Public Enemy released their debut album Yo! Bum Rush The Show February 10, 1987
Written by Mister Anderson on February 10, 2023
Yo! Bum Rush the Show is the debut studio album by American hip-hop group Public Enemy, released on February 10, 1987. It was recorded at Spectrum City Studios in Hempstead, New York, and became one of the fastest-selling hip-hop records, but was controversial among radio stations and critics, in part due to lead rapper Chuck D’s black nationalist politics. Despite this, the album has since been regarded as one of hip-hop’s greatest and most influential records.
Yo! Bum Rush the Show debuts The Bomb Squad’s sample-heavy production style, which is prominent in the group’s later work. Joe Brown of The Washington Post described the album’s music as “a more serious brand of inner-city aggression”, in comparison to Licensed to Ill (1986) by Def Jam label-mates the Beastie Boys. On its musical style, Brown wrote “Public Enemy’s mean and minimalist rap is marked by an absolute absence of melody – the scary sound is just a throbbing pulse, hard drums and a designed-to-irritate electronic whine, like a dentist’s drill or a persistent mosquito”. The album’s sound is accented by the scratching of DJ Terminator X. …[source: Wikipedia]
