Public Enemy Fights the Power of Itself

PUBLIC ENEMY “Greatest Misses”

Def Jam/Columbia * * * 1/2

Public Enemy’s second album, “It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back,” was the rappers’ equivalent of Bob Beamon’s long jump in the ’68 Olympics, an album that smashed the boundaries of sound and sense, political in every tick and scratch, an album so far ahead of what had been thought possible in hip-hop that musicians two decades from now will still be laboring in its shadow. Faced with his own early effort of that caliber, J.D. Salinger has spent his last 40 years hiding on a farm.

And though the members of Public Enemy itself can’t hope to approach that album every time out--or conceivably ever again--it is to their credit that they try every year and that they frequently come so close. On “Greatest Misses,” Public Enemy is taking it easy, sort of, in the spirit of heavy-metal live albums or the kind of semi-greatest-hits albums Madonna seems to put out every other year. The second half consists of celebrity-deejay remixes of some of the group’s less celebrated tracks, which are pretty much more generic than the original versions--the Bomb Squad, PE’s in-house production team, is regarded as the most original in rap.

But the first six songs, all new, are almost primo Public Enemy, great gobbets of the airways whipped up into a pumped-up paranoiac hip-hop souffle, songs about gangsters and dumb reporters and basketball players with broken dreams, all presided over by the deep, commanding, virtuosic voice of Chuck D. “Greatest Misses” may not be a great Public Enemy album, but until the next one comes along, it’ll more than do.