Flavor Flav / Public Enemy

Photographed during Public Enemy's 2011 UK tour, Flavor Flav is caught doing exactly what he has always done best: making himself impossible to ignore. Bent forward over the microphone, legs planted wide and wearing one of his trademark oversized clocks, he dominates the foreground while the rest of Public Enemy and their huge crosshair logo fill the stage behind him. I like that the photograph gives you Flav at full intensity without losing the fact that this is very much a Public Enemy show.
By 2011, Public Enemy had been challenging both the sound and politics of hip-hop for more than two decades. Albums such as It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back and Fear of a Black Planet established them as one of the most important groups in the history of the genre, with Chuck D's political writing, the Bomb Squad's dense production and Flavor Flav's deliberately chaotic presence creating something unlike almost anything that had come before. Their influence reached well beyond hip-hop, and they were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2013.
The Birmingham show came during a UK tour built around Fear of a Black Planet, more than twenty years after its original release. Rather than simply performing the album from beginning to end, Public Enemy revisited material from it alongside songs from across their career. That gave the show an interesting connection between the group they had been at the beginning of the 1990s and the band still performing those songs to another generation in 2011.
For me, this frame has so much of Public Enemy in one photograph. Flav is right at the front with the clock, the microphone and all that energy, but you can still see that enormous Public Enemy logo hanging over the whole scene. I could have gone tighter on Flav, but I think the phot
ograph would have lost something. I wanted him to be the subject without losing the band around him.