Bring The Noise. Public Enemy. 1988. Def Jam.

 Public Enemy’s incendiary manifesto is both polemic and cultural outlaw agitprop. Uneven, with a near meaningless fourth verse that begs for excision, Bring The Noise generates the kind of studio excitement that portends a major cultural shift. Tailoring a new aesthetic, Public Enemy dispenses altogether with the agrarian based folk blues and country that had flowed through rock and roll like a lymph since the time of Elvis and Chuck Berry. What remained for Public Enemy to work with was the power of rock and roll’s amplification, a force commensurate with the band’s creative potential. While other acts—The Who, Black Sabbath, Sex Pistols—prior to Public Enemy’s success had harnessed the thew of volume, they were simply acting well within the recognizable constraints of hard rock; those acts were the great disrupters of a commercial audience’s expectations and assumptions, elevating the form beyond recognized cultural borders. Public Enemy, however, assaulted a mass paradigm, causing lasting damage, and helped to mute rock and roll as the prevailing roar of popular culture, transforming it into hip hop. Lyrically, Chuck D covers a lot of territory, from the humorous to the inflammatory, and his lyrics do a lot of things—elucidate, amuse, enrage, lie—which clearly precludes the possibility that he’s a propagandist, for neither Louis Farrakhan nor Sonny Bono. He makes pop music; calling out Farrakhan by name Chuck D is no more embracing black nationalism than Patti Smith is urban terrorism when she sings beautifully, eloquently about Patty Hearst. That commonality—two major recording artists making salient references to living pop culture heroes—was more than coincidental; it was evidence that a shared cognizance drove the relationship between artist and listener involving reality and the world around us. Yet Public Enemy remained in a state of self declared opposition to rock and roll; the band was inducted into The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2013. “Now they got me in a cell cause my records they sell…Music that the critics are blasting me for, They’ll never care for the brothers and sisters…Roll with rock stars, still never get accepted as….” While the truth behind these claims is the lyricist merely  emphasizing his band’s outlaw aesthetic—“Rap is not afraid of you, beat is for Sonny Bono, beat is for Yoko Ono,” sings Chuck D, proving himself just one more of rock and roll’s many inclusionists—there’s no ignoring hip hop’s triumphant retransformation of the cultural roost once occupied by rock and roll. It’s still possible, without any difficulty, to turn on a radio and find new music by rock artists whose application of the mechanics of influence is in place with familiar humor, endearment, and vulgarity in all the right places. It’s out there, with all of its power and ritual intact, along with the gods of Ancient Greece and orgone energy, European Romani lycanthropy and deep space alien technology, medical data filed by needle exchange program professionals of Middle Earth and evidentiary specimens of the human soul, taken from the autopsied remains of both the crucified Christ and Elvis Aron Presley. They’re only waiting on our call.