Can't Stop Won't Stop (44 page)

Many compared rappers to
griots
—the mythmakers, genealogists, praise singers, oral historians and social critics of Senegambian society. “One would expect the griots to be valued members of their societies,” wrote Robert Palmer in
Deep Blues
, “but in fact they are both admired, for they often attain considerable reputations and amass wealth, and despised, for they are thought to consort with evil spirits, and their praise songs, when not properly rewarded, can become venomous songs of insult.”
²⁰
By definition, griots were not leaders, much less messiahs. They were a separate caste, an outcast class.

But many elders insisted that rappers, who clearly had the ability to move the media like no one since the Panthers, take their place in the community as leaders. At Howard University in 1987, Bill Stephney found himself on a panel discussion with Amiri Baraka, dub poet Mutabaruka, and musician James Mtume. The three asserted that rappers should be held to revolutionary standards of leadership. Stephney was aghast.

He argued, “Woe be it unto a community that has to rely on rappers for political leadership. Because that doesn't signify progress, that signifies default. Now that our community leaders cannot take up their responsibility, you're gonna leave it up to an eighteen-year-old kid who has mad flow? What is the criteria by which he has risen to his leadership? He can flow? That's the extent of it? If our leadership is to be determined by an eighteen-year-old without a plan, then we're in trouble. We're
fucked
.”

The elders protested, wondered if he wasn't just trying to duck responsibility. A young woman stood up in the audience to defend Stephney. She was Lisa Williamson, the anti-apartheid and anti-racist activist who was one of the most visible student leaders of the day. In three years, she would transform herself into Sister Souljah and join the Public Enemy camp as a self-described “raptivist.” In this generation, it was no longer about being a cultural
worker
, but being a political
rapper
. Stephney muses, “It was a reversal of the process.”

Chuck had begun to recognize his role, and with it, his limits. In a generation, George Clinton's “Chocolate City” talk about painting the White House black
and filling it with cultural icons like Muhammad Ali, Richard Pryor and Aretha Franklin was no longer a joke—it was what folks actually seemed to be asking for. But to call yourself a Black Panther of rap was one thing, to replace the Party was another.

“I'm not a politician, I'm a dispatcher of information,” Chuck D complained to John Leland. “People are always looking to catch me in fucking doubletalk and loopholes. They're looking to say, ‘Damn, in this interview he said that, and in this interview he said that.' They treat me like
I'm
Jesse Jackson.”
²¹

Chuck fashioned a new soundbite, describing a role he felt more capable of fulfilling. “In five years,” he would say, “we intend to have cultivated five thousand Black leaders. Maybe another Marley or a Jesse Jackson, a Marcus Garvey or another Louis Farrakhan.”
²²
And if that seemed to some to be a political retreat, it still ranked as one of the most ambitious claims ever advanced on behalf of art.

In the summer of 1988, thirty-one-year-old Spike Lee began filming
Do the Right Thing
in Bed-Stuy. Lee wrote and directed the movie, and it had been already rejected by one studio that found the ending too controversial. Angered at the white liberal platitudes of Steven Spielberg's
The Color Purple
and Alan Parker's
Mississippi Burning
, inspired by the Howard Beach incident and buoyed by the rising tide of cultural activism, Lee wanted to capture life on one racially tense Brooklyn block on the hottest day of the year. The movie would become a polarizing force in an already us-or-them kind of time.

He inserted himself in the lead as Mookie, an around-the-way Brooklyn guy in a Jackie Robinson jersey delivering pizzas for Sal's Famous Pizzeria. Mookie was, in film critic Ed Guerrero's words, a “b-boy survivalist,” less aquaboogieing than treading water, committed to nothing but making ends.
²³
His employers were an Italian-American family that drove daily from their Bensonhurst home to their commercial establishment in Bed-Stuy. Sal embodied nostalgia for the good old days of the Dodgers, when Black meant underdog, not majority. His eldest son, Pino, was hardened before his time, struggling with the fact that his father chose not to sell the pizzeria even as Bed-Stuy became unrecognizable. The youngest, Vito, was sweet, liberal and, in Pino's mind, hopelessly naive.

Their chief antagonist, Buggin' Out, played by half-Italian, half-Black actor Giancarlo Esposito, was a beetle-eyed political rad with attitude, issuing demands for Black faces on the Pizzeria's Wall of Fame—a comic play on Lee's own battle for representation. Radio Raheem was the strong, silent cultural rad, his face flickering minutely between menace and mask, letting his heroes, Public Enemy, project his anger from his omnipresent boombox. In his worldview, self-hatred and self-love were at constant war beneath his skin.

When Sal refused Buggin' Out's demands and forced Raheem to turn off his radio, the two teamed for an impromptu protest in the pizzeria. The result was a battered, silenced boombox, a do-or-die struggle between Sal and Raheem and a chain of events that would lead to Raheem's death, Michael Stewart-style, at the hands of NYPD. Only then would Mookie finally take a stand, tossing a garbage can through his employer's window. A riot ensued, culminating with Smiley, the neighborhood idiot who never smiled, striking the match as the block chanted, “Howard Beach! Howard Beach!” In this climax, Lee brought together newsreel images of the northern Black power riots of Harlem and Newark and the southern civil rights demonstrations of Birmingham and Montgomery in the context of the fraught new era of brutality and reaction.

Stuttering Smiley, whose very speech seemed paralyzed by the grandiloquent inquiries of Martin and Malcolm (“The ballot or the bullet?” “Where do we go from here?”), stepped through the flames to pin a postcard of them on the Wall of Fame, depicting the two unredeemed martyrs laughing and shaking hands in their only historic meeting. Then he allowed himself a private, inscrutable Sly Stone smile. The movie closed with opposing quotes from King and X on the question of violence as protest. Lee had offered no solutions. The power of Lee's statement lay in its dead-end generational rage and confusion.

Through no fault of Lee's, the movie opened on June 30, just two months after the sensational Central Park rape case, in which a group of Black male teenagers from Harlem were accused of a “wilding” rampage through the park culminating in a gang rape of a white female investment banker. (Years later, DNA evidence led a judge to overturn the five convictions, after each of the boys had become men, serving between seven and thirteen years in prison.)
Do the Right Thing
was greeted by a spasm of panic. Jack Kroll wrote in
Newsweek
, “To put it bluntly: in this long hot summer, how will young urban audiences—Black and white—react to the film's climactic explosion of interracial violence?”
²⁴

Lee's film turned mild-mannered film critics into political prognosticators.
New York
magazine's David Denby wrote, “[I]f Spike Lee is a commercial opportunist, he's also playing with dynamite in an urban playground. The response to the movie could get away from him.”
²⁵
Political pundits turned film critics, too. In a famous column,
New York
magazine political writer Joe Klein argued, “His film . . . is more trendoid than tragic, reflecting the latest riffs in hip Black separatism rather than taking an intellectually honest look at the problems he's nibbling around.”
²⁶

Klein wrote that white liberals would passionately debate what Lee meant to say. “Black kids,” he wrote, “won't find it so hard, though. For them, the message is clear from the opening credits, which roll to the tune of “Fight the Power,” performed by Public Enemy, a virulently anti-Semitic rap group:
The police are your enemy . . . White people are your enemy
. . .”
²⁷

But objections to Lee's film were not just racial, they were generational, too. In
The Village Voice
, Stanley Crouch compared Lee to Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl, and wrote, “
Do the Right Thing
, for all its wit, is the sort of rancid fairy tale one expects of the racist, whether or not Lee actually is one.”
²⁸
If Chuck D had pointed the finger at Crouch's generation for selling the race down the river, Crouch pointed the finger back. He wrote:

Intellectual cowardice, opportunism and the itch for riches by almost any means necessary define the demons within the Black community. The demons are presently symbolized by those Black college teachers so intimidated by career threats that they don't protest students bringing Louis Farrakhan on campus, by men like Vernon Mason who sold out a good reputation in a cynical bid for political power by pimping real victims of racism in order to smoke-screen Tawana Brawley's lies, by the crack dealers who have wrought unprecedented horrors and by Afro-fascist race baiters like Public Enemy who perform on the soundtrack to
Do the Right Thing
.
²⁹

The further critics got from the theater, the more the question hardened: come on, Spike, just exactly what
is
the right thing? In these upside-down times, political pundits and cultural critics wanted what they had little right to expect. Pundits snorted at platforms and proposals; instead, they turned politicians like Jesse Jackson into tragedies, and forced them to beg for redemption. Critics wanted from Spike Lee and Public Enemy the bland precision of diplomacy; instead, they got messy, plexus-pounding, fire-starting art.

Lee himself presented a strange mix of unblinking sincerity and brusque impenetrability that made him a seductive mainstream media subject. Suddenly Lee seemed more in demand as a race man than even Congressional Black Caucus head Ron Dellums. Once again, the questions haunted: Who speaks for young Black America? Were Black artists the new Black leaders? If they were, what did they really have to say?

Lee had commissioned Public Enemy to do the title track, for which Chuck, Keith and Eric put together “Fight the Power.” His idea for the video was to stage a “Young People's March to End Racial Violence.” Ads went out on urban radio to drum up turnout for the event.

On the day of the march, “Fight the Power” T-shirts were handed out to the youths, as well as placards featuring images of Angela Davis, Jesse Jackson, Paul Robeson, Frederick Douglass, Medgar Evers, Thurgood Marshall, Marcus Garvey, Muhammad Ali and the Public Enemy logo. Pickets reading “Brooklyn,” “Montgomery,” “Selma,” “Philadelphia,” “Wash. D.C.,” “Miami” and “Watts,” as well as “S1Ws,” “Flavor Flav” and “Terminator X,” were distributed into the crowd. Then they marched a mile up from the Eastern Parkway to the block where the movie had been shot.

There the group performed the song on a red, black and green stage framed by a large photo of Malcolm X, as the crowd danced and mugged for the cameras. The presentation was street demonstration, Black pride march and rap concert, as if the 1972 National Black Political Assembly had been transformed into a millennial Brooklyn block party.

Lee opened the video with historic footage of the 1963 March on Washington. Chuck broke in, “Young Black America, we rolling up with seminars, press
conferences and straight-up rallies. Am I right? We gonna get what we got to get coming to us. We ain't going out like that ‘63 nonsense.” Then it began with Chuck proclaiming, “1989! The number, another summer,” marking the moment for history.

It was just a seven-minute short to promote a record, a group, a brand. But the video also seemed to firmly establish Chuck's cultural authority. Public Enemy's first video, for “Night of the Living Baseheads,” was amateurish, almost a parody of Chuck's rap-as-CNN idea. But on “Fight the Power,” Lee placed Chuck in the streets amidst the likenesses of Black power fighters, one new Black icon anointing another.

Chuck was reluctant to be seen as his generation's Malcolm X or Paul Robe-son. He wanted to provoke, not to lead. But after this video, the question would be out of his hands. Public Enemy had gone, as Bill Stephney says, “from a rap group playing the Latin Quarter with Biz and Shan and Run and Whodini to now being the saviors of the Black community.” Soon they would be forced to confront a crisis that would test both Chuck's leadership of the group and the group's leadership within the community.

As the summer of 1989 opened, Chuck was ready for controversy. He says, “I remember specifically when I did ‘Fuck him and John Wayne.' I was totally prepared to handle all that shit.” Then Professor Griff gave an interview to David Mills of the
Washington Times
.

Chuck recalls, “It was almost like I'm going in to make a tackle and I get cross-body-blocked by a 500-pounder like out of nowhere, man, knocking me entirely out of the play. I was ready to go after John Wayne and Elvis with a vengeance, and then all of a sudden—blaaaau! Now I'm fucking getting chased. I'm scrambling in the pocket, man. I'm like, what the fuck? I can't throw this shit out of bounds!”

In fact, by the time they shot the “Fight the Power” video, Public Enemy was beginning to unravel.
It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back
had gone platinum and raised the industry's expectations for the group. But the original decision-making core of Chuck, Hank and Bill was coming apart.