As a counterpoint to the disgusting display of yesterday, the Vinyl of the Day is ‘Fear Of A Black Planet’, 1990, by Public Enemy — an extremely exact description of the motivations of the racist white supremacists and neo-Nazis infesting our country today. Not only one of the greatest rap albums of all time, it’s full of the best and deepest, most visceral and upfront protest music ever made. Song after song angrily slams institutional racism, from the portrayal of blacks in films to police brutality to government policies towards the poor - and they’re all still immensely well crafted and great to listen to, with PE’s masterful and incredibly complex use of mixing, overmixing, and sampling. Chuck D’s powerful voice and rhyming ability was counterpointed perfectly by Flavor Flav’s more lighthearted but still cutting ‘hype man’ persona to literally ‘give you your medicine with some sugar’, putting out the message for you to hear while dancing.
PE's third album is dense, heavy, and urgent as a bullet. ‘Fear of a Black Planet’ single-handedly added half a dozen phrases to the language, and not just from Chuck D.'s troop-rallying bellow--Flavor Flav's "911 Is a Joke" is as catchy an indictment of urban policy as anyone has ever come up with. The Bomb Squad's music is complicated, challenging, terse, and totally funky, and Chuck matches it with one impassioned pronouncement after another: on Hollywood's racism, on police brutality, on the abandonment of the black community by government, on "real history / not HIS story." The album ends with "Fight the Power," the group's ultimate statement of purpose, from its pounding, atonal sound collage to its furious politics.
PE and especially Chuck D were important voices about equality, racism, and institutionalized inequity, and we desperately need such voices again today more than ever. Fear of a Black Planet' is a nearly-perfect combination of music to move your feet and lyrics to make you think, lyrics that still are relevant to society today. It’s hard to believe that this album is now 27 years old, and things are actually worse now than when it was recorded.
From Wikipedia;
Fear of a Black Planet is the third studio album by American hip hop group Public Enemy, released on April 10, 1990, by Def Jam Recordings and Columbia Records. It was produced by the group’s production team The Bomb Squad, who sought to expand on the dense, sample-layered sound of Public Enemy’s previous album, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (1988). Having fulfilled their initial creative ambitions with that album, Public Enemy pursued a different direction and aspired to create what the group’s lead rapper Chuck D called “a deep, complex album”.
Fear of a Black Planet features elaborate sound collages that incorporate varying rhythms, numerous samples, media sound bites, and eccentric loops, reflecting the songs’ confrontational tone. Recorded during the golden age of hip hop, its assemblage of reconfigured and recontextualized aural sources preceded the sample clearance system that later emerged in the music industry. Fear of a Black Planet explores themes about organization and empowerment within the black community, social issues affecting African Americans, and race relations at the time. The record’s criticism of institutional racism, White supremacy, and the power elite was partly inspired by Dr. Frances Cress Welsing’s views on color.
A critical and commercial success in 1990, Fear of a Black Planet sold two million copies in the United States and received rave reviews from critics, many of whom named it one the year’s best albums. Its immediate success contributed significantly to the popularity of Afrocentric and political subject matter in hip hop and the genre’s mainstream resurgence at the time. Since then, it has been viewed as one of hip hop’s greatest and most important records, as well as being musically and culturally significant. In 2003, Fear of a Black Planet was ranked number 300 on Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 greatest albums of all time, and in 2005, the Library of Congress added it to the National Recording Registry.
AllMusic Review by Stephen Thomas Erlewine
At the time of its release in March 1990 -- just a mere two years after It Takes a Nation of Millions -- nearly all of the attention spent on Public Enemy's third album, Fear of a Black Planet, was concentrated on the dying controversy over Professor Griff's anti-Semitic statements of 1989, and how leader Chuck D bungled the public relations regarding his dismissal. References to the controversy are scattered throughout the album -- and it fueled the incendiary lead single, "Welcome to the Terrordome" -- but years later, after the furor has died down, what remains is a remarkable piece of modern art, a record that ushered in the '90s in a hail of multiculturalism and kaleidoscopic confusion. It also easily stands as the Bomb Squad's finest musical moment. Where Millions was all about aggression -- layered aggression, but aggression nonetheless -- Fear of a Black Planet encompasses everything, touching on seductive grooves, relentless beats, hard funk, and dub reggae without blinking an eye. All the more impressive is that this is one of the records made during the golden age of sampling, before legal limits were set on sampling, so this is a wild, endlessly layered record filled with familiar sounds you can't place; it's nearly as heady as the Beastie Boys' magnum opus, Paul's Boutique, in how it pulls from anonymous and familiar sources to create something totally original and modern. While the Bomb Squad were casting a wider net, Chuck D's writing was tighter than ever, with each track tackling a specific topic (apart from the aforementioned "Welcome to the Terrordome," whose careening rhymes and paranoid confusion are all the more effective when surrounded by such detailed arguments), a sentiment that spills over to Flavor Flav, who delivers the pungent black humor of "911 Is a Joke," perhaps the best-known song here. Chuck gets himself into trouble here and there -- most notoriously on "Meet the G That Killed Me," where he skirts with homophobia -- but by and large, he's never been so eloquent, angry, or persuasive as he is here. This isn't as revolutionary or as potent as Millions, but it holds together better, and as a piece of music, this is the best hip-hop has ever had to offer.