Public Enemy
What You Gonna Do When The Grid Goes Down?
Def Jam
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Yes, 2020 has been—and continues to be—a colossal clusterfuck. But at least we’ve gotten two Public Enemy albums this year. Sort of.

For those of you beaten into submission by the mind-numbing onslaught of dreck unleashed this calendar year, you may have understandably forgotten that Public Enemy had time to break up, get back together, and release an offshoot side project earlier this year. The less said about the “break-up” the better, since it may or may not have been a hoax. But Loud Is Not Enough, a project by Carlton “Chuck D” Ridenhour, Jahi, and DJ Lord Aswod, deserved your attention.

Now, less than six months later, they’ve brought William “Flavor Flav” Drayton back into the fold and released What You Gonna Do When the Grid Goes Down?, which could be considered the group’s fifteenth studio album. But it’s a bit complicated.

What You Gonna Do isn’t so much a new album as it is a reimagining/reworking of their previous release Nothing Is Quick In The Desert (2017). The crew took some of the best songs and interludes from Nothing Is Quick, slightly remixed and/or shortened some of these tracks, added some new material, and reissued it through Def Jam (though I have no idea what record labels even mean anymore in the Age of Streaming). The two albums even share similar cover artwork.

What You Gonna Do is a better version of Nothing Is Quick. There’s more thematic clarity throughout the album. And although What You Gonna Do is the slightly longer album with more skits/interludes, it still feels leaner. I’d say neither album is as good as Loud Is Not Enough, but there’s a sense of purpose here that’s been absent on a lot of the ’00s/’10s Public Enemy releases. The beats on What You Gonna Do aren’t quite as raw as I’d like, but they play to the group’s rock sensibilities that’s been a part of their sound since the beginning.

The underlying message of What You Gonna Do is the honoring of the past and the rejection of the idea that rappers and crews that made their name during the ’80s and ’90s are somehow irrelevant. Chuck D is now 60 (?!?!?!?) years old, and he is still capable of understanding and conveying the issues that confront the United States and the Black community now, nearly 35 years into his recording career.

The album is extremely reverential to the group’s past and hip-hop as Public Enemy knew it in their heyday. As Chuck D says on “Yesterday Man” (which also appeared on Nothing is Quick), “Yesterday being everything I ever said / Echo of the past coming out of my head / Saying new is better, so that new gets sold / They don’t want any better; they want different from old.”

Public Enemy also enlist a whole slew of collaborators throughout the album. Many of these are artists from their own era and before, ready to establish that they’ve got something left in their creative tanks (some are more successful than others). Others are from the rap generation directly after Public Enemy’s inception, who listened to the group during their formative years. And still some others have careers that started in the 2010s and are currently flourishing.

The album starts off with “GRID,” a team-up with funkateer George Clinton and Cypress Hill’s B-Real, Chuck D’s cohort in the Prophets of Rage supergroup. Chuck and Flav imagine a world that’s returned to analog status, absent of the Internet, social media, and even GPS, while they ponder if the world’s population is equipped to deal with social interaction outside of the omnipresent technology that we all now take for granted. “Folks might need to pick up a book, pick up a pen,” Chuck raps, while Flav adds, “Hey! Back to basics again.” The pair easily fall back into the rhythms they spent decades putting together. The song ends with the first overt instance of the group invoking their storied past, as Chuck delivers the final verse from “Miuzi Weighs a Ton,” one of the best songs in PE’s catalogue.

The album’s first single “State Of The Union (STFU)” also serves as its peak. It should surprise no one that production icon DJ Premier created an excellent track for Chuck and Flav to rap to, putting together something that’s unique in character, but still evokes the crew’s classic sound. Chuck and Flav use the track to dig into the current buffoon in office, showing no respect for the 45th president of these United States. “Sounds like Berlin burning, same thing,” Chuck D thunders. “History’s a mystery if y’all ain’t learning / End this clown show for real, estate bozo / Nazi cult 45, Gestapo.”

“Public Enemy Number Won” is the album’s most ambitious undertaking. It’s a posse cut that attempts to reunite the artists from Def Jam/Rush Management’s mid-to-late ’80s era, including contributions from the surviving members of Run-DMC and the Beastie Boys. It serves as the first appearance on record by Ad-Rock and Mike D of the Beastie Boys since the death of Adam Yauch (a.k.a. MCA). It also seems like they originally planned to include LL Cool J on the track (he gets shouted out multiple times) but couldn’t make it happen.

The track is more of a feel-good love letter to a bygone era than an actual tour de force, but I can appreciate the effort. As an update to Public Enemy’s first hit, “Public Enemy #1,” most of the emcees rhyme over the same sample flip of The J.B.s’ “Blow Your Head” opening organ solo. Flavor Flav starts by kicking Chuck D’s opening verse from the original version, followed by Run and DMC’s decent, though occasionally labored, contributions. Mike D and Ad-Rock mostly appear as comic relief, providing the track’s intro, and delivering a “Paul Revere”-influenced interlude honoring their fellow pioneers. Chuck D delivers the “O.G. circuit sound” while also pulling liberally from the final verse of the o.g. recording. The track ends with a one-minute turntable display by DJ Lord, who provides furious scratches over the drum-track from the J.B.’s sample source.

The posse cut “Fight The Power: Remix 2020” conveys the timelessness of Public Enemy’s message and views, as more than three decades later, the song and phrase still resonate. Chuck D enlists a whole slew of emcees influenced by PE’s words and music, including such heavyweights as Nas, Black Thought, Rapsody, YG, and the aforementioned Jahi. All deliver solid verses, touching on recent spates of police brutality and the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor.

A large portion of the album’s second half is material originally released on Nothing Is Quick, often in the same order as it appeared on the first album. Tracks like “Toxic” and “Go At It” (originally titled “So Be It”) stand out, as well as “Smash the Crowd.” The latter features a brief but righteously angry verse from Ice-T, who raps, “I’m not happy with this soft hippy cotton candy / Bang the crowd hard or get the fuck out my yard.”

What You Gonna Do ends with “R.I.P. Blackat,” a Flavor Flav solo cut where he pays tribute to Clyde Bazile Jr., a Houston-based graphic designer who died earlier this year due to heart failure. Flav has been known for his boisterous antics for much of his career, but here he strikes the appropriately somber and heartfelt note, describing how Bazile essentially saved his life when he was at his lowest point.

I certainly share the sentiments that Public Enemy and company express through What You Gonna Do When The Grid Goes Down?, in that I thoroughly dislike the idea that what’s “old” in hip-hop is no longer relevant and needs to be discarded. Though the execution isn’t always perfect, I thoroughly respect Public Enemy’s commitment to their storied past, and their efforts to remind people of their importance in the tapestry of hip-hop culture. And it’s always heartening to hear Chuck D kick a little ass.

Notable Tracks: “Fight The Power: Remix 2020” | “Public Enemy Number Won” | “Smash The Crowd” | “State Of The Union (STFU)”

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