The Odyssey rolls on, approaching
500 reviews! What will I do when I get
there, dear readers? Keep on goin’, I suppose...
Disc 480 is…Fear of a Black Planet
Year of Release: 1990
What’s up with the Cover? The imminent collision of planets! Although the writing style would make you
logically think of Star Wars, this cover reminds me of a movie I recently saw;
Lars Von Trier’s “Melancholia.” “Melancholia”
is a movie about how a group of characters react to the very real possibility
that a large planet may crash into the earth…or may just miss us; scientists
aren’t telling.
In this case, the collision planet
is apparently the Public Enemy planet, complete with massive logo. Underneath, stock ticker style, you are
reminded that this album is not in fact about celestial collisions but is
instead “The counterattack on world supremacy.”
As headlines go, that one needs work.
How I Came To Know It: One of my friends in university was a guy named Jeff,
who was from Toronto, who I have sadly lost contact with. He tried to get me to listen to both this and
Ice T, but I had little interest in either at the time (I was new to my folk
music phase). A few years later when my
roommate Greg also had this album I gave it a chance and liked it a bit more,
and eventually I liked it enough to buy it for myself. So I guess to summarize how I came to know
it? Gradually.
How It Stacks Up: I have three Public Enemy albums. I have to put this one last of those three,
despite its important place in music history.
Rating: 4 stars
“Fear of
a Black Planet is the artistic endpoint for the heady days before artists had
to pay for samples, and represents the best and worst of that period.
There
are so many samples on this record, music, dialogue, various sounds – you name
it. Like the most skillful conductor,
Public Enemy pulls together this disparate soup into exceptionally catchy
musical arrangements. Despite it being vilified
in the day by the ignorant (including me at the time), this takes an incredible
skill and an unflinching artistic vision.
It is hard to pack this much stuff
into a song and not end up with a hot mess.
At the
same time, I can’t help but find the album a bit busy for my personal
tastes. It may be done brilliantly but
at the end of the day there is still just too much going on for me. A classic example is on “Burn Hollywood Burn” which in addition to multiple music samples,
has a recurring whistle sound. The sound
is very evocative of a traffic cop, and in the context of the song you can picture
a cop blowing his whistle as he diverts traffic away from arson. In this case the arson is in the form of Public
Enemy’s rhymes against Hollywood’s racial stereotypes. I can’t deny that it works but I find the
whistle, clever as it is, prevents me from having a deeper emotional connection
with the song. Despite that, this is one
of my favourite songs, because I simply can’t deny Chuck D’s amazing rap action
and the old school beats the band lays down.
Strangely,
I find the saturation of sound less frustrating on the instrumental tracks, and
“Contract on the World Love Jam” and “Leave This Off Your Fuckin’ Charts” are
two of my favourite songs, despite their insatiable appetite for sampling.
Lyrically,
Public Enemy has a well-deserved reputation for taking on anything and everything,
and “Fear of a Black Planet” explores every awkward element of race relations
in America in unflinching fashion. Gone
are the days of merely rapping about how well you can rap, and yet they also
reject the equally two dimensional topics of drugs and murder that would later
grow into gangsta rap.
The
songs tackle topics like interracial relationships, black stereotypes in
entertainment, and the double standard of 911 response in bad neighbourhoods
(on the Flavor Flav classic, “911 is a
Joke”). They end the record giving a
musical middle finger to Elvis Presley on “Fight
the Power.” When they aren’t
confronting a tough topic, they are deconstructing the way they are perceived
by the public and the media reacting to them.
Ordinarily I would find this post-modern rehash annoying, but Public
Enemy are so good at it I can’t fault them.
Sadly, “Fear of a Black Planet” doesn’t have a standout on this topic
like “Don’t Believe the Hype” off
their previous album.
In fact,
for all my respect for “Fear of a Black Planet,” I find I prefer their previous
two albums, “It Takes a Nation of Millions” and “Yo! Bum Rush the Show.” A big part of this is my aforementioned
preference for the simpler arrangements and lower sample content where the band’s
natural brilliance shines through a bit better.
Regrettably,
for all its innovation, “Fear of a Black Planet” suffers from the
all-too-common recording sing of not knowing when to say when. The album is bloated at twenty tracks, and
that bloating gives it a directionless quality that makes it a lot less
memorable. I would have preferred fourteen
tight tracks that hit you hard, and don’t give you any filler time to catch
your breath.
In many
ways, “Fear of a Black Planet” reminds me of Led Zeppelin’s first album
(reviewed way back at Disc 27). On
the one hand I recognize its creative brilliance, but on the other I find it
doesn’t connect to me as strongly as a lot of other contemporary rap artists,
or even PE’s own earlier records. Like Zeppelin,
it is a five star album for influence, musicianship and production, but a three
star album in terms of how I react to it.
And so like that album, I split the difference and rated it at four.
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