Bum Rush the Show is the debut studio album by American hip hop group Public Enemy, released on February 10, 1987.

[3] Joe Brown of The Washington Post described the album's music as "a more serious brand of inner-city aggression", in comparison to Licensed to Ill (1986) by Def Jam label-mates the Beastie Boys.

[4] On its musical style, Brown wrote "Public Enemy's mean and minimalist rap is marked by an absolute absence of melody – the scary sound is just a throbbing pulse, hard drums and a designed-to-irritate electronic whine, like a dentist's drill or a persistent mosquito".

[5] Chicago Tribune writer Daniel Brogan described Public Enemy's style on the album as "raw and confrontational", writing that the group "doesn't aim to – or have a chance at – crossing over".

[6] According to music journalist Jeff Chang, Public Enemy embodied the "bumrush aesthetic" of underground black radicalism and used their debut album's cover to illustrate a resurgence in the spirit of militancy.

The cover features the group in a poorly lit basement, "readying themselves to bring black militancy back into the high noon of the Reagan day", as Chang described and compared to the 1987 Boogie Down Productions album Criminal Minded that followed.

Chuck D is shown dressed in white Islamic clothing, Professor Griff is on the far right wearing a red beret, and Flavor Flav has his hand reaching out over a turntable, which Chang interpreted as him blessing the vinyl record.

[11] In a review published in The Village Voice under the title "Noise Annoys", John Leland avoided the group's politics entirely and simply found Chuck D boring, instead preferring the more entertaining rhymes of Flavor Flav.

[23] Fellow Village Voice critic Robert Christgau said the group has "literary chops—amid puns more Elvis Costello than Peter Tosh, their 'Megablast' is cutting anticrack narrative-propaganda--and they make something personal of rap's ranking minimalist groove."

He found them lacking in levity, however, and complained that "Chuck D takes the bully-boy orotundity of his school of rap elocution into a realm of vocal self-involvement worthy of Pavarotti, Steve Perry, or the preacher at a Richard Pryor funeral.