numerous guests, but what prevails is the impression that it's better to listen to the classics for the hundredth time than to these nostalgic reworkings.

For the twentieth anniversary comes their tenth studio album, How You Sell Soul To A Soulless People Who Sold Their Soul? (2007), which contains one of their last moderately successful singles, "Harder Than You Think", built around a sample of Shirley Bassey's cover of Shirley Bassey's cover of "Jesahel" by our own Delirium. Among the twenty (too many!) tracks on the record, though, it's hard to find much worth pointing out to anyone but a diehard fan.

Five years then pass without a studio release, before 2012 brings not one but two twin albums: Most Of My Heroes Still Don’t Appear On No Stamp and The Evil Empire of Everything, preceded by yet another compilation for completists, Beats And Places.

Numerous producers flock in, and many friends and admirers lend a hand, including rockers Tom Morello and Henry Rollins on "Riotstarted"; given their age, the whole thing sounds at once like yet another tribute to themselves, but also a last-ditch attempt to prove that Chuck D and Flavor Flav have stayed true to form, even without the now-lost Bomb Squad, and that, perhaps, the same social and political issues they railed against in their early albums are still just as relevant today.

At least “I Shall Not Be Moved”, from the first one, strikes that balance between past and present that makes it a belated classic of the catalogue, but listening to both albums in full is only recommended to the most devoted fans.

In 2013 Public Enemy became the fourth hip-hop act to be inducted into the “Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame”, after Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five, Run-Dmc and Beastie Boys. In 2014 a Public Enemy for a new generation is born, dubbed PE 2.0 and made up of rapper Jahi and Chuck D himself. The original intent was to rework the group's classics to make them accessible to a new audience. This appears to be the moment when the band hits rock bottom: the spin-off project is a failure: it was meant to take shape as a trilogy but stops after the first two albums.

Flavor Flav's (fake?) departure: Public Enemy after Public Enemy

The highly creative phase of Public Enemy — the one that saw them reinvent hip-hop over the course of their first three albums and then carry on, with some difficulty, through the Nineties — had long been over by the time we entered the new century. The many changes that occurred throughout their career have had lasting effects, and some of them seem to have irreparably damaged the quality of the albums released over the first two decades of this third millennium. 

With the split from Def Jam, the end of the collaboration with the Bomb Squad, the rearguard partnership with Paris, the spin-off, and the endless stream of celebratory releases, the very idea of a band still fully active — alive even beyond yet another disappointing “rebirth”, “reinterpretation” and “reincarnation” — grew increasingly flimsy.

The albums that close out the 2010s are among the most forgettable of their career and, generally speaking, leave no mark whatsoever on the hip-hop of the period: the slightly more electronic and modern Man Plans God Laughs (2015; 28 minutes in total) and Nothing Is Quick In The Desert (2017; given away for free), heavy on electric guitar, stay afloat only thanks to experience and whatever remains of their old talent.

For a bit of context: 2015 is the year of “To Pimp A Butterfly” by Kendrick Lamar and “Rodeo” by Travis Scott; 2017 is the year of “Flower Boy” by Tyler, The Creator and of “Big Fish Theory” by Vince Staples, as well as the three “Saturation” albums by Brockhampton.

The inglorious end of Public Enemy, however, comes in 2020, when Chuck D and Flavor Flav split over the former's decision to use the Public Enemy brand to support Bernie Sanders's bid for the US presidency. With Flavor Flav ousted, the band — now renamed Public Enemy Radio and made up of Chuck D, DJ Lord, Jahi and the S1W (Security On The First Floor) — released just one album, Loud Is Not Enough (2020, released, fittingly, on April Fools' Day).

The stated intent was to return to their roots, as if thirty years hadn't gone by, but it's nothing too different from what they'd already attempted many times on previous albums. Chuck D would later claim that the falling-out with his rapper friend was all a publicity stunt, meant to expose the media's tendency to mostly push negative news about hip-hop, but Flavor Flav denied this on Twitter.

Be that as it may, Public Enemy released their anti-Trump anthem, “State Of The Union (STFU)”, and their fifteenth studio album, What You Gonna Do When The Grid Goes Down? (2020), packed with guest features and once again released on their old label Def Jam. Surprise: it's their most intense album in years, a burst of energy that briefly takes the story back to the mid-Nineties, when a record like this might have relaunched their career all over again. In 2020, instead, it's just a classic album by a classic band. Public Enemy's sixteenth studio album, Black Sky Over The Projects: Apartment 2025, arrives as a surprise, five years after “What You Gonna Do When The Grid Goes Down?”. Initially a Bandcamp exclusive, it's a chapter that carries on with aggressive hip-hop, firmly classic in its blend of politics and hardcore, with those welcome detours into other styles of music that recall the multifaceted, chaotic language of the Bomb Squad. It's surprising that the album sounds lively and fun without sacrificing too much of its barricade-storming message, and it's more than you're entitled to expect from a bunch of sixty-somethings who revolutionized this music almost forty years ago.

Despite elbowing their way into the spotlight more than ever, the Public Enemy of the 2020s now mostly command the respect of hip-hop diehards, forever drawn to the chance of hearing, once more, a trace of that magic sound that, in the mid-Eighties, changed this genre forever, turning it — to borrow Chuck D's own famous phrase — into the Cnn of the ghetto.

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