Pitchfork

Entering their third decade of hip-hop proselytizing and nation-building-- lest history forget, they were blasted by students in city squares during the overthrow of the former Yugoslavia's Slobodan Milosevic-- Public Enemy has entered a productive reclusion on their 11th full-length.

A far cry from their recent self-indulgent pouts, 2002's Revolverution and 2005's New Whirl Odor, How You Sell Soul to a Souless People Who Sold Their Soul??? gets at the finicky emotional recipe for P.E.'s success. Instead of pretending to strut and rage à la those aforementioned mid-1990s old grey mare trudges, How You Sell Soul (there is no way to cleanly truncate most P.E. titles) revisits instrumental blueprints from Fear of a Black Planet and It Takes a Nation of Millions, enshrined intros-- "The brother don't swear he nice/ He KNOWS he nice!"-- and plays the self-referencing cards with aplomb. Because when piss and vinegar is your blood type, there's no such thing as tempering. Old age is just a new window to shoot from.

The band combats "age" with disclosure: The liner notes sprawl like yearbook memories, thanking old AC/DC records for inspiration alongside Chuck's hand-holding descriptions of just how and why each song was constructed-- sample history, just WHY he respects KRS so much and just needed him for "Sex, Drugs & Violence". Chuck D even tones down his still-glorious solo megaphone riot and concedes: "Thank you for letting us be ourselves/ So don't mind me if I repeat myself/ These simple lines be good for your health" ("Harder Than You Think"). Simple chestnuts they are: kids gotta read, governments gotta be questioned, and gangster rap is fine, as long as you know it's rap, not reality.

And the skeletal disclosure works. Aside from a few ungainly, obvious missteps-- trying to play the Scott Storch melodic game on "Amerikan Gangster", wasting the KRS run-in on a track that sounds like a D12 refuse pile ("Sex, Drugs & Violence")-- the album is finely sequenced. Newsreel-ish interludes punctuate the album into thematic thirds (rebirth, bitches!/appraising the day/stumping for the apocalypse). The nakedly obvious structure loosens everyone's valves. Chuck worries about images and phonetics-- "watch the masses move as a mass of switches," "Botswana to Watts and Queens." The best melodies are given the space (Read: minimal Flav howling, Chuck pays attention to breath control) to breathe-- see the stubble-funk trash on "Frankenstar", the Commodores sample on "Escapism", and, the album's best track, Redman's burbling production and winsome guest verse on "Can You Hear Me Now?"

When How You Sell Soul rounds the corner into its raging final third, there's a nice little epiphany. With the way we now appreciate and consume music, P.E. may never be able to change America again (they probably have a bigger contemporary fanbase outside this continent), but they still can light up a few souls. No matter their pop "relevance," they refuse to, and refuse to let their listeners, be complacent. Read Orwell, beat Yung Joc with a trashcan, don't watch CNN. Just. Do. Something. When the apocalypse is finally unveiled, don't be the hollow man Joc-ing your way toward Bethlehem.