Public Enemy: He Got Game : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Chuck D hasn't lost his gift for making corporate slogans his own: On "Game Face," a song from the soundtrack to Spike Lee's new film, He Got Game, Chuck intones that he's still using "the mike to reach out and touch, instead of the phone." A reunion album of sorts featuring Flav, Professor Griff, Terminator X and the Bomb Squad production crew (as well as assorted guest stars), Game finds Chuck D focusing his wordplay on the complicated world of professional hoops, inspired by both the acrobatic beauty of city-park athleticism and the big money that have made the game America's newest national pastime. Dense and eclectic, brilliant at moments but sometimes confusing, He Got Game makes its shots more often than not.

From the uncharacteristically down-tempo but still authoritative title cut, which loops the Buffalo Springfield classic "For What It's Worth" (including strumming and vocals from Stephen Stills), through the reverberating "Unstoppable" (featuring KRS-One) and the rave-up "House of the Rising Son" (built on the Who's "Won't Get Fooled Again"), the first half of He Got Game is all over the court, loud and rambunctious and in your face, like the hectic backbeat to an ESPN highlight reel. Recasting the Sixties protest cut as a modern-day sermon on "He Got Game," Chuck D makes the title track a gospel-shouting epiphany, using "game" as a metaphor for betrayal, pain and redemption, to say nothing of contemporary hip-hop in these post-Puffy days of collecting Benjamins. And no one builds a track like the Bomb Squad, who have been rejoined by Hank Shocklee on this effort: The stereophonic blast of "Revelation 33 1/3 Revolutions" recalls the over-the-top groove-mining of It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, the kind of Public Enemy rhythm explosion that manages to have a great beat you can have angst to.

Crammed full of religious overtones (which might have more to do with the motion picture than with any new found PE spiritual awakening), He Got Game manages to balance a ghetto-savvy righteousness-likening pro ball to a "slave trade" on more than one occasion – with a sensitivity to the societal pressure that young people face to follow the Benjamins. The sly "Super Agent" and the corporate raiders who star in "Politics of the Sneaker Pimps" (a funny, frightening litany of brand names, narrated from the point of view of a slave-to-fashion b-ball prodigy) receive as much of Chuck's derision as the "man child, six feet five, but juvenile" whose talents are the oil of this cynical machine.

To hear Chuck tell it, he's only trying to find "where Christ is in all this crisis." Chuck realizes that the defiant-black-man aesthetic he gave voice to a decade ago is more apparent in the take-no-prisoners, cornrow-wearing "politics" of Allen Iverson and Latrell Sprewell than in the champagne consumer chic of all those rapping Bad Boys. Chuck D is inspired again, coming up with blues poetry for the hoops age. He Got Game is more a pretty layup than a dazzling slam dunk, but Public Enemy are still playing to win.