Public Enemy
Chuck D & Co make their way to the O2 Academy, and Getintothis’ Shaun Ponsonby is hyperventilating.
You saw that headline right.
Public Enemy – arguably the greatest group in the history of hip-hop – are making their way to Liverpool’s O2 Academy on December 2. Yeeeah, booooyyyyyy!
With their new album Man Plans God Laughs receiving acclaim across the board, Chuck D and co are making a rare appearance in the city, following a series of dates with The Prodigy.
Formed in Long Island, New York in 1982, Public Enemy are known for socio-political lyrics of Chuck D, the hilarious light relief of Flavor Flav, the militant attitude of Professor Griff and the S1W Group, along with the genuinely awe-inspiring, revolutionary and influential sampling of production team the Bomb Squad and DJ Terminator X, who left the group in 1998 to be replaced by DJ Lord.
Breaking through in hip-hop’s Golden Age, release delays of debut album Yo! Bum Rush The Show in 1987 meant that by the time it was released, the record appeared a little outdated. This was rectified with the following year’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, which was so far ahead of the game that nobody else could touch it. Perhaps they still haven’t.
The sampling on It Takes a Nation of Millions… isn’t even legal anymore. This wasn’t sampling a mere riff, this was making turntablists true virtuoso artists. Any given track on a Public Enemy record could include any number of samples, interwoven into a collage that created a sound of its own.
Take Welcome To The Terrordome from Fear of a Black Planet, for example. The known samples on that song alone are;
- AJ Scratch by Kurtis Blow
- Mother Universe by Soup Dragons
- Bon Bon Vie by S. Monk
- Seventh Heaven by Gwen Guthrie
- Operator’s Choice by Mikey Dread
- Jungle Boogie by Kool & the Gang
- Train Sequence by Geoffrey Sumner
- I Got My Mind Made Up by Instant Funk
- Hum Along and Dance by The Jackson 5
- Psychedelic Shack and Cloud Nine by The Temptations
- Cold Sweat, I Got to Move, Give It Up or Turnit a Loose, Soul Power, Get Up, and Get into It, Get Involved by James Brown
- Their own You’re Gonna Get Yours
Add this to Chuck’s preaching on top of it, and you have a powerful combination that has never, ever failed to pack its punch.
Let us be abundantly clear; this show will sell out.
Public Enemy play Liverpool’s O2 Academy on Wednesday December 2.
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