Coda.fm

Power to the People and the Beats: Public Enemy's Greatest Hits

by Public Enemy

• Buy it at Amazon.com

Public Enemy is not the kind of group that does compromise--either you own It Takes A Nation of Millions To Hold Us Back and its explosive follow-up Fear of a Black Planet in their entirety or you simply hate music. So use this all-too-brief primer merely as a map to find your way to the albums that actually shook the world, mixing blunt politics with hard-hitting beats and Chuck D's prophet-like zeal for affecting change. If nothing else, tracks like "Bring The Noise" and "Fight The Power" serve as timely reminders of how much power hip-hop can wield when not tripped up in name-calling and bitch-slapping (D famously dubbed the genre "CNN for black people"), while on "911 is a Joke" Flava Flav proves there's a fine-line between laughter and tears. --Aidin Vaziri