7. Public EnemyYo! Bum Rush The Show
This may not be my favourite Public Enemy album, it may not be my favourite hip hop album, but it was the first hip hop album I bought, on spec because of a Dele Fadele review. He wrote about it with such passion and made it sound like something you’d never heard before. And it was! It just completely severed the top of my head. The Bomb Squad were so incredible in how they used sound to jar and to mobilise at the same time, so funky yet so atonal. I grew up in Weymouth, which was whiter than white and culturally a million miles away from New York, but I could sense the disgruntlement, the protest, the sheer fuck you – it was all there for me to gravitate towards. To this day, I think it’s a shocking album in all the best ways. I liked that it seemed so completely anti-social. It wasn’t speaking to me directly, but that was cool, too. And if I was the enemy, so be it.
