Can't Stop Won't Stop (40 page)

For the hip-hop generation, popular culture became the new frontline of the struggle. While the political radicals fought a rear-guard defense against rightwing
attacks on the victories of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, the cultural radicals stormed the machines of mythmaking. Their intention was not only to take their message into the media, but take
over
the media with their message. Pop music, rap radio, indie film, cultural journalism—these could all be staging areas for guerilla strikes.

After Public Enemy finished
Yo! Bum Rush the Show
, Chuck came down to reconnect with Harry. Chuck was angry that, while white critics were excoriating him for his pro-Black nationalism, Black radio had remained indifferent to Public Enemy's music and message.

Black radio was a medium that survived on a paradox: integration had made it both obsolete and more necessary than ever. Before the ‘60s, Black radio had been a crucial space for marginalized Black voices. As the 1970s proceeded, it began to reflect the desires of a professional class trying to make good in the white world. The reactionary 1980s demanded an outlet for a resurgent rage against racism that united the middle class and the so-called underclass. But, caught up in the crossover, black radio was now afraid of being “too black.” Chuck found this state of affairs maddening.

He and Harry sat down to plot an attack. The result was an article in the February 1988 issue of
Black Radio Exclusive
, an industry magazine targeted at Black music executives. In the interview, Chuck unleashed his 2,000-pound Uzi on the Black bourgeoisie. He said, “R&B
teaches
you to shuffle your feet, be laid back, don't be offensive, don't make no waves because,
look at us! We're fitting in as well as we can!
”
¹⁴

Picking up a copy of
BRE
, he read it aloud: “ ‘
Favorite Car
: Mercedes Sports.
Favorite vacation spot
: Brazil . . . Look at them! They're going for Mercedes, Audis and BMWs . . . And this is what all these boot-lickin', handkerchief-head, materialistic niggers want!”

Harry, playing the straight man, protested, “But Chuck,
BRE
is a music trade journal, not a mass circulation newspaper or magazine.”

“But even so, Black radio has its responsibilities. The question they ought to be answering is, ‘How we gonna make our listeners, the Black nation, rise?' ” Chuck said, alluding to a never-aired rap classic by Brother D and The Collective
Effort. “The juggernaut of white media never stops. We have to build a system that consistently combats and purifies that info that Black America gets through the media. Instead, Black radio is pushing a format that promises ‘More Music, Less Talk,' which is the worst thing.

“The point is that there's no hard information in any of these formats. Where's the news about our lives in this country? Whether or not radio plays us, millions of people listen to rap because rap is America's TV station. Rap gives you the news on all phases of life, good and bad, pretty and ugly: drugs, sex, education, love, money, war, peace—you name it.”
¹⁵

In time, this idea would harden into Chuck's most famous soundbite, that rap was Black America's CNN, an alternative, youth-controlled media network that could pull a race fragmented by integration back together again. Here was the meaning of the media bumrush: to force media—Black or white—inimical to the interests of young Blacks to expose itself, and to break open a space for these voiceless to represent themselves more truthfully.

At the end of the article, in bold, read this disclaimer: “The interview with Chuck D in no way reflects the views of Columbia Records.”

And so the Trojan horse rolled through the gates. Bill Adler and indie publicist Leyla Turkkan pitched Chuck D to rock editors and writers as “the new Bob Dylan.” In a year, Chuck D had probably done more interviews than any other rapper to that point. “Our interviews,” Chuck says, “were better than most people's shows.”

Chuck treated his mostly white interrogators as adversaries. He often maumaued them, as if to extract a toll for every patronizing indignity and every highway robbery ever suffered by an old-schooler. He had never forgotten how the media treated Run DMC, and this antagonistic stance remained a constant for Public Enemy's first decade. When Harry Allen later became the crew's publicist, he added the additional honorific of “Director of Enemy Relations.”

The British tabloid music press found this package irresistible, and with a strange mixture of fanboy irony, Frankfurt School skepticism and thinly disguised racial fear, they began calling Public Enemy the world's most dangerous band. Their music was so good it was scary. Their idea that rap should advance the
radicalism of the Black Panthers and the Black Muslims—and that the white media's role was simply to transmit these messages—was even scarier.

In fact, Public Enemy was still trying to figure out what it was about. Stephney watched from the Def Jam offices as Chuck went out on the road and had an epiphany. Chuck told a reporter, “When kids have no father image, who fulfills that role? The drug dealer in the neighborhood? Motherfucking Michael Jordan? Rappers come along and say, ‘This is everything you want to be. You want to be like me, I'm your peer, and I talk to you every day.' So the kid is being raised by LL Cool J, because LL Cool J is talking to the kid more directly than his parents ever did.”
¹⁶

Public Enemy's worldview began with a scathing generational critique of Black America. In a 1987 interview with Simon Reynolds, Chuck laid out his view of history:

There was a complacency in the ‘70s after the civil rights victories of the ‘60s. Plus some of our leaders were killed off, others sold out or fled. There was propaganda by the state to make it seem like things had changed, a policy of tokenism elevating a few Blacks to positions of prominence, on TV shows and stuff, while the rest was held down. Blacks couldn't understand how they'd suddenly got these advantages, and so they forgot, they got lazy, they failed to teach their young what they had been taught in the sixties about our history and culture, about how
tight
we should be. And so there was a loss of
identity
—we began to think we were accepted as Americans, when in fact we
still
face a double-standard every minute of our lives.
¹⁷

Public Enemy's theme was Black collectivity, the one thing that had been lost in the post–Civil Rights bourgeois individualist goldrush. Over the years, rap groups had shrunk down to duos, but Public Enemy brought the crew back. They rolled deep, because Black people always overcame through strength in numbers. The S1Ws epitomized the crew's values: strength, unity, self-defense and survival skills. They carried plastic Uzis as props to show that they were not slaves. They were in control because they were armed with knowledge. Violence became their primary, and most often misunderstood, metaphor.

Stephney says, “In dealing with the apparent day-to-day, minute-by-minute cultural power that Chuck saw Public Enemy wield, I think he truly and legitimately believed that you could create a generation of young people who had a drive and ambition to make serious change and reform within the community.”

He adds, “Was it something that was mapped out by all of us at 510 South Franklin—a ten-point Panther-like plan on how we were going to take over the media? No.” As the crew moved out into the world and encountered resistance from white journalists who took their symbolism on its face, they began freestyling their message. Stephney chuckles, “A good portion of Public Enemy was jazz improvisation.”

Like Bambaataa, Chuck had been raised within his mother's embrace of Black Panther–styled revolutionary nationalism and anticolonial Pan-Africanism. On his first presidential election ballot, he voted for Gus Hall and Angela Davis, the Communist Party ticket. In rhyme, he boasted that he was “rejected and accepted as a communist.” He told a writer from the glossy teen zine
Right On!
: “We are talking about bringing back the Black Panther movement and Communism. That's dead serious. That's going a little too deep, but that's our edge.”
¹⁸

Yet he had also been raised on James Brown's “Say It Loud (I'm Black and I'm Proud),” and “I Don't Want Nobody to Give Me Nothing (Open the Door, I'll Get It Myself),” anthems that seemed not only to speak to the Black Panther's Sacramento takeover, but to the rise of the Booker T. Washington–like Black conservative movement that would push for economic self-sufficiency and the end of civil-rights programs like affirmative action. When Public Enemy was opening for the Beastie Boys, Professor Griff played cassettes of Farrakhan and Khallid Abdul Muhammad on the tour bus. Chuck listened closely. Here were the ultimate public enemies.

So Public Enemy's worldview did not adhere to traditional politics. Stephney, for instance, worked closely with civil rights organizations, and closely watched mainstream politics, but refused to join any political party. As Minister of Information, Griff told reporters Public Enemy was drawing on the thinking of Malcolm X, Mao Zedong, the Ayatollah Khomeini, Moammar Khaddafi, Winnie and Nelson Mandela and Minister Farrakhan.
¹⁹
As for Chuck, a self-declared
communist captivated by Farrakhan, he says now, “I don't know what I was. I definitely wasn't a capitalist. And I definitely wasn't American.”

In all of the crew's frequent discussions of politics, Stephney says, ideology had never come into question. Stephney admits, “In retrospect, I
wish
we had legitimate discourse about economic systems and what made sense and what didn't.” In his autobiography, Chuck did not describe his core philosophy in terms of ideology but instead something close to fraternal responsibility.

What Flavor believes and what Griff believes may be two different things, but they were both a part of Public Enemy. What Drew believes and what James Allen believes may be two different things. It's my job to bring it to a center point and say what's true for all of us. “We're Black, we fight for our people and we respect our fellow human beings.” Once you start getting into tit-for-tat rhetoric, then you fall into a sea full of contradiction.
²⁰

Stephney says, “Chuck sees much of what he does through the lens of sports. Teams. Teamwork. Working together as much as you possibly can until it may become too difficult on certain issues.” The concept of the public enemy brought together Huey Newton and Elijah Muhammad, Assata Shakur and Sister Ava Muhammad. Teamwork—an NBA-era take on Black collectivity—was a manifestation of Black love.

But white and Black critics alike began to bait Chuck and Griff, especially on questions of racial separatism, homosexuality and militarism. Griff and Chuck often responded with lines straight from Farrakhan's and Khallid Abdul Muhammad's speeches. It was agit-prop, theater, call and response. It got the desired rise out of journalists.

They read the crew's militaristic symbolism, Chuck's aggressive approach, Griff's sometimes bizarre pronouncements and Public Enemy's encompassing embrace of Black Marxism and Black Islam as revealing of undercurrents of violent fascism. After interviewing Chuck and Griff, Simon Reynolds wrote:

Ahem. What
can
I say? Rectitude in the face of chaos. An admiration for Colonel Khadaffi (“Blacks in America didn't know who to side with”). Harmonious totality. No faggots. Uniform and drill. It all sounds quite logical
and needed, the way they tell it. And it's all very very dodgy indeed.

If there's one thing more scary than a survivalist, it's a whole bunch of survivalists organised into a regiment . . . Fortunately, Public Enemy and Security of The First World are sufficiently powerless (“52 and growing”) to remain fascinating to us pop swots, rather than disturbing . . . Let's hope it stays that way.
²¹

Despite abhorring the crew's politics, the British music press took Public Enemy seriously enough to declare
Yo! Bum Rush the Show
one of the best albums of the year. Back home it was another story.

One key critic, John Leland, who wrote for
SPIN
and
The Village Voice
, set the tone early, ducking the group's politics entirely when he confessed that he found Chuck boring. “I like a good time,” he wrote, “and when Flavor Flav says he's got girls on his jock like ants on candy, or threatens to scatter suckers' brains from here to White Plains . . . yo that's when I'm hooked.”
²²

Stung by the criticism, Chuck told a British reporter he had gone looking for Leland at an industry reception to “fuck him up bad.”
²³
Later Chuck wrote “Don't Believe the Hype” and “Bring the Noise,” dumping his critics in the same wastebin as racist cops, corrupt conservatives and Black radio programmers. It was the first shot in what would become an increasingly vituperative relationship with the American press.

But the group also agreed to play a National Writer's Union benefit with Sonic Youth to support the freelancers' bitter fight for recognition against
The Village Voice
's management. “They do contradiction right,” wrote
Voice
columnistR. J. Smith, “like publicly dissing music crits for what they've said about Public Enemy and then coming off by far the most militant in their solidarity with writers. Like quoting Malcolm X and saying Blacks deserve $250 billion in reparations
and
playing a benefit on the 18th for Jesse.”
²⁴

None of this press stuff would matter much if they didn't sell records. And at that point, the album had barely sold 100,000 copies. Against the Def Jam/Rush roster—with Run DMC, Whodini, LL Cool J and the Beastie Boys all pushing platinum-plus—it was a huge disappointment.