“Fear of a Black Planet” by Public Enemy

A legitimately perfect hip-hop records turns 35 (!)

This album review revisits a protest rap landmark, Public Enemy's ferocious 1990 sophomore record, as it turns 35.

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Genre: Hip-Hop, Experimental

Label: Def Jam

Release Date: April 10, 1990

Vibe: ✊✊✊✊✊

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👉 Click the GIF to stream the album on your favorite platform

The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers.

- James Baldwin

After listening to Fear of a Black Planet again for this write-up, I kept asking the same question while outlining and researching this post: could Public Enemy thrive in the current music ecosystem? Not simply existing, but selling out massive venues and playing the kind of incendiary protest music that, certainly when this record was released at the dawn of the 90s, made large sects of Americans deeply uncomfortable. But, as Chuck D describes it, the messages in their protest anthems crossed whatever genre and racial lines so-called pundits thought would divide listeners. “I saw [Ian] in front of 75,000 people with a guitar, wearing a Public Enemy shirt,” Chuck D said of Scott Ian, Anthrax’s guitarist and co-founder. The nod led to the rap icon name-checking (and eventually collabing with) the metal band in “Bring the Noise,” one of the best-known cuts off their mind-bending sophomore record, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back. “Radio stations, I question their Blackness,” Chuck famously spits in the second verse. “They call themselves Black, but we'll see if they'll play this.”

He and the rest of Public Enemy push that ethos as far as it could go on Fear of a Black Planet, an album that reset the bar for hip-hop’s artistic aspirations. A couple of years before G-funk’s commercial takeover, it proved there was still room to grow rap as an art form, one that could bring serious sociopolitical criticism to the forefront culturally, and even more forcefully than folk and rock singers had done in the 60s and 70s. They didn’t want you to stand up and take notice, like you’re writing down a little reminder to yourself you may or may not act on later—they wanted you to do something about it. Now. You may not agree entirely with every namedrop or ideologies referenced in Public Enemy’s music, including (but not limited to) Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam, but that doesn’t mean they should be ignored, either. Unfortunately, we live in much the same world Chuck D described 35 years ago. Just swap out references to the crack epidemic and radio call-in shows for the opioid crisis and livestreaming, and you’re most of the way there.

It’s easy to think of Fear of a Black Planet as a simple run-it-back project for Public Enemy, Def Jam, and the burgeoning hip-hop industrial complex. But it wasn’t quite that cut and dry. The group’s politically and racially charged statements drew a ton of mass media ire long before Professor Griff gave a rambling interview to the Washington Post that featured anti-Semitic statements. Chuck D fired Griff after receiving an ultimatum from the Bomb Squad, the legendary production team featuring Eric "Vietnam" Sadler and brothers Hank and Keith Shocklee. Whispers about Chuck’s capabilities as a genuine voice for the marginalized were questioned. For a minute, there were questions about whether the group would emerge from the controversy with their bite still intact. Instead, they roared back with a record that was even more ferocious than their previous outing.

From the opening seconds, it’s clear the Long Island natives were hell-bent on shattering as many glass houses as they could with each bar on Fear of a Black Planet. Chuck D’s lyrical themes are as uncompromising as ever, exploring everything from racial paranoia to bigoted Hollywood typecasting to the media controversies they found themselves navigating. “Welcome to the Terrordome,” the searing direct response to the latter was “a black male correspondent’s view of how we looked at 1989,” according to Chuck D. “I just let all the drama come out of me. ‘I got so much trouble on my mind, I refuse to lose. Here’s your ticket, here the drummer get wicked.’ That was some true stuff. I just dropped everything I was feeling.” The Bomb Squad production is suitably and wonderfully erratic, sampling 22 tracks in an exhilarating stream-of-consciousness style. As you veer from James Brown to Kool and the Gang to the Temptations, the sense of urgency becomes almost unbearable. Before Chuck D utters a word, you implicitly understand the stakes couldn’t be higher.

Track after track, the Bomb Squad’s production techniques on Fear of a Black Planet are nothing short of mesmerizing. Unlikely sonic befellows are made, recontextualizing soul, funk, and rock classics into something fresh, vibrant, and exciting. The fact that they accomplished what they did using late-80s drum machines and samplers, such as the Akai S900, and an archaic Macintosh computer is a testament to the idea that, no matter how fancy your tools, you still need creativity to make ideas truly leap out of your speakers. The dense layering that resulted from the thicket of loops and overdubs was supposedly largely improvised in the studio, with several tracks coming together in the moment with no prior planning. "They're figuring out how to jam with the samples and to create these layers of sound," said journalist Jeff Chang. "I don't think it's been matched since then."

Legally, you couldn’t pull off what the Bomb Squad did with Fear of a Black Planet’s sampling. It was one of the last records to go about its business free of legal red tape during the golden age of hip-hop. 3 Feet High and Rising, which had come out the year before, teased the beginning of the end of that compositional goldmine. But the landmark Biz Markie lawsuit drove the final nail into the coffin, forcing hip-hop artists to get approval for every single sample by the original copyright owners or risk the consequences of infringement. Legal scholars estimate that, had Public Enemy had to navigate sample clearances following the court’s decision, they would’ve lost out on an estimated five million dollars in revenue on a Platinum record. When anyone asks why they don’t make hip-hop records like this one anymore, that’s a big part of the reason why.

Another is Chuck D’s incomparable presence behind the mic. His songwriting abilities are one thing, but his delivery, equal parts matter-of-fact and fiery, ensures every line lands with the right amount of venom. Some of his wordplay may even elicit a chucke or two in spots, like this gem from “Burn Hollywood Burn,” my pick for the best track on the entire LP: “So I rather kick some slang out/All right fellas let's go hang out/Hollywood or would they not/Make us all look bad like I know they had.” Those lines build a perfect kind of contrast woven through most of the album, one where the rhyming structure is playful while the subject matter is anything but. The title track holds nothing back when it comes to the stigma around interracial relationships. At the same time, “Who Stole the Soul?” asks tough questions about America’s penchant for ripping the guts out of one of its most foundational communities. You know a Public Enemy record is firing on all cylinders when Flava Flav, cartoonish hype man extraordinaire, gets to flex his socially conscious muscles on “911 is a Joke,” a song about exactly what it sounds like.

All this talk of historical and cultural significance, and we haven’t even touched the most enduring artifact on its tracklist: “Fight the Power.” Best known as the driving cut that soundtracks the opening title sequence of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, it’s widely acknowledged as one of the most timeless protest anthems ever recorded. More than anything, it’s a song that asks the listener to question the status quo, to walk around in this world with your eyes and ears open, willing to accept and embrace another person or group’s viewpoints at face value. As Chuck D remarks, you can’t have action without awareness coming first. “Most of my heroes don't appear on no stamps,” he says later, a sentence that’s so precise and free of any sugarcoating it remains absolutely chill-inducing.

Incidentally, this review moved me to dig out Lee’s film and rewatch it for the first time in nearly a half-decade. Like this record, it still feels so alarmingly relevant, but I suppose that shouldn’t come as a surprise. Both cut straight through to the heat of the human condition, for better and worse. The fact that there was and is a commercial appetite for artistic statements of this ilk fills me with optimism, not cynicism. Maybe that makes me naive, but so be it. Back then, the world had its share of problems, too. War, bloodshed, fear, and hate were all too prevalent, to say nothing of the moron who occupied the White House and the financial spiral his government sent the country into. The names, faces, and places may have changed, but the narrative is eerily similar. The difference is now, more than ever, we require music like this to give voice to those who need it the most. More than ever, we can’t let justice pass us by.