PUBLIC ENEMY Released Their Master Rap Attack Album ‘APOCALYPSE 91… THE ENEMY STRIKES BLACK’ Today 35 Years Ago
Significant longplayers from yesteryear
1 October 2026
Notorious rap rebels PUBLIC ENEMY released their master rap attack opus
APOCALYPSE 91… THE ENEMY STRIKES BLACK on 1 October 1991, today
35 years ago.
The album title is an allusion to the titles of the films
Apocalypse Now and The Empire Strikes Back.
It peaked on #4 on the USA Billboard 200, #1 on the hip-hop-rap charts.
The band would take a new direction with their sound, partly out of necessity.
The disks for every track they had been working on for the past four to five years
had been stolen. As a result, they had to rush to re-create their music and to
put out their album in a timely manner.
AllMusic/Stephen Thomas Erlewine said: “Arriving after two records – ‘It Takes
A Nation of Millions’ and ‘Fear Of A Black Planet’ – where the words and music were
equally labyrinthine, folding back on each other in dizzying, intoxicating ways, it is a
bit of a letdown to have Apocalypse be so direct, but there is no denying that the end
result is still thrilling and satisfying, and remains one of the great records of the
golden age of hip-hop.”
Turn Up the Volume: My all-time favorite raiding-and-raving rap revolutionists.
Even a nation of millions can’t hold Public Enemy back from bringing on the noise
and shutting the racists, absolutists, and xenophobes down. For a long time they
were in every way the most important black squad in the world.
SINGLES
ALBUM