Public Enemy

Rating 3.5 Stars Chuck D put out a tape to promote WBAU (the radio station where he was working at the time) and to fend off a local mc who wanted to battle him. He called the tape Public Enemy #1 because he felt like he was being persecuted by people in the local scene. This was the first reference to the notion of a public enemy in any of Chuck D’s songs. The single was created by Chuck D with a contribution by Flavor Flav, though this was before the group Public Enemy was officially assembled. According to Chuck, The S1W, which stands for Security of the First World, “represents that the black man can be just as intelligent as he is strong. It stands for the fact that we’re not third-world people, we’re first-world people; we’re the original people of the earth. On the track “Louder Than a Bomb” from It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, Chuck D reveals that the D in his nickname stands for Dangerous. Developing his talents as an MC with Flavor Flav while delivering furniture for his father’s business, Chuck D (Carlton Douglas Ridenhour) and Spectrum City, as the group was called, released the record “Check out the Radio,” backed by “Lies,” a social commentary—both of which would influence RUSH Productions’ Run-D.M.C. and Beastie Boys. The group was signed to the still developing Def Jam Recordings record label after co-founder Rick Rubin heard Chuck D freestyling on a demo. Around 1986, Bill Stephney, the former Program Director at WBAU, was approached by Sam Mulderrig and offered a position with the label. Stephney accepted, and his first assignment was to help Rubin sign Chuck D, whose song “Public Enemy Number One” he had heard from Andre “Doctor Dré” Brown. According to the book The History of Rap Music by Cookie Lommel, “Stephney thought it was time to mesh the hard-hitting style of Run DMC with politics that addressed black youth. Chuck recruited Spectrum City, which included Hank Shocklee, his brother Keith Shocklee, and Eric “Vietnam” Sadler, collectively known as the Bomb Squad, to be his production team and added another Spectrum City partner, Professor Griff, to become the group’s Minister of Information. With the addition of Flavor Flav and another local mobile DJ named Terminator X, the group Public Enemy was born.” Public Enemy opened for The Beastie Boys on some of their East Coast concerts, including Philadelphia, Newark and Brooklyn. Their debut album, Yo! Bum Rush The Show, was released in 1987 to critical acclaim. The album was the group’s first step toward stardom. The group released the album It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back in 1988, which performed better in the charts than their previous release, and included the hit single “Don’t Believe the Hype” in addition to “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos”. Nation of Millions… was voted Album of the Year by the The Village Voice Pazz and Jop Poll, the first hip-hop album to be ranked number one by predominantly rock critics in a major periodical. It is also ranked the 18th best album of all time by Acclaimedmusic.net. In 1990, the group released Fear of a Black Planet which continued their politically charged themes. The album was the most controversial album in the hip hop community. The song “Fear of a Black Planet” addressed the fear some white people have of black and white relationships. It was the most successful of any of their albums and, in 2005, was selected for preservation in the Library of Congress. It included the singles “Welcome To The Terrodome”, “911 (is a Joke)”, which criticized emergency response units for taking longer to arrive at emergencies in the black community than those in the white community, and “Fight the Power”. The song is regarded among the most popular and influential in hip-hop history and was the theme song of Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing. It was ranked the 80th best song of all time by Acclaimedmusic.net. The song attacked the standard American Icons Elvis Presley and John Wayne. The group’s next release, Apocalypse ’91…The Enemy Strikes Black, continued this trend, with songs like “Can’t Truss It”, which addressed the history of slavery and how the black community can fight back against oppression; “I Don’t Wanna be Called Yo Nigga “, a track addresses on how the the urban culture uses the word “Nigga” outside of its usual derogatory context. The album also included the controversial song and video “By the Time I Get to Arizona,” which chronicled the black community’s frustration that some States did not recognize Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday as a national holiday. The video featured members of Public Enemy taking out their frustrations on politicians in the States not recognizing the holiday. The groups last album to date is How You Sell Soul to a Soulless People Who Sold Their Soul. Public Enemy’s single from the album was “Harder Than You Think”. “Though the group has faded, the repercussions of Public Enemy are felt to this day. Public Enemy showed that rap was not, as Alan Light says, “just a silly novelty, a fleeting fad.” Public Enemy made hip hop, like punk and reggae before it, an outlet for frustration and a portal to understanding anger. Public Enemy gave hip hop a consciousness that trancends styles. It Takes A Nation Of Millions and Fear Of A Black Planet are as pertinent today as when they were released, in the way that Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On” still reverberates. They were talking loud and saying something, to interpolate James Brown. And for five years in the uneasy ’80s and the early ’90s, they were, to quote The Clash, the only band that mattered.” Source and more information: Wikipedia