When Fear Of A Black Planet came out in April 1990, it lived up to its expectations as PE’s greatest record. The thing dropped louder than an atom bomb on both the underground and mainstream alike. You could hear it in the intro of the record “Contract On A World Love Jam” through the winter-like winds blowing with a feeling of the dawn of a new age. Then, blasting into their manifesto that “Brothers Gonna Work It Out” as the first official song on the album. Where else were you going to get sound pieces from artists like Prince, Mikey Dread, James Brown, Lyn Collins, The Beatles, The Bar-Kays, The Temptations, Funkadelic, Malcolm McLaren, Chuck Brown, Musical Youth, The Blackbyrds, Roy Ayers, The Meters, The Spinners, Michael Jackson, Sly & The Family Stone, Zapp, The Commodores, Big Daddy Kane, Ice Cube, and comics Robin Harris, Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy, and afrocentric teachings of Dr. Frances Cress Welsing all on the same album? Perhaps Paul’s Boutique and Sandinista! were the only albums preceding it to ever parallel with similar sound collages.
But, beyond the music, it addressed the dark side of issues such as tokenism and interracial dating, nihilism, AIDS, reparations, and fatherlessness within the black community, sluggish medical aid services in the ghetto, attacked the mainstream media critics and government officials who had attack them in the press. And this all made you dance, laugh, and do your homework on how to make an individual and collective change against the norms of a racial and class stratification in society. This leaves it into question but as if to say that the state of the black community and hip hop is still in question moving forward.
The legacy of this album stands in musical acts that have run in the same vein as Public Enemy since Fear… like Dead Prez, Killer Mike, Ice Cube, Talib Kweli, Common, or Kendrick Lamar recently on To Pimp A Butterfly addressing issues within the black community. If Public Enemy’s first album’s mission was to “bum rush the show” business, and their second album “took a nation by the millions” to gather around to hear their message, then their third effort alluded to the idea of a black planet, which was equivalent to the raising of the flag at Iwo Jima, behind enemy lines. Or it least it can be said that it foreshadowed, twenty-five years later, that the Leader of the Free World would be a black man in President Barack Obama. Yet people would continue to appropriate black culture, while spilling black’s blood in the process. The album ends perfectly with a journalist asking Chuck D about the future of Public Enemy as a group, and Chuck getting his answer is cut short. It served as a premonition, leaving the group’s future into question, but also the state of the black community and Hip Hop, a collective public enemy to white supremacists across the globe, still in question moving forward.
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Keith Shocklee Tells The Groups Humble Beginnings
“We got into this to be in this business. One thing is when you have a regular job, we wasn’t street hustlers like some artists. We had regular jobs, and wanted to figure out if we could stay in this music industry, so this is a blessing. I know me and Chuck was talking about this: we had a job at Sears changing tires.
“Yeah, we worked the same job! So you go from that to making records? Come on. Everybody (in the group) had crazy jobs. So this is a situation in which, this is what we came to do, and what else are we gonna do? We can go back to working a 9-to-5 like everybody else, but we’ve been doing this for so long, so how you gonna get a 9-to-5 after working so long for yourself? And I think that’s one of the reasons why essentially the PE crew stayed together so long. Like this is the life! (laughs) I applaud the people out there who do those jobs. What we do is still a hustle, and we ain’t got no benefits. Well, now we got ObamaCare, but…(laughs)”
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Chuck D Talks “Revolutionary Generation” & Black Lives Matter
“Well, it really wasn’t that long ago. It’s long ago in like entertainment years, which are like dog years. You know what I’m saying? It’s not long ago so it’s not that farfetched. So you shouldn’t be surprised that some of these things still exist. They existed at the turn of the century; in the eighties; and you have some aspects of the seventies. Why should we be surprised when there was really no time at all considering that it’s been something in a 300-year span concerning the dynamics of race in the United States of America? It’s only new to people who are new.
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If you’re born in 1994, it’s new to you because this is something that’s going to affect you as a person of color as you go forward. Even if you choose to ignore it, there’s going to be some cause and effect that affects your day. And that’s what happened in Ferguson, is that young people who had been hearing about racism all the time weren’t able to process it totally affects them in the context of their everyday lives. They definitely felt it. They felt something, but they weren’t able to process it like “Yo, this is real!” Then you add their emotion, and then it’s like the people were emotionally bent on something. How do you process that into movement? So none of this new, it’s just that the people are new.”
Keith Shocklee’s Thoughts On “Fear Of A Black Planet” 25 Years Later
“With It Takes A Nation…, mainly my brother (Hank) constructed that and his basic concept with him and Chuck was more of a situation where we went after a way to wake up or shake up the nation or the planet. But, let’s deal with the nation. So it takes a nation of millions to hold us back. So we’re here to change your thought process with that album. Fear Of A Black Planet, from my perspective, was like “We have some issues dealing with what’s going on in our generation” at the time. And there was issue’s going on within our (group) situation.” Fear Of A Black Planet was another way of shocking the planet, like with quote-unquote a “a black planet.” Whereas black people are empowered, and have more control over certain things than others. I’d rather use that term “than others.” (laughs) Listen, if we was in control the media for how things are portrayed out there, what would you do?”
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“For It Takes A Nation…,, that was more street-oriented, like for the people in the streets. Fear Of A Black Planet was more geared towards the critics because when Nation came out, the critics had problems with it. Then all of a sudden, we addressed all the critics on the next album. That went after the jugular vein of the media. They were labeling us Anti-Semitists, rebel rousers, and all this other crap.”
“Yeah. Everything had to make sense. We didn’t put shit in just to fill up space- no. We searched until we found the right piece to make that statement, because of our record knowledge and our deejaying, we started from that. Back then coming up as deejays, there wasn’t a such thing as a Hip Hop part. So from there, after deejaying, we was playing bar mitzvahs to the park jams. So our record library was fuckin’ huge!
We had ever record listed in the book. So you went to the book and went to the number were it would be at. Then when you were done with it, you put it back to that number. That was back then in the seventies and eighties (laughs). It’s like (in “Night Of The Living Baseheads”) “One-two-three-four-five-six kick it! Two years ago, I put this together to-ROCK! the bells…” He was like, “Well instead of saying it, I’ll take Run’s “Two years ago” lyric (from “Sucker MC’s”) on the record, and then came in Aretha Franklin’s “Rock Steady” for the “ROCK” part of that section of the song. So Chuck snatched things from those records vocally. So Chuck was like “Let me take every vocal part that worked and put it in this song.” Cuz he already written it, and he just replaced it with those vocals from those records.” “Yup. And then you get to touch people’s lives. That’s a big thing. It’s like “alright, you got a hot record.”
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Then you deal with people, and you go to different countries, and people come up and tell you how your music changed their lives for how they were living, or how wild they were treated by the government, and our music was an inspiration to do things for them. It’s a whole ‘nother dynamic and paradigm when you hear people talk about it like that. It’s not just people saying “I loved your records coming up.” No, I get more people that come up to me saying, “Yo, your shit changed my life in which I was heading down the wrong path!” You know what I’m sayin’? That’s a whole ‘nother level of dealing with this.”
