Their spiky-haired frontman founded the band 21 years ago, and it only took them a few years until their debut album All Killer No Filler put them on the map, touring around the world and appearing on countless TV sets over MTV specials. In a different time when dance music was far away from the charts, Sum 41 were kings.
But with six albums under their name, and 16 years since their historic debut, Sum 41 are older, wiser, but not necessarily kinder to the past. Whibley runs us through the band's main discography, and while their first few albums were responsible for the band's rise to stardom, he has a different outlook towards those releases.
Sum 41-Chuck full album zip
The band will be performing in Singapore on August 24th at Zepp@BigBox, in support of their latest album 13 Voices. Here's what he has to say about that album, along with All Killer No Filler, Does This Look Infected?, Chuck, Underclass Hero and Screaming Bloody Murder.
Fear of a Black Planet is the third studio album by American hip hop group Public Enemy. It was released on April 10, 1990, by Def Jam Recordings and Columbia Records, and produced by the group's production team The Bomb Squad, who expanded on the sample-layered sound of Public Enemy's 1988 album It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back. Having fulfilled their initial creative ambitions with that album, the group aspired to create what lead rapper Chuck D called "a deep, complex album". Their songwriting was partly inspired by the controversy surrounding member Professor Griff and his dismissal from the group in 1989.
A commercial and critical hit, Fear of a Black Planet sold two million copies in the United States and received rave reviews from critics, many of whom named it one of the year's best albums. Its success contributed significantly to the popularity of Afrocentric and political subject matter in hip hop and the genre's mainstream resurgence at the time. Since then, it has been viewed as one of hip hop's greatest and most important records, as well as being musically and culturally significant. In 2004, the Library of Congress added it to the National Recording Registry. In 2020, Fear of a Black Planet was ranked number 176 on Rolling Stone's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time.
In 1988, Public Enemy released their second album It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back to critical and commercial success.[7] Their music's dense textures, provided by the group's production team The Bomb Squad, exemplified a new production aesthetic in hip hop.[8][9][10] The controversial, politically charged lyrics by the group's lead rapper Chuck D, whose braggadocio raps contained references to political figures such as Assata Shakur and Nelson Mandela, as well as endorsements of Nation of Islam-leader Louis Farrakhan, intensified the group's affiliation with black nationalism and Farrakhan.[9]
It Takes a Nation's success helped raise hip hop's profile as both art and sociopolitical statement, amid media criticism of the genre.[11][12] It helped give hip hop a critical credibility and standing in the popular music community after it had been largely dismissed as a fad since its introduction at the turn of the 1980s.[12] In promoting the record, Public Enemy expanded their live shows and performing dynamic.[7] With the album's content and the group's rage-filled showmanship in concert, they became the vanguard of a movement in hip hop that reflected a new black consciousness and socio-political dynamic that were taking shape in America at the time.[13]
Amid the controversy, Chuck D was given an ultimatum by Shocklee and Stephney to dismiss Griff from the group or the production deal would fall through.[12] He fired Griff in June, but he later rejoined and has since denied holding anti-Semitic views and apologized for the remarks.[14][17] Several people who had worked with Public Enemy expressed concern about Chuck D's leadership abilities and role as a social spokesman.[12] Def Jam director of publicity Bill Adler later said that the controversy "partly ... fueled the writing of [the album]".[18]
To follow up It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, the group sought to make a more thematically focused work and to condense Dr. Frances Cress Welsing's theory of "Color Confrontation and Racism (White Supremacy)" into an album-length recording. According to Chuck D, this involved "telling people, well, color's an issue created and concocted to take advantage of people of various characteristics with the benefit of a few".[18] He recalled their concept for the album in an interview with Billboard: "We wanted really to go with a deep, complex album ... more conducive to the high and lows of great stage-performance."[18] Chuck D also cited the commercial circumstances for hip hop at the time, having quickly transitioned from a singles to an album medium in the music industry during the 1980s.[19] In an interview for Westword, he later said, "We understood the magnitude of what an album was, so we set out to make something that not only epitomized the standard of an album, but would stand the test of time by being diverse with sounds and textures, and also being able to home in on the aspect of peaks and valleys".[19]
The Bomb Squad used devices including the E-mu SP-1200 drum machine and sampler, the Akai S900 sampler, and a Macintosh computer.[27] Chuck D remarked that "95 percent of the time it sounded like mess. But there was 5 percent of magic that would happen."[20] Shocklee compared their production to filmmaking, "with different lighting effects, or film speeds, or whatever", while Chuck D analogized to an artist creating green from yellow and blue.[20] As he had the production team improvise beats, much of the album was composed on the spot.[22] In a 1990 interview, Chuck added, "We approach every record like it was a painting. Sometimes, on the sound sheet, we have to have a separate sheet just to list the samples for each track. We used about 150, maybe 200 samples on Fear of a Black Planet."[28]
To synchronize the samples, the Bomb Squad used SMPTE timecodes and arranged and overdubbed parts of backing tracks, which had been inspected by the members for snare, bass, and hi-hat sounds.[27] Chuck D said, "Our music is all about samples in the right area, layers that pile on each other. We put loops on top of loops on top of loops, but then in the mix we cut things away."[27] Their production was innovative, according to journalist Jeff Chang. "They're figuring out how to jam with the samples and to create these layers of sound," Chang said. "I don't think it's been matched since then."[20] After the tracks were completed, the Bomb Squad began sequencing what was at first a seemingly discontinuous album, amid internal disputes.[29] Final mixing took place at Greene St. Recording and lasted until February 1990.[12] According to Sadler, "a lot of people were like, 'Wow, it's a brilliant album'. But it really shoulda been much better. If we had more time and we didn't have to deal with the situation of nobody talking".[29]
Fear of a Black Planet was conceived during the golden age of hip hop, a period roughly between 1987 and 1992 when artists took advantage of emerging sampling technology before record labels and lawyers took notice.[20] Accordingly, Public Enemy were not compelled to obtain sample clearance for the album.[20] This preceded the legal limits and clearance costs later placed on sampling,[30] which limited hip hop production and the complexity of its musical arrangements.[20] In an interview with Stay Free!, Chuck D said: "Public Enemy's music was affected more than anybody's because we were taking thousands of sounds. If you separated the sounds, they wouldn't have been anything--they were unrecognizable. The sounds were all collaged together to make a sonic wall."[31] An analysis by law professors Peter DiCola and Kembrew McLeod estimated that under the sample clearance system that developed after the album's release, Public Enemy were to lose at least five dollars per copy if they were to clear the album's samples at 2010 rates, a loss of five million dollars on a platinum record.[32]
For the track "Burn Hollywood Burn", Chuck D dealt with clearance issues from different record labels to collaborate with rappers Big Daddy Kane and Ice Cube, who had been pursuing the Bomb Squad to produce his debut album.[33] The recording marked one of the first times in which MCs from different rap crews collaborated,[33] and it led to the Bomb Squad working with Ice Cube on his 1990 debut album AmeriKKKa's Most Wanted.[34]
For the album's artwork, Public Enemy enlisted B.E. Johnson, a NASA illustrator.[18] His design illustrated Chuck D's concept of two planets, the "Black" planet and Earth, eclipsing.[18] Cey Adams, creative director for Def Jam at the time, said: "It was so interesting to me that a black hip-hop act did an illustration for their album cover. At that time, black hip-hop artists, for the most part, had photos of themselves on their covers. But this was the first time someone took a chance to do something in the rock'n'roll vein".[18]
Fear of a Black Planet's music features assemblage compositions that draw on numerous sources.[20] The production's musique concrète-influenced approach reflects the political and confrontational tones of the group's lyrics, with sound collages that feature varying rhythms, aliased or scratchy samples, media sound bites, and eccentric music loops.[36] Recordings sampled for Fear of a Black Planet include those from funk, soul, rock, and hip hop genres.[28] Elements such as choruses, guitar sounds, or vocals from sampled recordings are reappropriated as riffs in songs on the album, while sampled dialogue from speeches is incorporated to support Chuck D's arguments and commentary on certain songs.[14] The Bomb Squad's Hank Shocklee compared their produced sounds, surrounding Chuck D's rhythmic, exhortative baritone voice, to putting "the voice of God in a storm".[37] 2ff7e9595c