PE in no-so-full effect

Chuck D rules while Flav and 'Malibu’s Most Wanted' bite

I can’t even fathom that it’s been nearly 16 years since I last saw Public Enemy—when they played a show in Chicago at the voluminous Aragon Ballroom that ended in a mini riot**. PE is one of those bands that I have in this kind of elliptical orbit whereby I listen to them heavily for a while, then kind of move on for a long period of time, only to revisit them again with some listening density. Given that they’ve recently reemerged in my heavy rotation, I was stoked to see they were playing the Mezzanine last night, a newish (and awesome, intimate) venue in San Francisco.


Chuck (r) still has the shiver when he delivers. Not so much for Flavor Flav.

Now as back in the day, front man Chuck D—for my money, the all-time quintessential rap voice—delivers the biting cultural and social commentary with the same fire, strength and conviction that has always set the band apart and made them not only a means of entertainment, but a socially important catalyst as well.

Chuck’s voice is the same as it ever was—strong and authoritative—and he tore the house down early on with “Welcome to the Terrordome.”

Unfortunately, that early highlight was more or less the peak of the show. Somewhere on that track or the next one (which kind of melded into one) Chuck’s foil, Flavor Flav joined the stage and began laying down his court jester’s variety of vocalizations…the “boings” and “yeaaah booooyz” and the like. And while a perfect compliment when he’s used like a human sample machine, Flav just looses it when he tries to put a sentence together—which he did more and more of as the night wore on.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate the Flavor—despite him becoming an appallingly bad reality TV show cliché—I think he’s highly entertaining in small doses. But as the show progressed and eventually unvolved into Flav on the stage doing songs from his new solo album, things just started to suck. Like that Oprah magazine where she’s on the cover every month, Flav’s songs are the same way—repetitive ego overkill.

On the whole, however, the show was good—not great—but good. Professor Griff, the redheaded stepchild of the band—was on hand to lend his rhyming to the vocal mix and DJ Lord did a capable job of filling the very big shoes of the long-departed Terminator X, who left the group in 1998. I wasn’t so into the traditional guitar/bass/drums band—called The Banned—whom opened the show on their own and then played on the PE set. Part of what makes Public Enemy’s sound so amazing are the Bomb Squad’s beats and samples that came of age on Fear of a Black Planet and The Enemy Strikes Black. If these sounds were present at all, they were covered up by the heavy-handed band…whose 45 minutes of introductions I could have done without as well.

On the plus side, I have to give props (‘cause that’s what I do for a week or two after going to a hip hop show yo) to the crew that played just before PE, The X Clan. They were old school and dialed tight…and did a really great job of getting the place fired up.

In fact they almost made up for the rejects from Malibu’s Most Wanted who wedged in front of us just as the set began and made complete asses of themselves bouncing, fronting and jerking off for each other. I can’t remember the last time I wanted to hit someone so badly without being directly provoked. GRRR!

** At least that’s what it said in the newspapers the next day. I remember a bunch of people running around after the show, but it was in Uptown late at night and people a certain amount of anarchy was to be expected.