Public Enemy

Public Enemy formed on Long Island from a radio collective around Chuck D (Carlton Ridenhour), whose deep baritone and lawyer-brief construction of rhymes were unlike anything in hip-hop before them. The group’s structure was itself a statement: Chuck D as the prosecution, Flavor Flav as the court jester who both complicated and amplified the message, the S1W (Security of the First World) as uniformed backup, and Professor Griff as Minister of Information. Behind them, the Bomb Squad — Hank Shocklee and Eric “Vietnam” Sadler — assembled productions from hundreds of samples layered simultaneously, creating a wall of noise that demanded matching intensity from the listener.

It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (1988) is the genre’s greatest album: a 58-minute assault on white supremacy, media manipulation and the drug crisis in Black communities, delivered at a speed and density that made the Beastie Boys’ prior work sound like pop. “Fight the Power” (1989), written for Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, named Elvis and John Wayne as “straight-up racists” and became the film’s central anthem.

Public Enemy opened hip-hop to the full weight of Black radical thought — the Black Power movement, the Nation of Islam, the legacy of Malcolm X — and made the music politically engaged in a way it had never been before, pointing toward the explicit politics of Kendrick Lamar and beyond.