Earlier this year, Public Enemy's classic 1990 album, Fear of a Black Planet, celebrated its 25th anniversary. Almost 25 years to the day after Chuck D's piercing shouts bookended Radio Raheem getting choked out by the police in front of onlookers in Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing, Eric Garner suffered the same fate. Since then, the police have killed Michael Brown, John Crawford III, Ezell Ford, Tamir Rice, Rekia Boyd, Walter Scott, Freddie Gray, and many, many more unarmed black men and women. Public Enemy's message is more relevant now than ever.
Almost on cue, the group is back from a three-year hiatus with its 13th studio album, Man Plans God Laughs, a timely release that repackages classic Public Enemy motifs for a renewed struggle. The group seems revitalized by the current movement and, as a longstanding, outspoken voice for civil rights, anxiously seeks to lend its support in the ongoing fight for black lives—there's even a passing mention of the #BlackLivesMatter campaign. Chuck D is refocused and often sharp, using his strained, but still booming chants to rally allies. When he shouts, "So, it's cool to be black until it's time to be black," on "Mine Again", a song about African pride, it's as much a call-to-action for African-Americans as it is reprimand of cultural appropriators. The two major points of emphasis remain mobilizing the black base and challenging anti-black tyranny. The message is delivered heavy-handedly, but that's always been the group's method; the main difference between Man Plans God Laughs and Public Enemy at its critical best is that the former isn't bracing or forceful in any impactful way. It lacks bite. There's no punch.
Public Enemy's tone has always been angry, confrontational, and conspiratorial, and there's no group in history better equipped to weaponize black nationalism against white supremacy, but here the battle waged is at least partially against a spiritual adversary. The title originates from an old Yiddish proverb—a weird bit of irony for a group that has frequently been accused of anti-Semitism—and the record is lined with similarly out-of-place religious subtext (on "Those Who Know Know Who", Chuck fires subliminal barbs at the devil; there's no sympathy for the same foe in the intro). Scriptural buzzwords like "evil" and "wicked" pop up unexpectedly as descriptors. There's no piety, merely a fixation with "the great Satan", who plays a puppet master figure in the periphery, and this only splits focus and limits the commentary's potency.
Chuck told Rolling Stone that this would be "the most intense Public Enemy record of the century," but 2007's How You Sell Soul to a Soulless People Who Sold Their Soul??? was much fiercer and more substantial. Man Plans God Laughs isn't intense; it's concise, and though it can't quite muster up the heavy strikes of other PE projects, it benefits from brevity. Many of the tracks barely clock-in at two minutes, which suits Chuck's fragmenting rap style, Flav's fading wail, and DJ Lord's compact scratching. Things click on all cylinders with the skipping "Lost in Space Music", where Chuck and Flav play up the emcee-hype man dynamic. When given space, like on "Corplantationopoly", the veteran can still be exhilaratingly bullish, rumbling through with weighty appraisals of race politics. But Chuck's voice isn't the same weapon it once was, Flav's ad-libs aren't as timely and his appearances are less waggish, and the shifting rap tide hasn't done the group's traditionalist sensibilities any favors. You can feel the difference.
Man Plans God Laughs is entirely produced by longtime Bomb Squad member G-Wiz—who also produced the majority of How You Sell Soul—and some of his beats slap, particularly "Praise the Loud", which is augmented by DJ Lord scratches. But many others blatantly pander to rap radio, and some are just busy for no reason ("Give Peace a Damn"). Where previous PE releases this century have often sounded dated, this one often sounds forcibly modern, the sonic equivalent of your tech-challenged granddad trying to use Spotify. At one point, Chuck utters the words 'Turnt up brand." "Earthizen" attempts to reimagine the tired alphabet rap concept, but sputters, adding a cringeworthy hook: "The earth without art is just, 'eh'." Even for all its faults, though, this record doesn't lack the distinct, aggressively pro-Black energy that originally made Public Enemy a voice for the oppressed masses. That's what has always been the most important thing at the music's core. The message is still there, the delivery is just less effective now.
