REVIEW: Public Enemy, Muse Sick-N-Hour Mess Age (Def Jam)
- Martin Bate
A babble of voices....gunshots....a voice announces "Here we go again", a beat starts up and a radio announcer gives you a news bulletin 1999 style....then a *wicked* guitar riff interrupts before the beat kicks back in, louder, with Chuck D sneering and snarling all over the top of it. Ladies and gentlemen......PUBLIC ENEMY!
A lot has changed since P.E.'s last proper outing - the gangstas have taken over rap with their simple production and tales of bitches, blunts, 40's and gats, so Chuck, Flav and Terminator-X are back to tell you "What *time* it is".
P.E. *know* their backs are against the wall and that they must come out fighting, but rather than simply re-hashing the trademark Bomb Squad wall of noise production, they've chosen to throw some new styles into the mix. They've brought a more live, organic and less structured feel to their sound, even using live instrumentation along with the samples and loops on several of the tracks.
This album's closest cousin would be Fear of a Black Planet - it's a long album, with a variety of styles and moods, and an ambitious attempt to move forward. Like Fear.. it has also come out of troubled times for the band.
The first side is faultless with the style flipping back and forth between the new and old, Chuck and Flav telling you what's wrong with America 1994 and what can be done to stop the rot. The negative gangsta-rap image is attacked several times, no better than on "So Whatcha Gonna Do Now?", which utilizes a laid back, almost Dre-like style to talk about how "Everybody's talking that gangsta *shit*"
On the second side there's a few hiccups with some of the experiments not quite pulling it off (although coming fairly close). Flav's re-working of the Last Poets "Godd Complexx" strikes an unconvincing balance between the serious and comical, and "Aintnuttin Buttersong"s beats and Hendrix and child samples don't seem to hang together quite as they should.
In addition, the album should have finished on the collosal hard funk guitar and layered-to-fuck samples of "Hitler Day" (in which P.E. question the sense in celebrating Columbus) but instead plays out on the minimalist plod of "Living in a Zoo".
But while they can produce something like "Live and Undrugged" where Chuck's rhyme builds to a frenzied climax, with him only *just* holding onto the flow, you have to admit that P.E. are still a powerful force to be reckoned with.
