Digital Watches: Public Enemy in the 21st Century

Some groups never die. Years after fading from the spotlight, with the “public” in their name now somewhat of a misnomer, Public Enemy continues to make music. Both the two main members of the group, Flava Flav and Chuck D, are well into their fifties, yet show no sign of slowing down. In 2015, they dropped Man Plans God Laughs, and they released albums in 2006, 2007, and two(!) in 2012. It’s also not like these albums are just filler, either. They’ve featured singles like “He Got Game” and “Harder than You Think,” that hit just as hard as any single from their late ’80s/early ’90s heyday. Chuck D raps in “Harder than You Think,”: “‘Fight the Power’ comes great responsibility/‘F the Police’ but who’s stopping you from killing me?” It’s just what you expect from Public Enemy, both conscious of their role in music history and not afraid to go after other rappers. In other words, they are the definition of political rap. Why isn’t modern PE being recognized?

Perhaps it could just be age. Chuck D is 55 and Flavor Flav is 57, and like other groups from their era such as Wu-Tang and the Beastie Boys, their latest music has been, well, just slower. “Harder than You Think” is a great single, but the rest of the 2007 album it appears on, How You Sell Soul to a Soulless People Who Sold Their Soul, struggles to match its crispness. On the long and drawn-out “Sex, Drugs, and Violence,” a children’s choir sings “We like those gangsta rhymes/Just make sure they don’t corrupt our minds/These rappers kill and thieve/A lot of times it’s only make believe.” Public Enemy’s songs have always been a kind of sermon, but with such a simplistic narrative all pretense is taken away. They are all too willing to dismiss the hip-hop of the new millennium, but not explain their dismissal or propose an alternative.

Now three albums later, they try to sound more like the same “gangsta rhymes” they had just bashed. On Man Plans God Laughs, PE seems far more open to learning from the Hip-hop of the new millennium. However, PE still struggles to adapt. They use ham-fisted terms such as “earthizen” and “corplantation-opoly,” and employ dated electronica beats. As Sheldon Pearce notes in a Pitchfork review of the album some of the tracks “are busy for no reason,” and calls the album “the sonic equivalent of your tech-challenged granddad trying to use Spotify.” They have their lyrical heights, but at other times they sound tired, as in the strange chorus of “the earth without art is just, ‘eh’” on “Earthizen.” They are an old group trying to figure out what to do with the new tricks, and the relationship has far from cemented.

Public Enemy’s slow fade from hip-hop relevance began on Apocalypse 91...The Enemy Strikes Back, the album released just a year after Fear of a Black Planet. The golden age of Gangsta Rap was dawning, and artists like Tupac and Biggie loomed over the horizon. Instead of embracing the newer artists, however, PE almost completely ignored them. In the song “How to Kill a Radio Consultant,” they list off rappers they admire, and among them are “Marley Marl” and “Run”, but Ice Cube or Eazy-E are nowhere to be found. The album itself was excellent, but from that point forward they were trying to reverse the direction of hip-hop, not define it. Their next album Muse Sick-N-Hour Mess Age barely hit gold status, and afterwards none of their albums appeared on the Billboard 200.

But because Public Enemy released so much quality material back in their heyday, such a decline leaves no questions about wasted potential. From 1987 to 1991, they released four acclaimed albums in a row: Yo! Bum Rush the Show, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold us Back, Fear of a Black Planet, and Apocalypse 91...The Enemy Strikes Black. Each one of those albums was 12 groundbreaking just in their production. From the jarring, repetitive loops of Nation of Millions to the magnificently complex beat from “Fight the Power,” a grand revue of Black musicians from Bob Marley to Afrika Bambaataa, Public Enemy influenced a whole generation of producers. Many of their rhymes from this period have become hip-hop canon: “I got a letter from the government, the other day,/I opened and read it, it said they were Suckas!” from “Black Steel In the Hour of Chaos,” Flavor Flav’s tagline “Yeah, boy!” and above all, the chorus of “Fight the Power.” There is no question of “what could have been” for Public Enemy. They brought political rap to its apex and they stayed there for four years, an eternity in the music biz. One can’t really fault PE for living on house money at this stage in their careers.

And their live acts are just as powerful as they were twenty years ago. In the hour-long concert format, Chuck, Flav, and their entourage are able to maintain the urgency which made them such a consistently powerful group. I caught PE at X-Fest last year in San Diego, and even though the audience was there mostly for the group that came after Public Enemy, Modest Mouse, they still brought it. They played all the classics, and true to form, didn’t mince words when they declared Elvis and Motherfuckin’ John Wayne “Racist suckers, simple and plain.” The music wasn’t a beat too slow. But it was the visual elements of the concert, the performative aspects, in which things got a little strange.

Public Enemy shows have always been—ahem— visually provocative, as demonstrated by an excerpt from their 1990 song “Incident at 66.6 FM,” which sampled calls from a real talk show earlier that year:

CALLER Ah, I’ve seen these guys—I saw them warm up for the Beastie Boys last year.

DJ How were they?

CALLER How were they? I thought it was one of the most appalling things I have ever seen. There were two gentlemen in cages on either side of the stage with fake Uzis...

There were no Uzis at X-Fest, but the militancy was still there. Tall black men in military uniform stood on either side of Chuck and Flav, dancing in an aggressive if somewhat dopey fashion, swinging their arms around as if they were at a rodeo. Other members of their entourage stood onstage in shirts with the PE logo, clapping their hands and pumping up the crowd. That was all par for the course. What was absurd was the style of the character known as Flavor Flav. He appeared wearing a white tank top with an octopus on it, light blue gym shorts, and, hilariously, two digital watches. Although Chuck accepted his old-guy status and wore a simple white T-shirt, Flav seemed as if he were twenty. His physique was excellent as well. If it weren’t for his wrinkled face, I would never have thought he was a year over twenty-five.

The strangest part, however, was when the performance ended and Public Enemy was about to pack up. Flavor Flav popped back on stage, and went into a long monologue about world peace, making some tangents about racial inequality and love and such. However, the peculiarity of his rant came both from its length and Chuck D’s reaction. Flav talked for over thirty minutes. As smiling festival MCs tried to hint subtly that his time was up, he ignored them and kept up the spiel. And Chuck D, who hadn’t interacted much with Flav throughout the concert, now seemed to actively distance himself from his partner. Chuck turned his head from Flav during his monologue, almost giving an “I-don’t-know-this-guy” kind of look. Regardless of whether it was part of the act, it recalled the Big Boi—André 3000 divide that grew during Outkast’s heyday. Chuck D was Big Boi, the composed leader with static principles. Flav was André 3000, a more chameleon-like figure who waded in time’s currents. In Man Plans God Laughs, it was Chuck D who was struggling to adapt; Flav knew the time, then and always.

Public Enemy’s legacy is secure. Their latest albums may not contribute as much to that legacy as their earlier work, but they do not need to. They have struggled to keep up with the new Millennium of Hip-Hop, at least in their studio recordings, but their live shows retain raw force. And Public Enemy still has time ahead of them, either to adapt to the bleeding edge of Hip-hop, or propose a radical alternative.