The best thing I ever did in college was attend a lecture by Chuck D, who had been booked to speak at my campus for reasons I’m not even sure he understood. Rather than rapping, he just talked to the audience for an hour straight, free-associating through a laundry list of topics––he told us about the genesis of Public Enemy and how he met Flavor Flav, explained that after he found out about the football player Buster Rhymes he told a guy named Trevor he should call himself Busta Rhymes before somebody else did, stressed the importance of preaching as a rhetorical form, and claimed that the United States was on the verge of merging currencies with Mexico and Canada, which meant that we all needed to get passports. It was hilarious, insightful, informative, and at times utterly baffling, but my main takeaway from his talk was that Chuck D is an eccentric genius and Public Enemy is maybe the most influential rap group of all time.

Last Friday, amid all the hullaballoo about JAY-Z’s 4:44, Public Enemy quietly released Nothing Is Quick in the Desert, their 14th album, which was available for free download on Bandcamp until July 4th. It’s basically everything you could ask for in a Public Enemy album in 2017––full of righteous fury, slightly outdated politics, and Chuck D showing absolutely no consideration to the fact that his straight-ahead, staccato bullhorn flow has been outmoded by several generations of other rappers. Following the departure of The Bomb Squad from the group, P.E. was musically adrift for a few years, eventually picking up guitar wunderkind Khari Wynn, who became the group’s musical director in 2011. As a result, a lot of Nothing Is Quick in the Desert is full of crunchy riffs, and a good half of the record scans as straight-up rap-rock (not to mention, the album’s cover looks a lot like the work of Ed Repka, who did the art for like a bazillion Megadeth albums.

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