This week, we'll be running a series of essays from the next issue of our print quarterly, The Pitchfork Review, in which writers discuss political music that opened their eyes. Read them all here.
Fear of a Black Planetwas the first record I ever heard that seemed to contain far more information than I could possibly absorb. It was immediately obvious that Public Enemy leader Chuck D was trying to convey a hundred different things and that it would take the listener—or at least this listener—a long time to work out what they all were.
I was 16 and already interested in political music, but the other bands I liked felt safe and manageable. They were easy to co-sign because what they were saying made me feel like I was on the right side. At points on Fear of a Black Planet, I didn’t even know where the right side was.
My confusion was partly that the 1990 album assimilates, and implicitly rebukes, the voices of Public Enemy’s critics. Tracks like “911 Is a Joke” and “Burn Hollywood Burn” were self-contained and self-explanatory—they described the situations they were critiquing—but hearing “Contract on the World Live Jam” or “Incident at 66.6 FM” out of context felt like joining a TV series midway through season three, or hearing one side of an argument on the telephone. I knew that people were angry with Public Enemy, but who and why? I had no idea.
It was only later that I learned about the controversy that engulfed the group in the summer of 1989, after PE’s then-minister of information Professor Griff was quoted making anti-Semitic remarks. (The ensuing outrage caused the Def Jam act to disband temporarily, then re-form soon after, with Griff repositioned as “supreme allied chief of community relations.”) “Welcome to the Terrordome,” the album’s greatest and most complex track, was, I realized, an anxiously defiant communiqué from mediator Chuck D, a man who’d landed the task of defusing the media ruckus without jeopardizing band unity, and who had satisfied nobody—that he was saying, “Move as a team/Never move alone” at a moment when some members were barely communicating.
What I knew at the time, or what I could hear, was that Chuck was under immense pressure. On It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, Public Enemy’s previous LP that I picked up soon afterward, he sounded superhumanly strong and wise. But on “Terrordome,” he seemed backed into a corner, wildly swinging his fists at everyone who’d put him there. However hard he came at you, he had this tense, defensive quality. Not quite panic, but what precedes panic: a manic attempt to impose order on chaos. “Caught in the race against time, the pit and the pendulum.” The unprecedented density of the Bomb Squad’s organized bedlam added to the song’s apocalyptic fever. And right in the middle of it were those explosive lines about “the Rab” and “the so-called chosen.” Chuck always denied anti-Semitic intent, and his hot-tempered flailing was nothing like Griff’s chillingly calm conspiracy theories, but his words caused further uproar and could never quite be explained away.
Encountering Public Enemy as a teenager left me with a lasting conviction that protest music, when it’s really interesting, is a minefield. You can valorize anger and intellect but sometimes those qualities land artists in messes they can’t escape. I couldn’t disown PE and their peers even when they said things that were vexing—like the tossed-off homophobia of Black Planet’s “Meet the G That Killed Me,” or Ice Cube’s horrific “Black Korea”—because those lyrics weren’t aberrations. They came from the same place as their most fiercely righteous lines, which meant that you had to reckon with both if you wanted to understand either one. The history of political music—hell, any form of political engagement—tells us over and over that you can be radically progressive on one front and dismayingly reactionary on other; that your heroes can sometimes act like villains; that a sharp mind and a good heart have their limits.
That doesn’t mean you give a free pass to anybody, if at all. Read contemporaneous coverage of Public Enemy and Ice Cube and you’ll see conscientious critics wrestling hard with artists they find both magnificent and troubling. Call it hand-wringing if you like, but it’s of a different order to the kind of knee-jerk moralizing that reduces critics to schoolteachers, choosing between approval and disapproval. Now more than ever, I distrust criticism which advances the idea that art is improved if you remove the problematic parts, like excising the poisonous organs from a pufferfish. Fear of a Black Planet is so heavy, overwhelming, and revealing because it’s problematic—because the world it’s describing is problematic. Dropping “Black Korea” from Death Certificate would be no sacrifice, but you can’t cut out “Welcome to the Terrordome,”Fear of a Black Planet’s maddened heart: “I got so much trouble on my mind…. ”
In Philip Roth’s 1998 novel I Married a Communist, one character says that an artist’s job is “to impart the nuance, to elucidate the complication, to imply the contradiction. Not to erase the contradiction, not to deny the contradiction, but to see where, within the contradiction, lies the tormented human being. To allow for the chaos, to let it in. You must let it in.” Some artists do that consciously, but others reveal the contradiction despite themselves. Chuck’s intention in “Welcome to the Terrordome” is to draw a line under a controversy and get everyone off his back, but his frantic, overheated delivery, verging on stream-of-consciousness, betrays his confusion—and the palpable instability it creates is more compelling than his explicit agenda. Like the Sex Pistols’ “Bodies,” or the Manic Street Preachers’ “Of Walking Abortion,” or Sly and the Family Stone’s “There’s a Riot Goin’ On,” or a 1970s Nina Simone concert, the song leaves the listener no safe place to stand because the artist has no safe place to stand. To hear that instability from Chuck D, whose standard mode is ironclad certainty, is thrilling and unnerving. What if he’s as confused and fallible as anybody?
No matter how much I’ve learned about the circumstances surrounding Fear of a Black Planet since it first ambushed me in 1990, it still feels insoluble. It’s an hour-long argument with everybody; deciding whether or not to endorse or to excuse every detail is fruitless. You just have to plunge into the mess because the truth is in the mess—the truth that separates art from propaganda. Intentionally or otherwise, Fear of a Black Planet lets in the chaos.