Public+Enemy+-+Fear+of+a+Black+Planet

Editorial Reviews

 * Amazon.com essential recording**

PE's third album is dense, heavy, and urgent as a bullet. //Fear of a Black Planet// single-handedly added half a dozen phrases to the language, and not just from Chuck D.'s troop-rallying bellow--Flavor Flav's "911 Is a Joke" is as catchy an indictment of urban policy as anyone has ever come up with.

The Bomb Squad's music is complicated, challenging, terse, and totally funky, and Chuck matches it with one impassioned pronouncement after another: on Hollywood's racism, on miscegenation, on "real history / Not his story."

The album ends with "Fight the Power," the group's ultimate statement of purpose, from its pounding, atonal sound collage to its furious politics. Put //Black Planet// on, and it's always a long, hot summer. //--Douglas Wolk//

[|Fight the Power Video Clip]

[|Burn Hollywood Burn Vdeo Clip]