Public Enemy

Public Enemy revolutionized hip-hop, expanding the music's sonic vocabulary while raising the stakes for its social impact. Chuck D, the group's leader and conceptualist, claimed at their peak that "rap music is the invisible TV station that Black America never had" and he ensured that Public Enemy addressed the concerns of Black America, picking up a thread left hanging by the radical soul and funk of the late 1960s and early '70s. Samples of this music drove the bracing, cacophonic productions of the Bomb Squad on the early Public Enemy albums for Def Jam, a dense, invigorating collage of beats and noise that underscored the urgency of Chuck D's rhymes. With an oversized clock hanging around his neck, Flavor Flav acted as comic foil to Chuck's gravity but he wasn't strictly a hypeman, he was also the frontman on PE's "911 Is a Joke," a 1990 single that rivals 1989's "Fight the Power" as the group's best-known track. During hip-hop's golden age of the late '80s and '90s, the band was at the music's center, earning acclaim and controversy nearly in equal measure. The albums they made during this period, particularly 1988's It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back and 1990's Fear of a Black Planet, endured as classics, paving the way for their 2013 induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but Chuck D spent the second half of Public Enemy's career determined that the group avoided relic status. Through thick and thin, including an unexpected 2007 smash hit single in the U.K. with "Harder Than You Think," Public Enemy forged ahead, creating a different kind of revolution: they showed it was possible to grow old as a hip-hop group.

From 🇺🇸 United States