nicksneddon …………Watched the Public Enemy one last night. Very good. Me and my mates were into rap before acid house, probably the same as a lot on this board. PE, Eric B, Big Daddy Kane……these were the first artists on mix tapes filtering through to the Essex suburbs when I was at school. Then gradually house/acid house started appearing on the mixes too.
This period of rap is now why I despise current rap/RnB. So happy it was called out on the documentary that any political messages were diluted in the early 90s resulting in the MTV friendly version of rap showing scantily clad women and low riders, with lyrics just banging on about how much money they have. The whole West Coast Dre scene. The pop version of rap. Loved hearing the old skools view of that !
Also interesting to compare the Public Enemy movement with current BLM. Sad that political rap petered out getting replaced by bling, therefore removing the message from public conciousness via this method. I learnt a lot from PE lyrics, trying to understand what happened in US history. I feel this was a real missed opportunity for things to move forward, wasting a couple of decades until the emergence of BLM in 2013