Public Enemy Brings The Noise

The 2008 Pitchfork Music Festival began Friday night with a history lesson for the music lovers assembled in Chicago's Union Park. Now in its third year, the weekend-long event curated by Chicago-based Web publication Pitchfork Media continued its streak in balancing the critically acclaimed and the audience-pleasing.

This first evening stood in contrast with the rest of the festival. Full days of performances are scheduled for Saturday and Sunday, but Friday only featured three bands. Also, although Pitchfork's overall focus is on cutting-edge sounds, the opening night cast a spotlight on important music of the past.

Ironically named "Don't Look Back," Friday was part of a concert series in which artists play one of their seminal albums all the way through.

Headliners Public Enemy had the hardest task in replicating "It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back," the hip-hop group's sample-heavy 1988 statement of intent. Famous for its dense collage of samples, beats, rhymes and wild noises, the album required the use of some prerecorded material,

In true hip-hop tradition, PE made the experience as live as possible, with a three-piece band that, in the set's only major deviation, replaced the horror movie piano of gritty prison break tale "Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos" with a thick, funky jam. True to form, the gravel-voiced Chuck D's political pontification commanded the stage with the energy of a rapper one-third his age, while jokester and TV star Flavor Flav showed up fashionably late and worked the crowd like a pro.

Sebadoh, led by Lou Barlow (who plays Pitchfork again Sunday with Dinosaur Jr.), unveiled 1993's lo-fi indie rock classic "Bubble and Scrape." The record's juxtaposition of Barlow's melodic, mopey style and bandmate Eric Gaffney's petulant punk lashings may have portended internal strife when it was recorded, but as a live set, it resembled a dizzying immersion in a raw, powerful rock 'n' roll blender.

Boston's Mission of Burma started the night with 1982's post-punk favorite "Vs.," the only LP the band recorded during its '80s run. Guitarist Roger Miller, whose tinnitus caused the band to dissolve after touring "Vs.," spat out his intelligently defiant lyrics as drummer Peter Prescott's thick, jerky battering and bassist Clint Conley's growling bass experiments jabbed and rolled, the very definition of "thinking man's punk."