Public Enemy

Around 1987, when The Sugarcubes started, I got heavily into hip hop. I was listening to Public Enemy every day, which meant a bit of a fight on the tour bus as I was trying to play it all the time and the others hated it. After Public Enemy, everything else is just like... woofty. I mean, wimpish. Yo Bum Rush The Show was the one that opened your mind but Fear Of A Black Planet is the one that, musically, is a masterpiece. They’ve been so misunderstood. They’ve mostly been taken for their politics, which is great, but if you just look at the other worlds, and there are a lot of worlds in this world, one being music, which is the leader of them all because it’s pure instinct - well, musically, they just did it. No- one in hip hop, house, techno, whatever, opened up as much ground as they did. The music is so modern and so... abstract. It’s just like, fuck the rules. I would put them in a group with people like Stockhausen and Schoenberg. Forget about rock’n’roll chords, we’ve all been suffering from them all our lives, and they just rescued us from that syndrome.

Q magazine, october 1993