Fear of a Black Planet is the third studio album by American hip hop group Public Enemy. It was released on April 10, 1990, by Def Jam Recordings and Columbia Records, and produced by the group's production team The Bomb Squad, who expanded on the sample-layered sound of Public Enemy's previous album, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (1988). Having fulfilled their initial creative ambitions with that album, the group aspired to create what lead rapper Chuck D called "a deep, complex album". Their songwriting was partly inspired by the controversy surrounding member Professor Griff's antisemitic public comments and his consequent dismissal from the group, amidst the mainstream success of their radically political single "Fight the Power" (1989).
Reflecting its confrontational tone, Fear of a Black Planet features elaborate sound collages that incorporate varying rhythms, numerous samples, media sound bites, and eccentric loops. Recorded during the golden age of hip hop, its assemblage of reconfigured and recontextualized aural sources took advantage of creative freedom that existed before the emergence of a sample clearance system in the music industry. Thematically, Fear of a Black Planet explores organization and empowerment within the black community, social issues affecting African Americans, and race relations at the time. Its critiques of institutional racism, white supremacy, and the power elite were partly inspired by Dr. Frances Cress Welsing's views on color.
A commercial and critical hit, Fear of a Black Planet sold two million copies in the United States and received rave reviews from critics, many of whom named it one of the year's best albums. Its success contributed significantly to the popularity of Afrocentric and political subject matter in hip hop and the genre's mainstream emergence at the time. Since then, it has been viewed as one of hip hop's greatest and most important records, as well as being musically and culturally significant. In 2004, the Library of Congress added it to the National Recording Registry. In 2020, Fear of a Black Planet was ranked number 176 on Rolling Stones list of the 500 greatest albums of all time.
Background In 1988, Public Enemy released their second album It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back to critical and commercial success. Their music's dense textures, provided by the group's production team The Bomb Squad, exemplified a new production aesthetic in hip hop.. The controversial, politically charged lyrics by the group's lead rapper Chuck D, whose braggadocio raps contained references to political figures such as Assata Shakur and Nelson Mandela, as well as endorsements of Nation of Islam-leader Louis Farrakhan, intensified the group's affiliation with black nationalism and Farrakhan.
It Takes a Nations success helped raise hip hop's profile as both art and sociopolitical statement, amid media criticism of the genre.. It helped give hip hop a critical credibility and standing in the popular music community after it had been largely dismissed as a fad since its introduction at the turn of the 1980s. In promoting the record, Public Enemy expanded their live shows and performing dynamic. With the album's content and the group's rage-filled showmanship in concert, they became the vanguard of a movement in hip hop that reflected a new black consciousness and socio-political dynamic that were taking shape in America at the time..
In May 1989, Chuck D, Bomb Squad producer Hank Shocklee, and Def Jam executive Bill Stephney were negotiating with several labels for a production deal from a major record company, their goal since starting Public Enemy in the early 1980s. As they were in negotiations, group member Professor Griff made antisemitic remarks in an interview with The Washington Times, in which he said that Jews were the cause of "the majority of the wickedness" in the world. Public Enemy received media scrutiny and criticism from religious organizations and liberal rock critics, which added to charges against the group's politics being racist, homophobic, and misogynistic..
Amid the controversy, Chuck D was given an ultimatum by Shocklee and Stephney to dismiss Griff from the group or the production deal would fall through. He fired Griff in June, but he later rejoined and has since denied holding antisemitic views and apologized for the remarks. Several people who had worked with Public Enemy expressed concern about Chuck D's leadership abilities and role as a social spokesman. Def Jam director of publicity Bill Adler later said that the controversy "partly... fueled the writing of [the album]".
To follow up It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, the group sought to make a more thematically focused work and to condense Dr. Frances Cress Welsing's theory of "Color Confrontation and Racism (White Supremacy)" into an album-length recording. According to Chuck D, this involved "telling people, well, color's an issue created and concocted to take advantage of people of various characteristics with the benefit of a few". He recalled their concept for the album in an interview with Billboard: "We wanted really to go with a deep, complex album... more conducive to the high and lows of great stage-performance." Chuck D also cited the commercial circumstances for hip hop at the time, having quickly transitioned from a singles to an album medium in the music industry during the 1980s. In an interview for Westword, he later said, "We understood the magnitude of what an album was, so we set out to make something that not only epitomized the standard of an album, but would stand the test of time by being diverse with sounds and textures, and also being able to home in on the aspect of peaks and valleys".
Recording and production
Fear of a Black Planet was recorded at three studios—Greene St. Recording in New York City, The Music Palace in West Hempstead, and Spectrum City Studios in Hempstead—from June to October 1989. It was produced by The Bomb Squad—Chuck D, Eric "Vietnam" Sadler, Keith Shocklee, and his brother Hank Shocklee—while Chuck D called Hank, their director, "the Phil Spector of hip-hop". Keith, significant in composing the main tracks and music,. received here his first official credit as a team member.. For the album, they sought to expand on the dense, sample-layered "wall of noise" of Public Enemy's prior album, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back.
Employing an elaborate method, the Bomb Squad reconfigured and recontextualized disparate sound fragments, while expanding their repertoire of samples to radio and other sources. According to Shocklee, "When you're talking about the kind of sampling that Public Enemy did, we had to comb through thousands of records to come up with maybe five good pieces. And as we started putting together those pieces, the sound got a lot more dense." Hank Shocklee called it "a production assembly line where each person had their own particular specialty ... [Shocklee] came from a DJ's perspective. Eric [Sadler] is coming from a musician's perspective." Sadler's approach was more traditional and structured, while Shocklee's was more experimental. As the main lyricist, Chuck D wanted to recontextualize the sampled material into his lyrics and create a theme.
The Bomb Squad used devices including the E-mu SP-1200 drum machine and sampler, the Akai S900 sampler, and a Macintosh computer.. Chuck D remarked that "95 percent of the time it sounded like mess. But there was 5 percent of magic that would happen." Shocklee compared their production to filmmaking, "with different lighting effects, or film speeds, or whatever", while Chuck D analogized to an artist creating green from yellow and blue. As he had the production team improvise beats, much of the album was composed on the spot. In a 1990 interview, Chuck added, "We approach every record like it was a painting. Sometimes, on the sound sheet, we have to have a separate sheet just to list the samples for each track. We used about 150, maybe 200 samples on Fear of a Black Planet."
To synchronize the samples, the Bomb Squad used SMPTE timecodes and arranged and overdubbed parts of backing tracks, which had been inspected by the members for snare, bass, and hi-hat sounds. Chuck D said, "Our music is all about samples in the right area, layers that pile on each other. We put loops on top of loops on top of loops, but then in the mix we cut things away." Their production was innovative, according to journalist Jeff Chang. "They're figuring out how to jam with the samples and to create these layers of sound," Chang said. "I don't think it's been matched since then." After the tracks were completed, the Bomb Squad began sequencing what was at first a seemingly discontinuous album, amid internal disputes. Final mixing took place at Greene St. Recording and lasted until February 1990. According to Sadler, "a lot of people were like, 'Wow, it's a brilliant album'. But it really shoulda been much better. If we had more time and we didn't have to deal with the situation of nobody talking".
Fear of a Black Planet was conceived during the golden age of hip hop, a period roughly between 1987 and 1992 when artists took advantage of emerging sampling technology before record labels and lawyers took notice. Accordingly, Public Enemy were not compelled to obtain sample clearance for the album. This preceded the legal limits and clearance costs later placed on sampling, which limited hip hop production and the complexity of its musical arrangements. In an interview with Stay Free!, Chuck D said: "Public Enemy's music was affected more than anybody's because we were taking thousands of sounds. If you separated the sounds, they wouldn't have been anything--they were unrecognizable. The sounds were all collaged together to make a sonic wall." An analysis by law professors Peter DiCola and Kembrew McLeod estimated that under the sample clearance system that developed after the album's release, Public Enemy were to lose at least five dollars per copy if they were to clear the album's samples at 2010 rates, a loss of five million dollars on a platinum record.
For the track "Burn Hollywood Burn", Chuck D dealt with clearance issues from different record labels to collaborate with rappers Big Daddy Kane and Ice Cube, who had been pursuing the Bomb Squad to produce his debut album. The recording marked one of the first times in which MCs from different rap crews collaborated, and it led to the Bomb Squad working with Ice Cube on his 1990 debut album AmeriKKKa's Most Wanted..
For the album's artwork, Public Enemy enlisted B.E. Johnson, a NASA illustrator. His design illustrated Chuck D's concept of two planets, the "Black" planet and Earth, eclipsing. Cey Adams, creative director for Def Jam at the time, said: "It was so interesting to me that a black hip-hop act did an illustration for their album cover. At that time, black hip-hop artists, for the most part, had photos of themselves on their covers. But this was the first time someone took a chance to do something in the rock'n'roll vein".
Music