PUBLIC ENEMY: “Muse Sick-N-Hour Mess Age” (Def Jam)

Perhaps I expect too much. Few groups in the history of popular music have broken as much ground as PE. Once you heard ‘You’re Gonna Get Yours’ back in 1987 or around then, you knew that here was a massive machine.

PE rolled along, sparking out awe-inspiring albums like It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back and Fear Of A Black Planet. The latter was particularly astonishing. It really was like music from another planet. 1991’s Apocalypse 91… The Enemy Strikes Black is also a masterpiece. I mean, will the Nineties produce anything better than ‘By The Time I Get To Arizona’?

1992’s Greatest Misses saw a big drop in quality. It wasn’t really a proper album with six new tracks, six remixes, one live. The remixes were great but the new stuff was a bit dodgy. People were wondering if PE were losing it.

Thing is, PE are much more than a group; they are a political movement. But the political movement is driven by one man, and that man is Chuck D. Conversely, PE are much more than a political movement too. They are one of the most innovative musical groups in musical history. The PE sound has been produced, arranged, directed and sequenced by The Bomb Squad: Chuck D could have been rhyming gibberish and their magic would have still knocked you out. And yes, Chuck D’s voice is that powerful and commanding that it would stop a charging rhino, but, let’s face it, it’s always been a strange – almost Beavis and Butthead-like – delight to hear Flavour Flav,the clown-prince of rap, brewing up his tornado of cliché-to-be one-liners in the background.

The Bomb Squad are very much in the background of Muse Sick-N-Hour Mess Age (Music and our message, is one way of reading this title), and the sound definitely suffers. Most of it is like slightly messed-up old funk b-sides. Without Bomb Squad power, Chuck D’s message of Black unity through strength and community will be harder to sell. Not alone that but Flavour Flav’s recent visits to gaol for allegedly beating his girlfriend and then shooting at a neighbour have burned badly into PE’s high moral ground.

On Muse Sick-N-Hour Mess Age, Chuck D sounds increasingly like a Christ on the cross, who has just discovered there is no God. Not that Chuck has given up believing, simply that there is a desperation in the air. Flavour Flav is simply not as convincing as the nuclear-powered smart-arse of yore. There’s a weariness in all his bravado. And the album is too long, a fault from which so many rap albums suffer. At 73 minutes, it drags on and on. Songs like ‘What Kind Of Power We Got?’ could be halved, quartered, if not dispensed with completely.

PE can still deliver. ‘White Heaven/ Black Heaven’ is short, simple, touching and very powerful. ‘Race Against Time’ has the drive of old. ‘Thin Line Between Law & Rape’ shuffles along with lots of reggae flavour. ‘Death Of A Car Jacka’ has attack. ‘I Stand Accused’ is a definite musical standout, even if lyrically we see Chuck rapping a paranoid and adolescent dream of seeing all his critics dead. In fact, as I run selectively through this album I can’t help but feel that some good editing — taking about a third out — would have made it doubly powerful.

Public Enemy are back, but it’s hard to see how Muse Sick-N-Hour Mess Age will have anything near the same impact as Snoop Doggy Dogg’s Doggystyle. Snoop, in many ways, represents the ultimate gangster rapper and attitude that Chuck D is so determined to divest himself of. Chuck raps about “Good versus evil/God versus the devil.” On this outing, God should lighten up a bit and take some music lessons, because Doggystyle pees all over the muse.

• Gerry McGovern