Recent attempts to punish Kneecap and Bob Vylan for the rap groups’ strident criticism of Israel recall the outrage Public Enemy stirred up in the late 1980s by remixing the ideas of Malcom X and the Nation of Islam.
Although the world looks very different today than it did back then, the attempt to suppress artists that refuse to play by mainstream rules does not.
Responding to the Bob Vylan controversy, Public Enemy front man Chuck D reinforced the distinction between art and life: “Bob Vylan ain’t got no tanks. . . You can’t really kill nobody with a guitar and microphone.”
Given the extremity of the backlash against Bob Vylan, this statement could land Public Enemy in serious trouble. But that’s why Chuck D made it.
If Public Enemy wants to escape the prison of respectability that inevitably descends on artists of their age, they can’t afford to play it safe.
That’s why Black Sky Over the Projects: Apartment 2025 is full of jabs at the band’s musical children and grandchildren.
One popular subgenre of social media “shorts” turns on the contrasts between authority figures of different generations. Whereas the Gen Z and Millennial examples try to meet their charges more than halfway, the Boomers bring the hammer down.
Chuck D and Flavor Flav are Boomers. But their experiences as Black men in American society give them a radically different perspective than their white, suburban counterparts.
As the album’s lyrics make clear, the problems in American society that motivated the band to create their early records are resurgent. But mainstream culture is lagging behind.
That realisation is fueling the band’s renaissance.
Chuck D and Flavor Flav’s rapping is once again buoyant, pivoting effortlessly from harsh critique to comic relief.
Although the dense layering of samples that made the band’s Fear of a Black Planet a masterpiece is no longer feasible, Lorrie “The LBX” Boula, and Rhiannon Rae Ellis do a remarkable job of channeling the raucous energy of the Bomb Squad’s sound.
The fact that Black Sky Over the Projects was a surprise, debuting on Bandcamp as a pay-what-you-wish release makes it even better.
For long-time fans like me, who were already into the band before Spike Lee’s 1989 film Do the Right Thing introduced them to a large audience, the new record feels like a miracle.
That’s because we desperately need one.
Just reading the news these days is enough to hurl progressives into a slough of despair.
After decades of slow but steady improvement in how public figures in the United States treat people of color, culminating in the two-term presidency of Barack Obama, the past decade has witnessed a depressing reversal of fortune.
Donald Trump rose to power with a divide-and-conquer strategy pitting Black against Brown, native-born against naturalised, American and immigrant, and—most important of all—individuals against the collective identities that supposedly deprive them of their individuality.
Things were bad enough during the first Trump Administration, when the President declared that the mass of white supremacists and neofascists marching in Charlottesville, Virginia included plenty of “good people”.
Although Black Lives Matter managed to make significant headway in American society during the pandemic, conservatives attacked it so relentlessly that public figures who expressed sympathy for the movement were pushed to the margins of the national conversation about race.
The focus shifted to “butt-hurt” white people who had to suffer through school lessons and educational television that made them feel bad. In conservative-run states like Florida and Texas, teaching “critical race theory” and exploring the legacy of slavery were effectively outlawed.
Because Public Enemy started out during Ronald Reagan’s years in the White House, when progressive gains made in the 1960s and 1970s were being systematically rolled back, their mission to communicate hard truths that were suppressed by the mainstream media is perfectly suited for combating political regression and social apathy.
But nobody in the Black community wants to travel back in time to the era of segregation, when the incalculable injuries their ancestors had suffered were ignored in political legislatures and corporate boardrooms.
As exciting as it may be for Public Enemy’s fans to reconnect with their work, listening to new music that recalibrates their political aesthetic for the dystopian 2020s, we recognise how perverse it is for their music to once again sound decades ahead of its time.
Nevertheless, Public Enemy make a strong case for their contemporary relevance.
“Ageism” forcefully dispels the notion that a band of men who get the “senior” discount must be dated. If young people won’t meet the moment, sixty-somethings who “only rub alcohol” instead of drinking it will have to do it for them:
This the curmudgeon clap
Call it Armageddon rap
Now believing heathen
Who swore real money was the church of crack
40 years later
Wild child try to style that
TV shows and movies
Damn, I’m call it wack
White execs getting checks
Try to bring it back
Green light in some dark ass times
That’s why I’m spitting these old ass rhymes
These “dark ass times” revive the worst aspects of the 1980s, including the reactionary impulse to turn the legacy of the counterculture into decontextualised signifiers devoid of political meaning.
Despite the fact that Chuck D and Flavor Flav have reached retirement age, Public Enemy is back. But the United States has been speeding backward so fast that we are basically meeting them where they were over three decades ago.
In light of the nostalgia for the 1980s percolating through American society, it’s important to remember just how bad things were for the Black community back then.
Political hysteria led to a massively unfair situation in which the possession of crack cocaine was punished far more harshly than that of the powdery form favoured by well-off white people.
Incarceration rates skyrocketed. In big cities, the effect was so dramatic that young Black men seemed like an endangered species.
Donald Trump, whose father was a notorious New York slumlord, famously took out a full page newspaper ad calling for the state to revive the death penalty for the Central Park Five, Black teenagers who had been accused of brutally raping a woman in 1989.
After years spent in prison, the five were eventually exonerated. Yet Trump has continued to speak as if they had been guilty.
That’s why Chuck D has frequently worn a T-shirt featuring the first names of the Central Park Five.
Refuting the notion that Trump only turned conservative after deciding to run for President serves two purposes.
It counters the recency bias demonstrated by many liberals, who act as if the United States was doing great before MAGA. And it reinforces the continuity between the racism that circulated during the Civil Rights Movement and the sort that was stirred up when Obama ran for President.
From a musical standpoint, these reminders situate Public Enemy squarely in the middle of a continuum that stretches from the first Black popular musicians who achieved crossover success in the postwar era—Chuck Berry and Little Richard among others—through the “post-race” genres that dominate the charts today.
Black Sky Over the Projects is a worthy addition to the band’s remarkable catalogue.
More importantly, this impressive record reminds us of the enduring importance of their brand of critique. Even though the mainstream media has changed radically since the 1980s, the need for the left to provide counter-programming is as strong as ever.
Please support The Battleground. Make a donation to help us produce more political culture writing like this.
Photograph courtesy of Sam. Published under a Creative Commons license.
