Album of the 'Week': Fear of a Black Planet

Public Enemy are ludicrous. I possess the first issue of the Public Enemy comic, from 2007, in which Chuck D fires up a young, disillusioned black man to fight authority, and, I seem to remember, ninjas. The character voices awestruck approval at the revelatory and liberatory power of Public Enemy's music and Chuck D's public speaking before, during, and after fighting the power. All this would be fine if this was charmingly ill-thought out fan-fiction, but the author of the comic is Chuck D himself. Public Enemy have developed into a middling band of overly earnest, politically confused old men, which would be fine, if they didn't have the most musically radical back catalogue of any popular band of the last 30 years.

'Fear of a Black Planet' is often referred to as the first hip-hop concept album, but it is nothing of the sort. Politically confused, over-long and patchy, there is no concept that can be said to guide the piece. The driving force of the album is utter rage. Rage at the band's detractors, rage at homosexuals, rage at race mixers, at Hollywood, and, finally, 'the power'. Rage breeds incoherence, and, coming to 'Fear of a Black Planet' decades after its release, with its reputation as the apex of politically engaged hip-hop, the unpalatable depths of homophobia and (perfectly understandable) race-hatred were shocking, but not as shocking as the sheer fragmentation of Chuck D's lyrics. It's difficult to discern a thread in any of the lyrics. This is in no way a criticism, it renders his writing a collection of placard slogans and a mass of phrases, delivered in his college-trained radio announcer voice. It does however, get a bit much - Ice-T's verse in 'Burn, Hollywood, Burn' (which can be said, with fair confidence, to have predicted the L.A Riots of 1992) actually arrives as light relief, even when he shouts "don't fight the power/(gunshot) the motherfucker!".

The lyrics are the transcription of a riot of ideas, influences and emotions. They form new beats, get sidetracked, alternate between self-pity and bombast. One of the masterpieces of the album, 'Welcome to the Terrordome' begins "I've got so much trouble on my mind/Refuse to lose". The lyrics as a whole betray a seige mentality, following the controversy created by the band's conduct (particularly Professor Griff's claim that "Jews are responsible for 90% of the evil in the world today" a wonderfully precise bit of utter nonsense), and reflect the broader seige mentality of a black community seeing the gains of the civil rights era rolled back by Reaganomics. The shifting rhythm and shock phrase-turning ("brain game, intellectual Vietnam", "subordinate terror kicking off in error", "most of my heroes don't appear on no stamp") and the authoritative delivery make avoiding engaging with the lyrics impossible. They force debate. That MLK and various faceless nameless orators appear in sample makes this even more delicious.

This, however can be said of any number of earnest rappers. What gives 'Fear of a Black Planet' its continued shock power and enduring status isn't the healthy dose of Louis Farrakhan-era Nation of Islam politics or Chuck D's self-pity, but the mindblowing production of The Bomb Squad. As opposed to the fast majority of hitherto existing hip-hop, each track is through-composed, and the album contains thousands of micro-samples. At one point (the first 20 seconds of the gloriously titled 'Anti-Nigger Machine'), the level of abstraction resembles John Cage's 'Williams Mix'. This alone makes the buffoon I saw perform his rap version of Elton John's Tiny Dancer look even more like an arse. But there's more - the vast majority of the tracks have no tonal centre - no student will ever be able to perform 'Fight The Power' in an ironic fashion at an open-mic night.

But most importantly, the production embraces what devotées of anologue call 'the digital squelch' and computer sequencing (Chuck D even namechecks the Mac on which the album was presumably made). 'Fear of a Black Planet', despite its 'classic' status, belongs to an old school of hip-hop that purists and modern practitioners like to imagine doesn't exist - one that isn't identifiably old, and is directly politically confrontational. The wonder of 'Fear of a Black Planet is that not only has it not dated, but it sounds as though it could have been released in the distant future.