Public Enemy; Power To The People and The Beats: Public Enemy's Greatest Hits (Def Jam/Universal).

GIVEN THE WAY GREATEST HITS COMPILATIONS are often thrown together by any label with money to license music rights from an artist's parent company, a collection featuring the work of a group as influential and controversial as Public Enemy would be rightly viewed with suspicion. Still, Universal (Def Jam Recordings's current distributor) has managed to release a not-quite-as-expansive-as-deserved, but competent snapshot of a group that for better or worse became the sonic template and barometer of verity for just about every major hip-hop label.

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Pompous and majestic as Marcus Garvey on parade in full dress regalia, yet down-to-earth as a Black Panther teach-in, Public Enemy managed to strike a necessary balance between the serious and the silly. Lead rapper Chuck D's crisp baritone and complicated internal rhyme schemes ("Never badder than bad/cause the brother is mad at the fact/that his brother's corrupt like a senator" on "Bring The Noise" comes to mind) worked only when alternately reigned in and encouraged by Flavor Flav's homeboy histrionics--reminding the listener that despite the riot going on, it was still, in the end, a party record.

The wavering between those extremes informs not only the sonic architecture of the songs featured on Power To The People, but the lyrical intent, as well. (The Bomb Squad's innovative, pre-digital sampling techniques are to this day the gold standard of hip-hop production.) Veering from incisive, anger-flecked cultural critique of capitalism and Global White Supremacy ("Public Enemy No. 1" and the scathing, breathless "Prophets Of Rage") to cleverly worded, anti-Semitic backhands (the infamous "Welcome To The Terrordome," "Can't Truss It") and homophobia (Chicago attorney Thomas "TNT" Todd's intro clip on "Fight The Power") Public Enemy's poetics ran the gamut from laser-sharp analysis to cringe-worthy parroted rhetoric.

Though their outsider missives became less popular with the commercial (and often more class-resonant) rise of gangsta, Public Enemy has remained the touchstone in dialogues regarding the possibilities and ultimate viability of "revolutionary" rhetoric as mediated by corporate media machinery.

By the album's closer (the title song from the 1998 Spike Lee film, He Got Game--complete with The Buffalo Springfield's Steven Stills warbling meta-ironically over a loop of their 1967 hit "For What It's Worth"), Public Enemy's legacy is less cemented than illuminated for examination of their continuing relevance. Former P.E. publicist and Beastie Boys member Adam Yauch's liner notes seem way too short. Still, former P.E. publicist Harry Allen's closing assertion that "The matrix is deeper, more diabolical, more pernicious, more invisible" speaks volumes about the political, cultural and creative void in pop music--let alone hip-hop--that Public Enemy valiantly, if imperfectly, attempted to address across the arc of their career.

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