911 (Is a Joke)

Rap: 911 (Is a Joke)

K-SCORE:  25

Rappers:  Public Enemy

 

It's time to hear from Long Island's Finest, Public Enemy.  I chose 911 (Is A Joke) for Kyle to listen to, but I forgot that Chuck D doesn't rap on it at all.  This was kind of an oversight on my part...but Kyle already listened to it and wrote a review.  Too late, sorry!  It all rests on your shoulders Flavor Flav.  Good luck!

-Mike

(See KRR Intro here)

track 3 of 1990 album Fear Of A Black Planet | Official Public Enemy website: http://www.publicenemy.com/

                This seems like a perfect opportunity to remind anyone who reads this blog that all of my reviews are written with no context.  Most of the time I’ve never heard these songs before, and a lot of the time I’ve never heard of these rappers before.  Each review takes the isolated song and subjects it to the swift and cruel keyboard of justice.

                So Flavor Flav, as an avid reader of Kyle Reviews Rap, you shouldn’t be surprised by your score of twenty-five.  I don’t know if there is a specific incident or set of incidents that inspired you to record “911 (Is a Joke)” as an attack against 9-1-1 operatives, paramedics, doctors, and ambulance drivers, but looking through this now obsolete piece of rap history, it comes off as an embarrassment.

                With no reference to a specific time or place, “911 (Is a Joke)” takes wild, unsubstantiated stabs at people who trained for a long time and who work incredibly hard to save the lives of individuals in our society in dire need of help.  Even if there is an inciting event behind your cries of racism, you should have spent most of the time describing the atrocities of that or those incidents in order to make the political message powerful.  People learn from extrapolating truths about the world from specific observable examples, as opposed to being preached a message and forced to assume specific examples are out there.

                Your lyrics are tasteless.  You claim the paramedics are “comin’” with a “stretcher,” but that “that’s a body bag in disguise y’all betcha” and the ambulance itself is an “autopsy ambulance just to dissect ya.”  Gross.  They hate the 9-1-1 callers from poor communities so much they’re going to perform an autopsy right there in the ambulance just to get it over with?  Inappropriately hyperbolic, Mr. Flav.

                I get the sense that politically charged rap was your thing, Public Enemy, so I feel like reviewing this song devoid of its political message is like reviewing Predator and leaving out the deadly creature in the jungle, but regardless I’ve gone ahead and evaluated “911 (Is a Joke)” on other grounds as well to see if it has merits beyond content.  I’ve determined that it does not.

                Flavor Flav, you speak in this nasally monotone that has no diction and sounds awful.  Your rap is pretty slow, doesn’t have an interesting beat.  There is no satisfying musical quality to this song, but there is a huge amount of strange ambient noise going on in the background that adds absolutely nothing to the rap, but hurts my ears.  There are a few clever rhymes hidden throughout, and when you add these to the possibility that you’ve been keeping very careful data on EMT response times using the wall clock hanging around your neck, you’re saved from a score that would have you swimming with 300 Brolic at the bottom of the barrel.  Instead you’re housed adjacent to DMX.  Be careful.  He is the hood.