Public Enemy

Public Enemy was the sign that hip-hop had exploded like a grenade. A rap group as abrasive, hardcore, and eloquent as a JFK speech, their music was one classic track after another: tense, multilayered, harmonically wild music. Chuck D declaims like a master preacher with foil Flavor Flav's voice darting around his. They've got the desperate energy of people fighting for their lives, and everything from their pumped-up rhetoric to the group's quasi-paramilitary organization to the sirens and sax squeals in nearly every track declares how urgent their mission is.