Album of the Day: Public Enemy, “Yo! Bum Rush the Show”

Public Enemy
“Yo! Bum Rush the Show” (Cd Def Jam/Columbia CK 40658)

After yesterday’s more reflective break, we’re back in full steam with the debut album by Public Enemy, perhaps the most important group to appear on the hip-hop scene so far.
Thanks to their politically explicit and aggressive lyrics, a public image completely unconcerned with diplomacy and an initial trilogy of albums of astonishing quality (don’t miss the subsequent albums “It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back” and “Fear of a Black Planet”), the group managed to conquer a vast audience even beyond the black music market, arousing heated controversy in the USA for their radical positions in defense of the rights of African Americans.

“The government is responsible” is written on the cover of “Yo! Bum Rush the Show” and as soon as you start listening you understand that the members of the group mean business, denouncing excessive lifestyles based on gigantic cars and waste of money, social relationships with social climbers and drug dealers, lives always lived on the edge of danger, displays of obtuse machismo with weapons and machine guns used as symbols of power (listen to “My Uzi Weighs a Ton”).
Sometimes one suspects that the denunciation of all this is not free from a certain self-satisfaction, but the power of the message comes through loud and clear, especially thanks to the musical part that has the power of a kick in the stomach.

Producer Rick Rubin chooses very violent rhythms that hammer relentlessly throughout the album, adding arrangements with a minimal taste that intertwine synthesizers with a 70s flavour, urban noises, overlapping electronic drums and distorted electric guitars (entrusted to Vernon Reid, whose distorted solo in “Sophisticated Bitch” penetrates the brain). On this furious sonic terrain, the scratching of DJ Terminator X and the cutting voices of Chuck D and Flavor Flav, real vocal drummers who spit out their invectives against American hypocrisy through machine-gun fire of words that leave you stunned, integrate well.

Music that instantly photographs reality, hip-hop generally doesn’t age well but this album released twenty years ago
It retains its capacity for denunciation intact, because the problems it addresses are still the same today and nothing in the world has changed.

Carlo Boccadoro, composer and conductor, was born in Macerata in 1963. He lives and works in Milan. He collaborates with soloists and orchestras in different parts of the world. He is the author of numerous books on musical subjects.

This text is taken from “Lunario della musica: Un disco per ogni giorno dell’anno” published by Einaudi, courtesy of the author and the publisher.