Chuck d's debut solo album opens with an excerpt from the discussion that begins Spike Lee's movie Clockers – a group of black kids arguing about whether Chuck D still matters as a rapper. After the excerpt fades, Chuck's voice comes into the foreground, noting what they have to say. Then he blasts in with "Mistachuck," a blistering claim to his accomplishments in the world of rap and a State of the Hip-hop Union address.

That segue sums up the perspective of Autobiography. On this album, the 36-year-old Chuck D speaks as a rap elder statesman, not so much embroiled in the music's ongoing controversies as commenting on them from a distance. He lectures the young gangstas of "Generation Wrekked," as one title puts it, from a similar remove, urging them like a benevolent uncle to set aside the blunts and the guns, to forget the East Coast/West Coast rivalries and study their history.

Though such messages don't make for much cultural heat, Chuck certainly has the shoulders to carry their moral weight. As the leader of Public Enemy, he was in the thick of the anti-Reagan charge in the '80s, articulating a vision from the urban battle zone that was both incendiary and inspiring. Chuck has lost none of his anger, but he sets his sights lower now, preoccupied as he is with preserving his reputation and combating a fictional character he calls Big Willie, a black record-industry executive desperate to cater to the white power structure. And in a surprising move, Chuck reunites with ex-Public Enemy member Professor Griff, whose anti-Semitic comments plunged PE into controversy in 1989, on "Horizontal Heroin," a Last Poets-style anti-drug riff.

Working here with producers Gary G Wiz and Eric "Vietnam" Sadler, Chuck successfully reinvents the sound he defined with Public Enemy, slowing the beats down and introducing stylish R&B elements like sampled horn parts and vocal choruses. Seventies soul singer Isaac Hayes even steps up to the mike on the fearsome "But Can You Kill the Nigger in You?" And Chuck can still cram more meaning into a telegraphic phrase – "Metaphors be passin' you like taxicabs," as he puts it in "Generation Wrekked" – than any other rapper on the scene.

Chuck insists that Public Enemy will be back next year with an album called Afraid of the Dark? If that title reminds you of Fear of a Black Planet, that's part of the problem with Autobiography as well. A song like "Talk Show Created the Fool" is funny and sharp ("Ricki Lake is eating mad steaks off your bad breaks"), but Chuck already covered this ground in 1988 on "She Watch Channel Zero." It's time for this "incredible rhyme animal" to go on a fresh hunt. (RS 744)

ANTHONY DECURTIS