white male consumer

Eighteen years after their debut album, Public Enemy has put out studio release number 10, entitled New Whirl Odor. This album finds all of the original members back together, sans Terminator X (DJ Lord once again taking over duties on that front), on Chuck’s new label Slam Jamz. The album sounds both similar and different from every previous Public Enemy release, something fans will tend to enjoy while others might not.

The new sound comes from different producers than those used in the past – Johnny Juice and Abnormal Dubose take over major duties, which results in a different sort of Public Enemy. But it’s still Public Enemy, through and through – meaning that it sounds a lot like an album that should have been released 20 years ago.

The biggest failing is the album’s monotony. There are big, fat thumping bass beats, turntable scratches, and synthesized snares, loops, and miscellaneous thumps – in every single track. (Compare “Bring That Beat Back” with “Makes You Blind.” The latter is perhaps a few BPM slower, otherwise they’re nearly identical tracks, with different hooks.) Each track sounds more and more like the last. If this is your thing, Public Enemy brings it in spades. Others might be checking to make sure that their track repeat wasn’t accidently switched on.

Rapping over the beats is Chuck D’s habitually angry, intense flow, blending stabs at current events with nonsense lines more suitable to t-shirts or bumper stickers than politically charged music. Chuck D jumps about any number of topics from line to line, ranging from terrorism and the president to “bio microchips in the arms of pimps” (“Yall Don’t Know”) and the failings of the music industry (“Preachin to the Quiet”). Flava Flav occasionally injects a line, and Professor Griff has his bits (including the track “As Long As The People Got Something To Say”). These Professor Griff moments are less than spectacular but provide some variety from Chuck D.

And included as always, are those quintessential Public Enemy moments – quotes from black leaders (this time around, Reverend Al Sharpton discussing rap in “…And No One Broadcast Louder Than… (Intro)”), an interlude with a radio call-in show discussing Public Enemy (“66.6 Strikes Again”), and as many references as possible to current events, people, and institutions that Chuck D can lyrically violate in 15 tracks.

New Whirl Odor is a lot like any other Public Enemy release in the past decade. It lacks the relevance and uniqueness of their first few albums, but at the same time sounds as if it were made at the same time – in the Eighties. It’s as if Public Enemy releases albums in a bubble, independent of present music trends. This has a certain appeal, yet it’d still be nice if they grew some. That said, this is probably the best album since Apocalypse ’91…The Enemy Strikes Black.

Public Enemy was one of the original politically conscious rap groups – not to mention the best and most controversial. Now they flirt with irrelevance, all of their tracks and lyrics sounding rehashed, as other rap groups do the political thing better (acts like Dead Prez and Common immediately spring to mind). Yet Public Enemy aficionados will likely enjoy the new album. The uninitiated might, provided they’re not looking for relevant political lyrics, and don’t mind beats pulled from a decade or two ago.