Public Enemy’s sonic collage treated American history as raw material for militant retelling

Evidence

Abduction was what it felt like on first listening to Public Enemy. Like the post-punks, Public Enemy implicitly accepted the idea that a politics which came reassuringly dressed in established forms would be self-defeating. The medium was the message, and Public Enemy’s astonishing militant montage was remarkable for both its rabble-rousing sloganeering and its textural experimentalism. When the group’s music, produced by the Bomb Squad, looped fragments of funk and psychedelic soul into abstract noise, it was as if American history — now cut up into a science-fiction catastrophe, a permanent emergency — was made malleable and ripe for rapid-fire retelling from the perspective of a post-Panther black militancy. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1283

Categorization

• XREF: Links to Steve Goodman’s Sonic Warfare framework and to the Afrofuturism themes in this book’s broader corpus.