It’s been a quarter of a century since Chuck D, Flavour Flav, Terminator X and Professor Griff first bum-rushed the show as Public Enemy – though the story began even earlier than that with D and Flav’s Spectrum City project. Then they spent the best part of a decade until the mid nineties, famous (thanks to incendiary lyrics and the Bomb Squad’s production) for being one of the biggest and hardest-hitting acts in hip-hop music. Not to mention having (in the form of the Security Of The First World) the campest crew of dancers since The Village People. Despite the departure of Terminator X in the late nineties and the temporary exit of Griff as a consequence of some dubious views on Jews and gay people (for which he later gave a public apology) PE have never split and if their mainstream presence had diminished in the 2000s – the use of Harder Than You Think as the theme for last summer’s Paralympics from their 2007 tenth album How You Sell Soul to a Soulless People Who Sold Their Soul? made them hard to avoid once more.
It is from the late eighties to late nineties glory years that this 25th Anniversary Collection draws however. The growing market in prestige vinyl re-issues as a collector’s luxury item in the face of the digital onslaught means you can expect to find a boxed set that brings the noise in the form of vinyl re-issues of: Yo! Bum Rush The Show (1987), It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back (1988), Fear Of A Black Planet (1990), Apocalypse 91… The Enemy Strikes Black (1991), Muse Sick-N-Hour Mess Age (1994) and He Got Game (1998). You can get yours next month. Despite what Chuck D said, believe the hype in this case, and if you still aren’t down with PE – I can’t do nuttin’ for ya, man. PR blah video below…
(Out 15 April on Universal)
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