I gave myself an edit window via settings to move this down to 2 so I could give public enemy a 3
great songwriting, great voice, great work by the band. hard to say too much more really, it's just really good.
This being given to us two days after Licensed to Ill is 80s hiphop hydrogen bomb vs coughing baby, for me.
It's really cool listening to like, how exciting the genre must've been to be part of at the time, having evolved so much already with space for so many kinds of creativity at work.
I was thinking it was dragging a bit by the late-middle but Me Myself and I brought me back.
Later now, listening again to Me Myself and I, and watching the video for it, and I can't help but smile.
911 is a Joke has me torn between liking the message and having to listen to Flav's flow. But getting back to chuck right after makes it easy enough to forget at least.
Getting that brief bit of 1990 AIDS homophobia made me double-take lol.
I respect this a lot as an answer to the cultural response they were getting. I know already there is Public Enemy material I enjoy more though.
You know what immediately strikes me, sitting down and listening to a full funk album for the first time in my life, is like... how to put this. From my british perspective, it immediately strikes me how my exposure to funk through Pop Culture has been very selective in terms of what got heard, you know what I mean? What I mean to say is that, what funk was 'big' enough to be known in The Monoculture over here was conspicuously less political. But the moment I listen to an influential album, I'm hit in the face with how overtly political it is. And I love that about it, to be clear. It's something where like, if you had asked me if funk music is often political or not, I would've said yes of course it is, because rationally I could've intuited that it was so. 'Intellectually', I knew it was true. But it was still a pleasant shock to hear it so immediately and consistently through this album, when the only funk I heard with any frequency at all in my life to date was what the powers of British popular culture from the time deemed safe and inoffensive enough to expose me to.
A shorter album after the loooong sessions the last couple were is a nice break lol.
Not a ton to say except that I like it. I'm bad at articulating specifics about music I like. Metal Mickey probably my fave.
Vocals are *so* accented in some parts that it almost feels like they're taking the piss, but I might be kind of impossible to please.
This feels every bit like the compilation album it is, rather than a coherent piece of work. Their sound is bland as fuck in the poppier parts of the album. In the tracks where they're closer to the punk part of their roots, it at least feels like they've got *some* kind of character to them, which just about whisks it out of the 1 star doldrums for me. As far as I'm concerned, it really just doesn't hang with the calibre of album we've mostly had until now, nor is it on a meaningful level of cultural relevance in the way that saved Licensed to Ill in terms of my respect.
