Public Enemy’s ‘Fear of a Black Planet’ Turns 35 This Year!
From time to time, I will be doing a series of throwback CD reviews of CDs I find relevant and think need to be recovered and kept alive, as well as introduced to a whole new audience that may be too young to remember. Here is the latest in my series of throwback CD reviews. Enjoy… The first one is Public Enemy’s “Fear Of A Black Planet,” released in March 1990 on Def Jam Recordings.
PE’s third album is dense, heavy, and as urgent as a bullet, birthed in the aftermath of Reaganomics. “Fear of a Black Planet” single-handedly added half a dozen phrases to the language, and not just from Chuck D’s troop-rallying bellow and Master Of The Universe voice, but Flavor Flav shines on “911 Is a Joke” which is as catchy an indictment of urban policy as anyone has ever come up with.
In essence, along with KRSONE, P.E provided dynamic, socially relevant Hip-Hop that transcended cliche and hype. This album’s concepts remain innovative and classic today. The production has stood the test of time as well as any other album from that era.
Even after several decades, “Fight the Power” remains one of the most well-known and cherished songs in hip-hop history, and the group itself is as closely associated with politically oriented hip-hop as it is with the genre. It’s a prime example of the group’s promotion of opposition to established power structures and disdain for all-American icons like John Wayne and Elvis Presley. A final exclamation point marking the end of a turbulent period for the group, it would appear as the last song on Fear of a Black Planet.
A few years before the policy banning the chokehold in NYC, Radio Raheem is a character in Spike Lee’s written, directed, and produced 1989 film, Do the Right Thing, portrayed by the late Bill Nunn, who was killed after a white NYPD officer choked him to death.
Even though Radio Raheem was a fictional boombox-toting neighborhood philosopher known for blasting Fight The Power by Public Enemy, after he was choked to death by the police, we all felt it as if he was real. After Eric Garner’s death twenty-five years later, we all relived the death of the beloved Spike Lee character. In the movie, Radio Raheem’s death triggered a riot where the neighborhood pizzeria that refused to put pictures of black people on the walls was burned to the ground.
Thirty-five years later, Fear of a Black Planet still has the same impact. The album’s first official single, “Welcome to the Terrordome,” is as “angry” a hip-hop song as any recorded in the 1990s and later. Like the previously mentioned “Fight the Power,” the song is essential to the group’s legacy.
Chuck D uses the song “Terrordome” to express his annoyance with the news media and to focus on the scandal that engulfed the group in the second half of 1989. Since the group’s founding, Public Enemy has had a, let’s say, tense relationship with the media, and Chuck lashes out at them throughout all four verses of the song. In many respects, he is right when he says that the song was meant to mark the beginning of what the 1990s would bring for Public Enemy and rap music.
The Bomb Squad’s music is complicated, challenging, terse, and totally funky, and Chuck matches it with one impassioned pronouncement after another: on Hollywood’s racism, on miscegenation, on “real history / Not his story.”
It is also, without a doubt, the best musical moment of the Bomb Squad. In contrast to Millions, which was all about aggressiveness—layered aggression, but aggression nonetheless—Fear of a Black Planet touches on harsh funk, dub reggae, unrelenting beats, and sensual grooves without missing a beat.
The team, comprised of Hank and Keith Shocklee, Eric “Vietnam” Sadler, and “Carl Ryder” (Chuck D’s production nom-de-plume), takes their “wall of sound” production styles and cranks them up to the maximum, generating a belligerent and harsh aural assault. It’s even more openly hostile to traditional forms of hip-hop production than Public Enemy’s previous two releases.
“Fear…” is one of the best rap albums ever made, and at a time when sampling was affordable. It allowed Terminator X and the Bomb Squad to produce the most radical apocalyptic hip-hop assault on the ears. “Brothers Gonna Work it Out” swirls with immediacy, as does “Power to the People” and “War at 33 1/3.”
This album is so much more chaotic and dense “It Takes a Nation of Millions.” The beats are huge, and Chuck D is full of fury. The album ends with “Fight the Power,” the ultimate statement of purpose, from its pounding, atonal sound collage to its furious politics. Put “Fear..” on, and it’s always a long, hot summer. When hip-hop needed credence and a cornerstone for a new decade, “Fear…” provided just that, and P.E delivered the funk. This controversial release, in my opinion, is perhaps P.E.’s greatest hour.
In 2025, the Rhyme Animal Chuck D’s words are still relevant as White Fear of The Browning of American is shaping our democracy and society, it’s more intense and visible than ever. If we even needed a voice like Chuck D in Hip-Hop, it is now!
to “ Wow!! Where did the time go!! I was one of the first to play this album!! It’s relevant more now than before because the majority of the people on the planet are black!! Making it a true Black Planet!! ” 
to “ Wow!! Where did the time go!! I was one of the first to play this album!! It’s relevant more now than before because the majority of the people on the planet are black!! Making it a true Black Planet!! ”