RECORDINGS VIEW; Hip-Hop's Prophets of Rage Make Noise Again

Public Enemy always wanted to be significant. From its first album, "Yo! Bum Rush the Show" in 1987, the group marketed itself as a distillation of black anger and resistance. It set out to be the voice of a community, not just one more posse of boasters; its logo, drawn by the group's main rapper and writer, Chuck D. (Carlton Ridenhour), was a silhouette of a black man in a rifle's crosshairs, and for millions of people that logo is now as recognizable as the CBS eye or the Coca-Cola wave. Public Enemy has become a self-made and self-conscious symbol, hip-hop's "prophets of rage."

Significance can weigh down a band, making songwriters didactic and overly deliberate; look what happened to Bruce Springsteen. Yet significance can also help performers grow up faster and think harder. Both happen on Public Enemy's fourth album, "Apocalypse 91 . . . the Enemy Strikes Black" (Def Jam/CBS 47374; all three formats).

This time out, the lyrics tend to stick to one topic -- slavery, alcoholism, individual responsibility, black economic self-sufficiency -- instead of zapping between ideas and inside references, while simulated radio and television sound bites drive home the lessons. Generally Chuck D. and his sidekick Flavor Flav (William Drayton) are weighing their words; the group has dropped divisive Black Muslim rhetoric, though it is by no means conciliatory. And while Public Enemy is now consolidating its sonic revolution instead of inventing new idioms, its latest songs are still packed with rhymes and noise.

Public Enemy's impact has as much to do with its sound as with its words. Chuck D.'s deep, booming voice, caroming off the beat in intricate metrical schemes, has a preacher's power and a boxer's jabbing attack; Flavor Flav offers regular-guy affirmation and comic relief. Their producers, the Bomb Squad, stack up riffs in music that turns abrasive noise into attention-getting hooks (and, when played on overloaded boom boxes and car stereos, back into even more abrasive noise).

By making America's racial tensions its central subject, Public Enemy has pushed plenty of hot buttons. Some fans equate the group with the cause of justice for blacks, placing Public Enemy above any disagreement or criticism. And some detractors, projecting their own guilt or fears, have imagined a group whose entire message is one of racial hatred.

With songs that mix political, personal and promotional statements in quick-cutting, often oblique language, Public Enemy has always been more complicated than that. Most of its messages have to do with black pride and black nationalism, and insist that the black community must unite to claim what it has earned. That message and the confrontational music are finding listeners. "It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back," released in 1988, and "Fear of a Black Planet," released in 1990, have each sold 1.3 million copies, and the group's success has spawned a whole wing of radical rappers.

Public Enemy has often been political without being politic. Its first two albums had a sexist streak, partially corrected on the third album with "Revolutionary Generation." Apparent endorsements of Louis Farrakhan (in "Bring the Noise" and "Don't Believe the Hype"), the Nation of Islam leader, have troubled non-believers; Chuck D. has said he supports Mr. Farrakhan's emphasis on black self-sufficiency, not his anti-Semitism. Public Enemy has made some missteps, particularly a ruckus over anti-Semitic interview statements by an employee who was eventually fired, and a few ambiguous lyrics reacting to the incident. Those slips have been widely publicized, sometimes with distortions that seem to validate the distrust for the press that Public Enemy proclaimed back in 1988 with "Don't Believe the Hype."

The title of "Apocalypse 91 . . . the Enemy Strikes Black" reveals the album's direction, as it denounces self-destructive behavior within black America. In one segment, a country-fiddle tape-loop plays as the Southern-accented voice of one "Bernie Cross house" of the Ku Klux Klan thanks black "gangs, hoodlums, drug pushers and users" for helping the Klan's mission by wiping themselves out. Chuck D. said in an interview in Spin magazine, "This record is the one where we deal with the problems we've got with us. Black accountability."

Is this the neoconservative Public Enemy? Not at all. Public Enemy's exhortations to self-improvement don't claim that blacks created their own problems or that discipline and bootstrap enterprise are cure-alls, and "Jack" -- the group's non-denominational nickname for white supremacists -- still lurks behind systemic discrimination. When Public Enemy decries alcoholism in "One Million Bottlebags," with horn squeals bouncing woozily from speaker to speaker, sound bites contend that alcohol is marketed disproportionately to black consumers, a situation Chuck D. calls "genocide."

But consumers aren't free of blame; he continues, "Plan that's designed by the other man/ But who drink it like water?" In "Shut 'Em Down," about the lack of black-owned businesses, he mentions how hard it is for black entrepreneurs to get start-up loans.

New songs also look beyond the ghetto. "By the Time I Get to Arizona," with a slow, buzzy clavinet riff, denounces Arizona's refusal to honor Martin Luther King Jr. Day. "Can't Truss It" is Afrocentric history, with Chuck D. imagining himself as cargo in the slave trade. Its desolate-sounding backup riffs are unsettling, but the singsong rhyme lacks momentum.

From its black-to-black perspective, "Apocalypse 91 . . . the Enemy Strikes Black" returns to familiar Public Enemy topics. "Nighttrain," a harsh, atonal stomp with a sung chorus and beeping Morse code in the mix, picks up one of the messages of the last album's "Welcome to the Terrordome." It asserts, "You mustn't just put your trust in every brother," especially thieves, drug dealers and Uncle Toms. "Move," with a dense, propulsive funk beat, free-associates among boasts and warnings: "If ya draggin' us down with the wack attitude/ Get up, look out, get out the way/ Move!"

Public Enemy also continues its electronic counterattack against mass-media clout. "How to Kill a Radio Consultant," with a dense, swirling mix of horns and voices and scratching, is its latest denunciation of radio stations that won't play rap; "More News at 11" is about watching black-on-black violence on television. In "A Letter to the N. Y. Post," Flavor Flav and Chuck D. denounce the newspaper's front-page coverage of Flavor Flav's arrest for assaulting his girlfriend: "Put my address in the paper 'cause I smacked that girl." (He pleaded guilty to third-degree assault and was sentenced to 30 days in jail; she was granted an order of protection against him.) Unfortunately, the song goes on to a homophobic digression that praises James Cagney as a gay-basher.

That's the only lapse on "Apocalypse 91"; otherwise, Public Enemy seems determined to avoid pointless contention. And the album ends by reaching out to white suburban audiences with a remake of "Bring the Noise" in collaboration with Anthrax, the speed-metal band whose pummeling guitars fit perfectly with the Bomb Squad's sirens and funk. Although both Anthrax and Public Enemy are million-sellers, the fusion of two grating bands from two fringes seems less commercially calculated than previous rap-rock partnerships.

Except for the Anthrax collaboration, "Apocalypse 91" doesn't make any musical or literary quantum jumps; it's a high-level holding action. But Public Enemy can still lead the radical rap movement it started. It shows the competition how to create agitprop that goes beyond sloganeering, in hip-hop whose sound is as insurrectionary as its words.