Fear of A Black Planet - Concept

Concept

To follow-up It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, the group pursued a different direction, content-wise. According to Chuck D, they sought make a more thematically focused work and to condense Dr. Frances Cress Welsing's theory of "Color Confrontation and Racism (White Supremacy)" into an album-length recording, "telling people, well, color's an issue created and concocted to take advantage of people of various characteristics with the benefit of a few". He recalled their concept for the album in an interview for Billboard, "We wanted really to go with a deep, complex album more conducive to the high and lows of great stage-performance".

Chuck D also cited in their creative vision the commercial circumstances for hip hop at the time, having quickly transitioned from a singles to an album medium in the music industry during the 1980s. In an interview for Westword, he later said, "We understood the magnitude of what an album was, so we set out to make something that not only epitomized the standard of an album, but would stand the test of time by being diverse with sounds and textures, and also being able to home in on the aspect of peaks and valleys". On their musical direction, Chuck D said, "We wanted to create a new sound out of the assemblage of sounds that made us have our own identity When we made It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back we were shooting to make What’s Going On by Marvin Gaye and when we made Fear of a Black Planet I was shooting for Sgt. Pepper's."

The album's artwork followed Chuck D's concept of two planets, the "Black" planet and Earth, eclipsing. The group enlisted B.E. Johnson, a NASA illustrator, to create the cover. Cey Adams, creative director for Def Jam at the time, later said of the creative decision for the artwork, "It was so interesting to me that a black hip-hop act did an illustration for their album cover. At that time black hip-hop artists, for the most part, had photos of themselves on their covers. But this was the first time someone took a chance to do something in the rock'n'roll vein".