No matter what your race, religion, or stance on the social acceptability of viking helmets, if you’ve ever wanted to haul off and just tell the establishment to go shove it, Chuck D, Flava Flav (and their badass production team, the Bomb Squad) were there for you. In fact, heck, they were there to do it for you. Starting with their 1987 debut Yo! Bum Rush the Show and culminating with 1998’s He Got Game, these guys spent over a decade, six studio albums for Def Jam, and a lot of crazy clock necklaces dedicating themselves to the task of raging/partying against the machine on your behalf.
Now, an incredible 25 years since they first crashed onto the scene and pretty much defined hardcore hip-hop, Island/Def Jam is celebrating the group’s gritty, take-it-to-the-streets mentality by releasing their entire catalog “on 180-gram heavyweight vinyl, in a limited edition box set” that you can probably, possibly, maybe-kinda afford. Fight the power!
Either way, though, all the jams are here (“Public Enemy No. 1,” “Bring the Noise,” “Fight the Power,” “Welcome to the Terrordome,” “911 Is a Joke,” etc.) on a total of nine heavy-ass 12-inch vinyl records, presumably enclosed in some sort of appropriately-violent looking box. The whole shebang includes Yo! Bum Rush the Show (1987), It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (1988), Fear of a Black Planet (1990), Apocalypse 91… The Enemy Strikes Black (1991), Muse Sick-N-Hour Mess Age (1994) and He Got Game (1998); and will be released on April 15. Pre-order info seems scant at the moment, but TMT is a pretty big deal, so we probably just got the press release ahead of anyone else in the music biz. In the meantime, I suggest we all prepare by adding the word “terrordome” to the dictionaries of all the electronic devices we use.
Public Enemy 25th Anniversary Vinyl Collection:
01. Yo! Bum Rush the Show (1987)
02. It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (1988)
03. Fear of a Black Planet (1990)
04. Apocalypse 91… The Enemy Strikes Black (1991)
05. Muse Sick-N-Hour Mess Age (1994)
06. He Got Game (1998)
• Public Enemy: http://www.myspace.com/publicenemyofficial
• Island/Def Jam: http://www.islanddefjam.com