This came out in 2001 – or at least that’s when I got it. Here’s what I said about it back then (with some minor editing):
Everything old is new again on this latest solo dispatch from Chuck D’s old pal Professor Griff.
And the Word Became Flesh finds Public Enemy’s so-called Minister of Information becoming a Minister of Reformation, re-recording a slate of old PE tracks and tunes from his four previous albums (along with three new tunes). The reworkings aren’t just for nostalgia’s sake, mind; these versions take a new run at the old material, stripping away much of PE’s metallic hip-hop bluster and replacing it with cutting-edge loops and low-funk grooves that revamp the tracks into more textural, spoken-word pieces. The point? Perhaps to show that musical styles and societal fads come and go, but the underlying messages and problems — the poverty, the ghetto politics and racist realities depicted in cuts like Imagination and The Late Great Blackman — don’t change. Or maybe it was just easier than writing a whole bunch of new words.
