Public Enemy is the best hip-hop has to offer

For a long time, I refused to accept hip-hop into my little musical universe. It just was not something I even considered. It was noisy, it was brash and it was too, well, too black for my white-bread, suburban existence. Besides, I thought, how hard can it be to talk over music and make the words rhyme?\nBut after the Los Angeles riots of 1992 and other racially-charged events, I started to think about the reasons fueling the anger and frustration behind much of the hip-hop scene. I started to realize that maybe, just maybe, the messages expressed by rappers were not only valid but incredibly vital, and that perhaps hip-hop was, after all, something I needed -- and wanted -- to hear.\nThat's when I discovered Public Enemy. I took a chance and bought 1991's Apocalypse '91… The Enemy Strikes Black, and I was blown away. From the opening beats of "Lost at Birth," through the fire of "Can't Truss It" and "By the Time I Get to Arizona," to the album-closing version of "Bring Tha Noise" with the heavy-metal band Anthrax, Chuck D became a revelation for me. "Land of the free/ but the skin I'm in identifies me," Chuck raps on "Nighttrain." From there I picked up 1988's It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back and 1990's Fear of a Black Planet, and I became convinced that Public Enemy was one of the most important groups of artists in the last 20 years of popular music. And I remain convinced.\nAnd now, rappers like Jay-Z and DMX enjoy the level of success and fame that would have seemed impossible for pioneers such as Afrika Bambatta, Grandmaster Flash and Kurtis Blow. And, at the same time, white clowns such as Eminem and Kid Rock produce music that is a sad, pitiable distortion of what hip-hop was and should be, all this making me more certain that Public Enemy is the most important act in hip-hop history.\nThat's because Public Enemy infused rap with social and political urgency. Songs like "Night of the Living Baseheads," in which Chuck laments the way cocaine was destroying African-Americans communities, and "Rebirth," which has Chuck urging people to be wary of modern racism ("You can't see who's in cahoots/ 'Cause now the KKK wears three-piece suits"), resonate with the same type of awareness and an activism that revolutionized rock and roll in the 1960s.\nAs stunned crowds watched Spike Lee's brilliant "Do the Right Thing" in 1989, they also heard Public Enemy's hip-hop anthem, "Fight the Power." The song defined the band and crystallized the emotions felt by millions of disenfranchised, down-and-out people across the country.\n"Our freedom of speech is freedom or death," Chuck raps on the song. "We got to fight the powers that be." The track turned out to be a clarion call for action and resistance: "What we need is awareness, we can't get careless… My beloved let's get down to business." The song also included perhaps the most famous rhyme in hip-hop history: "Elvis was a hero to most but he never meant shit to me/ Straight up racist that sucker was, simple and plain/ Mother fuck him and John Wayne."\nToday, it seems, such messages have been drained from hip-hop, which too often languishes in the culture of "bling-bling." While on the one hand, the fact that hip-hop artists are finding the type of material success that has, in the past, been notoriously withheld from African-American stars is a positive development. But on the other hand, it's distressing that those artists gave up all sociopolitical relevance to do it.\nPublic Enemy represents the best of hip-hop, the brightest such an important, urgent genre of music has to offer. Hopefully the band won't be forgotten as hip-hop continues to move forward into the future. \nRyan Whirty writes "Play Back," a bi-weekly column about classic music.