Which is a stranger thought — that Public Enemy's days as hip-hop's single most important, relevant group has now been over for more than twice as long as they had lasted? Or that Public Enemy was ever important and relevant in the first place?

It's my hope, at least, the majority of you would have answered with the former; PE's glory days may have taken leave of them long before the dawn of the 21st century — a glance at VH1's program schedule is enough to confirm as much — but their importance to hip-hop history, popular music history, and just plain history in general is one thing that can never be overstated.

These guys were, at one point in time, the cutting edge for rap music: an incisive Molotov cocktail of street rhymes, dense samplescapes, and radical Black politics, the likes of which has never been seen before or since. I'm not saying political rap didn't exist outside of Public Enemy, either before or after the release of their 1987 debut LP Yo! Bum Rush the Show, but I am saying their prescient combination of progressive lyrics and progressive production has never quite been replicated, not even after more than a quarter century of rap music at its highest profile. Even if Public Enemy always was ahead of their time, there's still a nagging sense that "their time" hasn't quite arrived.

That's why the mere appearance of MKLVFKWR, a DVD which captures a complete concert in Manchester from the now three-year-old Revolverlution tour, is in itself a little disappointing. Back in their heyday, Public Enemy would never dream of releasing three-year-old material, not even as a stopgap video collection. This was a group who sang about what was happening today to be listened to tomorrow; a group so supremely of-the-moment that when snippets from a 1987 London Hammersmith Odeon concert appeared on It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, they were a mere five months old — and that was in the vinyl era!

Meanwhile, in a day and age when bootleggers can videotape a concert on a Friday and have it captured and uploaded onto YouTube by Monday, here's Public Enemy putting out a video that predates George W. Bush's second presidential term. Times have certainly changed.

In fact, this could be said to be the theme for MKLVFKWR: Manchester UK Live in general. One of the most interesting things about this DVD is just getting to see how a PE show goes down these days. For starters, the Security of the First World seems to have been downsized to just two guys standing stock-still in berets (they've traded in their Uzis for nightsticks, too, unless that's just a coy reference to the UK's gun control laws), while Public Enemy's trademark rapid-fire barrage of samples is sometimes bolstered, sometimes replaced with live drums, bass, and guitar. This makes for some radically different, more guitar-driven arrangements for many classic songs, which, incidentally, are often condensed into the kind of "get 'em out of the way" medleys Prince has specialized in since he became a Symbol.