They wrest control from the music industry (“Leave This Off Your Fuckin Charts”), the movie industry (“Burn Hollywood Burn”), the police (“911 Is a Joke”) and give “Power to the People.” The cover artwork depicts a rival planet, terra incognita, looming threateningly close to the Earth, emblazoned with the Public Enemy logo. On the heels of the earth-shattering It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, the group symbolically summons their army of raging prophets for a planetary coup. To begin answering these questions, we must return to the outset of the decade and to Public Enemy’s 1990 release, Fear of a Black Planet. How did we get here? And 20 years later, what do we make of the proliferation of apocalyptic themes in ’90s hip-hop? Armageddon has been in effect, get a late pass. At the turn of the millennium, apocalyptic themes permeated hip-hop to a remarkable extent. Method Man has just released Tical 2000: Judgement Day, Busta Rhymes is recording Anarchy, the conclusion to a four-part series of albums that traffic in cataclysmic symbolism, and rap’s leading supervillain has ushered in Operation: Doomsday. It is dark, hell is hot and the year is 1999.
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