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.

Approaching Gore Vidal: Part 1, 'Palimpsest'

Approaching Gore Vidal is no easy task, as David Dimbleby recently discovered. He's the last man standing from the era of the mega-celebrity author, Norman Mailer and Truman Capote having died. He's also older than most American houses, if not the Sun. Reading his autobiography, 'Palimpsest', you would not be surprised to read a withering put-down of Jesus, or an anecdote about Julius Caesar cruising for rough trade.

Given Vidal's absurdly interesting life story, 'Palimpsest' is a pallid, sporadically interesting work. In large part this is due to Vidal's aristocratic background, and the tiresome focus on family (or family tree) that follows. One of the best anecdotes in the book is of Princess Margaret watching a film about the fall of the last Tsar and Tsarina of Russia, and exclaiming "They're so ordinary. They're just like us!". When Vidal is in aristocratic mode, the book becomes tiresome - clearly, nobody ever told him that an Upper Class name dropper is not a thing to be. This mindset also leads him to effectively end the book with the assisination of JFK, in 1963. The book was written in 1994, and Vidal, seeing himself as the sum total of the company he keeps, considers very little of the 30 intervening years to be worth recording.

More's the pity, as the first half of the book, dealing with his adolescent love affair with a boy named Jimmie Trimble, his ongoing homosexuality and World War II, is riveting. Vidal's style, alternately acid and profound, suits the subject matter perfectly. Jimmie dies in WWII, and Gore undertakes a pre-AIDS marathon of loveless casual sex, etching over a thousand notches into his proverbial bedpost. Despite the evidence to the contrary, Vidal is reticent to consider himself homosexual - one of his most famous aphorisms being "there are no homosexual or heterosexual people, there are homosexual and heterosexual acts". In Gore Vidal's case, there are an epic amount of homosexual acts, and next to no heterosexual acts.

Animating the section is Vidal's dedication to creating an historical record of an existing homosexuality (or homosexual acts) in the mythic past beloved of American conservatives. In Vidal's alternative history, WWII becomes a festival of enforced homosexuality, which demobbed soldiers re-enact with glee. The emergence of the USA as the world's hyperpower provides Gore and his contemporaries with more places to cruise. Allusions are made to the homosexual leanings of both JFK and RFK.

The aspect of the autobiography that is most striking is the distance with which he views his friendships. He draws a scathing comic sketch of the author Anais Nin, drawing on his dislike for her prose, her rampant lying and narcissism. All very amusing, but obviously posing the question of why he was a very close associate of hers for several years. Tennessee Williams has a slightly less sharp assessment, but then they were friends for decades, and the portrait is still cutting. The last years of his life story as he tells it, spent as a courtier in the JFK White House, follow a similar pattern - Bobby Kennedy and Jackie Onassis bearing the brunt of his spite. Ultimately, the impression that Vidal creates is of the consumate observer-writer - dispassionate, non-interventionist and not averse to shaping a narrative to his greater glory.