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'I Never Thought Rap Could Be Put on a Record'
While LL Cool J needed love and Run-D.M.C. showed off their new pair of Adidas, there was a whole different kind of riot going on with Public Enemy. Over drums and noise, MC Chuck D - the hard rhymer - barked political slogans like "Fight the Power" with all the subtlety of a New York Post headline, and made rap sound a whole lot scarier in the process. Here, he traces PE's family tree and angry genesis.
VH1: Can you tell me what you thought the first time you heard Grandmaster Flash's "The Message"?
Chuck D: It was definitely a change for Grandmaster Flash, because they had done upbeat party tunes. When I first heard "The Message," I was actually on a dance floor in Queens. They played this new song by Grandmaster Flash and nobody could dance to it! That change actually took rap into a whole phase that was kind of like bread and milk for Public Enemy to exist on later on.
VH1: What kind of impact did James Brown have on your music?
Chuck D: James Brown had such an impact not only my music but my life. "Say it loud: I'm black and I'm proud," when I was 8 years old, was such a part of the fabric of my understanding of where we was at in 1967 and 1968. Before that, we were called "colored" and before that "Negroes." If you said you was black, people thought you were crazy. Then there was the groove. James Brown's band maintained that riff, that vamp, that loop to make you dance hard for a long time instead of just giving you that small break. Sometimes cats don't understand that without James Brown, there would be no rap.
VH1: How did the Last Poets influence Public Enemy?
Chuck D: They were able to put in words on top of music - what people were feeling at that time. It was a time of revolution. The Last Poets actually discussed these things. They had a profound influence on Public Enemy. So did Gil Scott Heron, as well as James Brown. Remember James Brown did some poetry pieces, too, like "King Heroin" and "Public Enemy Number One."
VH1: Were the Last Poets threatening to white audiences when they first emerged?
Chuck D: Of course they were. If they was actually accepted by mainstream America, you wouldn't be asking me these questions! They was underground. When you said Last Poets, it was synonymous with Black Panthers, Nation of Islam, all those other things that never floated to the mainstream. They represented the feeling of the people. They came out and said, "Niggers are scared of revolution." And revolution means change.
VH1: What did it mean to you when you heard them use the word "nigger" in a song?
Chuck D: It was shocking the first time I heard the word "nigger" in a song. But it wasn't like you could get a CD and walk upstairs and hear your own version of the Last Poets. Back then, if you had a record player, it was pretty much heard by the whole household. So as a child, I couldn't listen to Richard Pryor or the Last Poets. Maybe it would leak through by you listening from a far distance. But it's different from today.
VH1: When did you first realize the power of the medium?
Chuck D: I realized the power of the music and the medium as early as 1977. People would throw on something like Herman Kelley's "Dance to the Drummer's Beat" and I would see kids run half a block and do half a flip just to let this inner soul come out. I've never seen - and still to this day I haven't seen - as much bottled energy let out like a nuclear blast like I saw in hip-hop from '77 to '79, before the first rap records. I never thought that rap could be put on a record. It was a total party thing. One of the famed New York DJs, Eddie Cheever, would do these massive functions where he would rap. He was bragging about how he was going to do a record. I'm like, "That's ridiculous. How can you put rap on records? How you gonna put three hours of partying on a record?" When the first rap record came out, it was a 15-minute record by the Sugarhill Gang, "Rapper's Delight," the hottest record of the summer. The irony in that record was not how long that 15 minutes was, but how short that 15 minutes was. Because they condensed the whole party thing into 15 minutes.
VH1: How did Public Enemy get their start?
Chuck D: Public Enemy got started as mobile DJs in the Roosevelt area. Nothing was being done for young people. We took the ball up ourselves and decided to throw our own gigs and wave the banner of hip-hop, which was looked down upon. Hank Shocklee formed Spectrum City, a group of mobile DJs that played hip-hop and black dance music. I got recruited in 1979, worked with the organization, and for six or seven years we did everything else except make records. We moved in on a radio station at Adelphi University. We knew that we could actually combine our musical aspirations with the radio station and build a platform all in the name of hip-hop, and still be politically astute enough to say that we care about ourselves, we care about the young cats that's coming up, and we gonna do something about it if nobody else does.
VH1: How did you come up with the name Public Enemy?
Chuck D: Public Enemy was basically concocted from a song I made called "Public Enemy No. 1" for WBAU radio. Because I just chose to MC, one cat wanted to take me out. So I made this tape and roasted him. I put it on the radio, and called it "Public Enemy No. 1." It made it seem like cats were after me. Later on, when Rick Rubin wanted to sign us, we didn't have a name. Hank all of sudden just said, "Hey, call the group Public Enemy." That rang off bells, because we already was going in line with what we believed in.
VH1: What made you think you could take hip-hop and rap and mix it with a political agenda?
Chuck D: We knew that sense would outweigh nonsense as long as it was over the music. The music is what spoke volumes, although when Public Enemy first made music, our goal was to destroy the concept of music and go left field in that Ornette Coleman type of way. Our bottom line was that we have to perform it faster, stronger, amongst everybody else, and just keep going and pushing it. We'd force it down people's throats, as we'd have the same stage as the Whodinis and the Runs and the LLs. Because in the middle ages of hip-hop, the whole key was your differences from one another, not your similarities.
VH1: Did you feel that you were threatening to the establishment?
Chuck D: Hell, yeah. When we came up with the group Public Enemy, we knew that we would probably end by 1989. We drew references that America had problems with, like with the Nation of Islam. You look at black folks between [the ages of] 20 and 40 here in this country. That's probably the most powerless group of people - who really can't create change, can't employ their own, can't educate their own, can't enforce the rules to be changed in the community environment. That's a troubling aspect of the last 20 years that has probably been dictated through the process of trying to fit in and be cool, be safe. Public Enemy spoke against that. When that attention was raised, people were allowed to actually come into the marketplace as equals as far as images were concerned - on television and entertainment and mass media.
VH1: Do you think there's as much political leanings to the music as there was when you and KRS-One were rapping?
Chuck D: No. You have people like Dead Prez, Common, and the Goodie Mob in rap music who will say profound things. But they have to be able to develop their craft enough to appeal to the person who ain't trying to hear none of that. The only thing that can happen now is some real change to make their platform a lot better. You have a revolution of people rebelling against a bling-bling era. The bling-bling era is not totally a bad thing. It blasted the gangsta era dead, especially after Biggie got killed. That was just a turnoff to young kids. Then you had the bling-bling era, which was about partying and materialism. It's cool if you show people materialism, but they don't show them how they can get there. They don't say, "You got to get your education, you got to be able to run your community, you got to be able to do more things than sing, dance, dunk basketballs backwards, and tell jokes." That could be the next development.
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