Talk:Muse Sick-n-Hour Mess Age

Unrepresentative Reviews
All the quoted reviews are glowing, yet the article's description gives the impression that the album was poorly received. Some of those negative reviews need to be quoted so we have a neutral viewpoint in here. 58.165.45.116 (talk) 23:15, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

Chicago Tribune review
Transciption using Google News Advanced News Archive Search. Chicago Tribune (Kot, Greg. 8. September 1, 1994) review of Muse Sick-n-Hour Mess Age (1994):

"Muse Sick N Hour Mess Age (Public Enemy) (STAR)(STAR)(STAR) 1/2. In contrast to "Apocalypse '91," which found Public Enemy straining to fend off the West Coast onslaught of Ice Cube and NWA, "Muse Sick. . . " is as bold and bracing as any hip-hop record released this year. Whether the band will regain its position as a cultural force, as it was during the "It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back"/"Fear of a Black Planet" era, is problematic. But at a time when hip-hop seems to be drowning in gangsta cliches, Chuck D's stentorian baritone sounds more authoritative and high-minded than ever. For every poorly conceived idea (his conspiracy theories sound more malnourished by the album, and his anti-drug preaching rings hollow in the wake of sidekick Flavor Flav's recent legal troubles) there are a half-dozen provocative ones. And, in any case, the verbal missiles come flying so fast and furiously that just listening to the man flow is entertainment enough. Then there's the music: the live drumming in particular gives PE's densely packed sonic shrapnel a kick that's as exhilarating as any rock record's."

- Greg Kot

Dan56 (talk) 10:16, 2 January 2010 (UTC)

Hot Press review
Transcription. Hot Press (McGovern, Gerry. September 21, 1994) review of Muse Sick-n-Hour Mess Age (1994):

"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.

Rating: 7 / 12"

- Gerry McGovern

Dan56 (talk) 05:46, 2 January 2010 (UTC)

The Washington Post review
Transciption using Google News Advanced News Archive Search. The Washington Post (Harrington, Richard. b.07. August 24, 1994) review of Muse Sick-n-Hour Mess Age (1994):

"Public Enemy's Chuck D is finding out in the '90s what Bob Dylan found out in the early '70s: You may be a powerful, resonant voice for your generation, but that doesn't mean people will keep listening - particularly if your later records lack the visceral power of your early and defining work. Public Enemy's new "Muse Sick-N-Hour Mess Age" (RAL/Island) meanders like Dylan's 1974's "Planet Waves," just as PE's 1992 "Greatest Misses" echoed 1973's "Dylan," a collection of marginal outtakes and leftovers that belonged on a bonus disc, not a bona fide one. PE and Dylan shaped and influenced many subsequent artists in terms of both lyrical content and musical style, though PE's progeny, of course, were never saddled with the weight of being "the next Dylan." The rap group's burden has, in fact, been much more immediate and ironic, built on perpetual great expectations for "the next Public Enemy album." Those expectations were squarely met from 1987's explosive "Yo! Bum Rush the Show" through "Apocalypse 91 ... The Enemy Strikes Black."

Part of the problem with "Muse Sick-N-Hour Mess Age" is that rap is the most relentless of pop forms in terms of innovation and experimentation. PE's "bring the noise" wallop - given life in performance by deejay Terminator X's thunderous scratches and sound scores and in the studio by the producing Bomb Squad - was immense in 1987 but now seems on the verge of becoming dismissed as "classic rap." Recently, Terminator X and the Godfathers of Threatt released "Super Bad" (RAL/Pro Division), in which he brought together such Old School acts as Whodini, Fantastic Five and the Mighty Cold Crush Brothers with new acts such as Punk Barbarians and Bonnie 'n' Clyde. Full of slamming bats and over-the-top production, its highlights include "It All Comes Down to the Money" (with Whodini in fine form) and "Sticka," an anti-censorship rap featuring MC Lyte, the Ices Cube and -T and PE pal Chuck D. But it's 1994, and the Bomb Squad has been defused by new sampling laws and the new bloods - Gary "G-Wiz," Larry "Panic" Walford, Easy Moe Bee and Kerwin "Sleek" Young - only occasionally do PE sonic justice.

And at a time when the majority of rappers - particularly the gangsta variety - are opting for insinuating grooves and slyly engaging delivery, Chuck D's stentorian preaching and monotonic, in-your-ear delivery suddenly seem overly rigid. While madcap partner Flavor Flav's occasional offerings tend to be lighter and insouciant, they are also limited. On the new album, he gets three showcases - the best is a mutually supportive shout-out with Chuck D titled "What Kind a Power We Got?" The answer, of course, is "soul power." Flav, who will release his first solo album in the fall, is also heard on "I Ain't Mad at All" and "Godd Complexx," a critique of white supremacy inspired by the Last Poets' vintage "White Man's Got a God Complex." On the positive tip, all this means PE has chosen to remain true to itself rather than to accommodate commercial considerations. What also remains unchanged is Chuck D's confrontational attitude and the wide range of both his targets and obsessions: white supremacy, black nationalism, empowerment for the disenfranchised, putting one's own house in order and getting reparations for historical injustices.

Feathers will be ruffled, and PE really doesn't care whether it belongs to the black gangsta rap poseurs lambasted in "So Watcha Gone Do Now?" (where the chant "rap, guns, drugs and money" is angry, not celebratory) or the supremacist-oppressors who hover in so many songs like white shadows. In "Hitler Day," Chuck D rejects Columbus Day on the grounds that the alleged discovery of America ("How can you call a takeover a discovery?") had genocidal implications for the Native Americans already here and for the Africans soon to be brought here as slaves. "I don't hate nobody/ I hate that day/ It's as crazy as Hitler Day," he raps, later taking on Thanksgiving, Independence Day and Memorial Day ("It makes me curse when they don't include/ 100 million of us black folks that died in the bottom of boats/ I can carry on 'bout the killin' till dusk and dawn/ and war ain't the reason they gone").

Even "The Star-Spangled Banner" is rethought in "Aintnuttin Buttersong," which ends with this unflinching appraisal: "Red is for the blood that we shed as a people/ Blues is for the sad-{expletive} songs we be singing in church while the white man's Heaven is black man's Hell/ The stars are what we saw when we got our ass beat/the stripes whip marks on our back/ The white is for the obvious/ There ain't no black in that flag ..." The "white man's Heaven" riff, which goes back to a text by Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam, reappears (partly as spoken-word dichotomy) in "White Heaven/Black Hell," while the many-sourced call for reparations informs "Thin Line Between Law and Rape" (featuring guest reggae singer Prince Colin Rochester).

Political paranoia is a relative thing, and PE stumbles with "Race Against Time," which proposes that a World Health Organization AIDS conspiracy ("world health organized murderized") is part of a racist blueprint for black genocide. And the ecology-oriented "Bedlam," which invokes an "after the math disaster wit a European autograph." When in doubt, cherchez les blancs. "What Side You On" recasts the perennial labor and civil rights challenge into harsh racial solidarity, juxtaposing righteousness ("In the brain game/ I'm keepin' my head clear") and retribution ("Black mans law iz raw like Africa/ You violate we're coming after ya"). Chuck D's rage is familiar, of course, and it runs deep. It's tempered with frustration and balanced by commitment, or as he explains in "Stop in the Name": "I'm comin wit the antidote/ I hope they cope to da rhythm I wrote/ Pawns in da game going down da drain/ Final call to my race in pain."

PE's call for an end to self-destructive behavior ranges from the caustic ("Live and Undrugged") and compassionate ("Whole Lotta Love Going On in the Middle of Hell") to the frustrated. On "So Watcha Gone Do Now?," Chuck notes that he's " 'bout ready to bounce trouble on the corner of Blunt Avenue an 40 ounce ... Sense goes over nonsense/ when it makes no sense/ I'm throwin' up da fence." The cut ends with an audio collage of historic racial disparagement pulled from films, television and recordings, resolved in the pride of a youngster who says he's not a "boy," but a man, "black and beautiful." The album's first single, "Give It Up," is accompanied by a claymation video in which weapons are transformed into books as Chuck proposes, "Some ain't gonna change/ I got 'em in range/ I gotta rearrange/ So I'm buildin' back ya brain." At the end, he cautions, "Check yourself before you wreck yourself/ respect yourself/ You gots to give it up" - "it" being the hegemony of guns, drugs, alcohol and hopelessness that have destroyed family and culture in the black community. In 1994, the terrordome remains open for for business, and Public Enemy won't let anyone forget that."

- Richard Harrington

Dan56 (talk) 10:16, 2 January 2010 (UTC)