The 1990s in 10 Albums: Fear of a Black Planet (1990)
I’m all outta Dead Bands.
It began with a simple premise, one surely guaranteed to get ten posts on this blog: for each year of the 1990s, without repeating an artist, review one album, without repeating artists/bands. 10 different albums, 10 different bands, and hopefully something close to 10 different genres/subgenres and 10 different angles on this particular decade — one that, in 2017, is well within memory and only just nostalgia.
Unfortunately, the bauxite of this premise turned out to contain not the tough, strong aluminium of creative criticism, but the rusty iron of instant writer’s block. For iTunes knows all and sees all — at least musically — and delivered the news, stark and clear: I have no albums from 1990. None. And no more than two tracks from the same artist, either.
This meant I’d have to begin with something I’m less familiar with. Legend — or Wikipedia, at any rate — lists many albums from Major Acts. Mike Oldfield, a mere fifteen years after the height of his fame! The Travelling Wilburys! The KLF, who will never appear on Spotify! And enough compilations to build a ziggurat of jewel cases out of. Truly, an embarrassment of riches.
It’s no spoiler to say I went, in lieu of anything on my iPod, for Public Enemy’s Fear of a Black Planet. There is otherwise a relative dearth of hip-hop amongst these ten albums, so for the most part, this seemed fair; but also, the album seems to stand apart from 1990’s other output as a genuine-rated classic. I question this, just a little bit — but there’s no denying that Black Planet represents a brief and curious era in music history, arguably beginning with Public Enemy’s own It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back in June 1988, running through Paul’s Boutique (1989) and dying with the ruling of Grand Upright Music, Ltd v. Warner Bros. Records Inc. in December 1991. For better or worse, hip-hop, and music, wouldn’t ever sound like this again — not in the mainstream, at any rate. To drag around 200 royalty payments was too heavy a financial burden.
But for those 3.5 years, thanks to legal laxity and technological capability, it was possible to make an album sound this busy, and with good enough producers — and the Bomb Squad were more than good enough — provide force. At its toughest (and often best), Fear of a Black Planet isn’t so much music as shaped noise, and it’s unsurprising that proto-Fox News media was able to treat this with alarm, even without the lyrics.
The thing is, from “Contract on the World Love Jam” onwards, the band themselves do play up to this, over and over, which would be fine if the subsequent 27 years had backed up this claim of being the Most Dangerous Band Around. Sure, this is hindsight talking, but PE don’t play this angle ironically, nor do they ramp it up into operatic villainy. Instead, it sits in the dead zone of being played more-or-less seriously, and hence being pretty silly.
For the opening seven minutes or so, though, it works impeccably. “Brothers Gonna Work It Out” allegedly has a mere 12 samples on it, as opposed to the 12,000 it sounds like. It’s not a song of 1-dimensional anger, either — there’s a real positivity, to the point of being downright utopian (“cause one day…”).
It’s not that there are any bad tracks after this, but none of them hit with the same force. The busyness obscures whatever tempo range exists, and Chuck D is often equally angry about all kinds of issues — although he is angrier on the title track, another highlight.
Really, there aren’t any lowlights — at least, not in terms of whole tracks (there are lines regarding women and gay people that are, shall we say, not quite 2017). If I have any scepticism about this album being a classic, though, it’s mostly in terms of length — did this need to be twenty tracks long? I reckon there’s a better album here, forty minutes, nine tracks, and no short ones bar maybe “Contract…”: a straight column of musical tanks rolling forward, flattening all opposition. As it is, the album seems to feel a bit longer than the 63 minutes of its actual runtime.
As mentioned before, though, we’ll probably never hear a mainstream album like this again, and by the end of the following year, the possibility was dead. The 1990s would head in different directions — as the next nine entries will partially prove, there wasn’t just one.
