Most people today when they hear the name Flavor Flav they think of a modern day minstrel show who dated Brigitte Nielsen, renamed a bunch of hood rats and embarrassed their mothers on cable television, and will soon be the latest roastee (not to be confused with the drunken Toasteee) in Comedy Central’s Roast of Flavor Flav, which hasn’t been all that funny in recent years. As hard is it to do so, I still try to remember Flav as the greatest hype man ever for the seminal rap group Public Enemy who album, Fear of a Black Planet, is this month’s induction into the Scooter Hall of Fame.
Public Enemy had a lot to live up to back at the beginning of the nineties. Their previous album, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back netted five million in sales, big numbers for a rap group back then. And the previous summer, Fight the Power, which is quite possibly the greatest rap song ever recorded, showed up on the Do the Right Thing Soundtrack (and also shows up as the last track on Fear of a Black Planet). Even though Flav told us not to believe the hype, this album definitely lived up to it.
Even though he is mostly known for getting the party started on stage, Flavor Flav showed on the album that he can indeed rap as 911 Is a Joke remains as one of the group’s best and Can’t Do Nottin’ for Ya Man isn’t that bad either. But it still remains the Chuck D show. And he had plenty in his crosshair on this album including the movie industry (Burn Hollywood Burn), the IRS (Who Stole the Soul?), people against inter-racial dating (the title track), the music industry (Leave this Off Your Fu*kin Charts) and most notable Elvis who, “never meant to be straight out racist) and of course in that same vain John Wayne.
Lost sometimes in the greatness of the rap group is the group responsible for producing the album, The Bomb Squad. They managed to mix multiple samples (something you will never see again thanks to new licensing laws) ranging from your typical funk grooves of James Brown to even the Beatles with the guitar solo from the end of Let’s Go Crazy thrown in for good measure and mashed them up into some of the best noise around, most of the time unable to make out the original sample unless you listen closely.
Fear of a Black Planet also earned the dubious title as being the first album ever that my parents banned me from listening to thanks to the “Parental Advisory” sticker on the cover. And since our lone CD player at the time was in the living room, it was easily enforced by them. Luckily there are friends out there with CD to tape converters and walkmans to get my PE fix during those years until finally getting a CD player of my own. But I wonder what my parents would say now that Fear of a Black Planet was chosen by the Library of Congress to be added to the National Recorded Registry.
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