Deep Cut Friday: ‘B Side Wins Again’ by Public Enemy
The ‘Fear of a Black Planet’ track made its debut as the B side to “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos”
Written by Al Shipley |
Chuck D, Flavor Flav, and Terminator X of Public Enemy in 1987. (Credit: Jack Mitchell/Getty Images)
Each week, SPIN digs into the catalogs of great artists and highlights songs you might not know for our Deep Cut Friday series.
Vinyl singles have historically featured the most accessible and radio-friendly song on the A side, but every now and again, DJs and music fans have flipped the record over and decided they preferred the B side, elevating classics like the Smiths’ “How Soon Is Now?” and Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive.” Chuck D, who played records for groundbreaking hip-hop shows on the Adelphi University radio station WBAU and on WLIR, made that dynamic the basis of the Public Enemy track “B Side Wins Again.” In the song’s central metaphor, Black America is the overlooked flipside of the country’s white mainstream culture.
Appropriately, “B Side Wins Again” made its debut on the B side of Public Enemy’s 1989 single “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos.” As with many of Public Enemy’s songs of the era, “B Side Wins Again” is a dense collage of samples, with the Bomb Squad assembling shards of songs by the Commodores, Kool & the Gang, and the Jazz Crusaders. A year later, a slightly remixed version of “B Side Wins Again” gained greater renown on Public Enemy’s third album Fear of a Black Planet, where it appropriately follows an instrumental titled “Leave This Off Your Fuckin’ Charts.”
Public Enemy revisited the song with “B Side Wins Again (Scattershot Remix)” on the 2002 album Revolverlution. Three years later, Chuck D guested on DJ Spooky and Slayer drummer Dave Lombardo’s version of “B Side Wins Again” for their album Drums of Death. In June 2025, Public Enemy began working the song into their concert setlists for the first time in over a decade, with Chuck D rapping just the fourth verse of “B Side Wins Again” during a show in Florence, Italy.
Three more essential Public Enemy deep cuts:
“Timebomb”
By the time Public Enemy’s debut album Yo! Bum Rush the Show was released in 1987, most hip-hop songs had adopted a structure of 16-bar verses in between choruses. “Timebomb,” however, was Chuck D’s old school tour de force, with 66 consecutive bars and no hook.
“Security of the First World”
Public Enemy never scored a Top Ten single, but they influenced a lot of popular music. “Security of the First World,” a brief instrumental from 1988’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, became the basis of a No. 1 pop hit when Lenny Kravitz sampled it for Madonna’s 1990 single “Justify My Love.”
“Move!”
Bronx rapper Sister Souljah replaced Professor Griff as Public Enemy’s ‘Minister of Information’ and made her on-record debut on “Move!” from Apocalypse 91… The Enemy Strikes Black. A year later, Sister Souljah released a solo album, and her comments to the Washington Post about the L.A. riots became a flashpoint of controversy during Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign.
Link to the source article – https://www.spin.com/2025/11/deep-cut-friday-b-side-wins-again-by-public-enemy/
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