Professional ratings
Review scores
Source	Rating
AllMusic
Chicago Tribune
Entertainment Weekly	B
Los Angeles Times
Q
Rolling Stone
The Rolling Stone Album Guide
The Source	2.5/5
The Village Voice	A−

Muse Sick-n-Hour Mess Age is the fifth studio album by American hip hop group Public Enemy, released on August 23, 1994, by Def Jam Recordings. Its title is a stylization of the phrase "music in our message" (or "music and our message"). The album debuted at number 14 on the U.S. Billboard 200 chart, selling 56,000 copies in its first week.

Upon its release, Muse Sick-n-Hour Mess Age received generally mixed to positive reviews from most music critics, amid controversy among critics and fans over Public Enemy's relevance in hip hop at the time.

Due to a change of the album's release date, negative reviews from publications such as Rolling Stone and The Source were published a month prior to the album's first sales week. In spite of this, Muse Sick-n-Hour Mess Age fared better with its first week sales of 56,000 copies than most of Public Enemy's previous albums. The album quickly fell off the charts, as sales were negatively impacted by Def Jam's move from Sony Music to PolyGram during its release.

According to music journalist Neil Strauss, music critics initially accused Public Enemy of "being out of touch, of launching a weak attack against the trend toward gangster rap, of writing second-rate rhymes, of producing the album poorly, of using a bad pun for the title ('music in our message') and of being too old".

Spin (8/94, p. 84) - Highly Recommended - "Knee deep in the age of gangsta, at the anticlimactic millennial edge of a world already gone wrong, Public Enemy has dropped its latest."

Entertainment Weekly (8/26 - 9/2, p. 112) - "...it takes true guts to dis gangsta rap and to challenge the black community to confront its problems..." - Rating: B

Q magazine (9/94, p. 106) - 4 Stars - Excellent - "Fact is, the lay off has just made Public Enemy sound fresh again...because they've regained the wicked combination of sonic disturbance and loose, rabblerousing funk that drove classic jams like 911 is A Joke."

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