Documentary captures the most influential band of the past 40 years
Graeme Tuckett
I’m pretty sure that of all the streaming platforms and terrestrial channels I look at – my favourite is still good old YouTube. Beneath the layers of kittens and kids-doing-thedarnedest-things, some nights it looks as though someone has uploaded to YouTube every documentary, music video, news story and legally available TV episode of everything, ever, in human history.
So when I went looking for a decent film on Public Enemy – maybe the most important and groundbreaking hip-hop group ever and easily the most influential band of the past 40 years in any genre – I quickly turned up two documentaries. One of which – Welcome To The Terrordome: The Legacy of Public Enemy – is pretty great.
Public Enemy weren’t the first rap group to get noticed, but they were one of the first to marry the style to lyrical content that mattered. And then to break through into mainstream American consciousness in a way that changed that country and the music industry forever.
Like The Clash – who they name check often, Public Enemy were a little older than most of their contemporaries. Carlton Ridenhour (Chuck D) and William Drayton Jr (Flavor Flav) met at university. They were in their early 20s. The murders of Martin Luther King Jr, the Kennedy brothers, Medgar Evers and Malcolm X were events they remembered from their childhoods, and which were talked about in their homes.
The group’s early years moved fast. With Richard Griffin (Professor Griff) and Norman Rogers (Terminator X) onboard to complete the classic lineup, the band released a first album that made waves – even though a delayed release made Yo!
Bum Rush The Show sound already dated when it dropped into the creative cyclone of New York in the 1980s.
But their second album, It Takes a Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back, smashed the sales charts and brought Public Enemy’s conscious, informed and impassioned style of hip-hop, delivered over uniquely dense layers of sampling and percussion, into the homes and radio stations of people around the world.
Along with Grandmaster Flash, Run-DMC, Eric B and Rakim, Public Enemy and that album changed the musical and social landscape more radically than any group or record had in a decade or more.
Film-maker Robert Patton-Spruill captures those heady, revolutionary early days beautifully. But Welcome to the Terrordome doesn’t shy away from Griff’s anti-Semitic controversial outbursts, Flav’s criminal charges and descent into self-parody.
More than anything, the film communicates just how smug, self-satisfied and tone-deaf the mainstream music industry and press could be – and how every decade the industry needs to be smashed out of complacency and made into something relevant again. The 60s had Dylan, The Beatles, The Stones and co. The 70s had punk, funk and disco.
And the late 1980s had a golden age of politically charged, musically groundbreaking and angry-ashell hip-hop that might never be equalled.
Maybe, one day, Spike Lee will make the Public Enemy biopic he’s been talking about for years. Until then, Welcome to the Terrordome: The Legacy of Public Enemy is a blast. There’s also a one-hour BBC doco called Prophets of Rage. And they’re both free on YouTube. What a time to be alive.