Can't Stop Won't Stop (47 page)

Where Jackson's presidential run had failed, demographics kept the Rainbow dream alive. The city was now more than half nonwhite, suggesting that a progressive coalition of nonmajority groups could win. Black Manhattan Borough President David Dinkins emerged as a popular mayoral favorite to reduce tensions and heal divisions. A Tribe Called Quest's Phife Dawg pleaded on “Can I Kick It?”: “Mr. Dinkins, will you please be my mayor? You'd be doing us a really big favor.”

Dinkins trounced Koch in the Democratic primary. Then, handily defeating Republican candidate Rudy Giuliani, he was elected the city's first Black mayor. But the “gorgeous mosaic” he had described in his campaign speeches was never to be. Just two and a half weeks into office, Dinkins saw it smashed.

After an afternoon encounter in the Red Apple Grocery between Korean shopkeeper Bong Ok Jang and Haitian customer Ghiselaine Felissaint—some say Jang beat her, others say he didn't—an angry crowd of Black Caribbeans formed outside the grocery. One fearful Korean worker bolted across the street to another Korean-owned store, Church Fruits. Two days later, a formal boycott of both stores began.

To the boycott spokesperson Sonny Carson and others, Korean Americans were the new Jews. Carson told Professor Claire Jean Kim, “The boycotts weren't aimed at the Koreans themselves. The boycotts were aimed at the attitude of people coming into our community and taking advantage of what the system allowed to have, to provide them a place to continue to rip us off, that the crackers had done before they got here.”
⁴⁷

The truth was much more complicated. In many cases, Korean Americans had bought or rented from Jewish or Italian Americans, who then became their wholesale suppliers. Korean Americans often complained that these whites gave them discriminatory prices and treated them in a racist manner. These arguments sometimes rose to the level of physical confrontation, and Koreans had launched their own boycotts against white wholesalers.
⁴⁸

But from winter cold through summer heat, the Flatbush boycott continued for eight months, leaving Korean Americans and African Americans tense and the progressive coalition in ruins. In Crown Heights the following August, relations between Blacks and Jews reached a horrific new low in two days of rioting following the hit-and-run killing of a Black boy by a Lubavitcher Jewish driver, and the subsequent murder of a Hasidic scholar by a group of black teens.

Mayor David Dinkins's one-and-done term was in for three long lame-duck years. The Rainbow dream and the 1960s idealism that birthed it had suffered a death blow.

But Public Enemy was staging a comeback. After several weeks of media silence, Chuck issued a press release on August 1—both his and Griff's birthday—announcing that the group was back in effect, that James Norman was now the Minister of Information and that Griff had taken on the title of Supreme Allied Chief of Community Relations.

“The show must go on. Brace yourselves for 1990,” the press release read. “We're still pro-Black, pro–Black culture and pro–human race. Please direct any further questions to Axl Rose.”

Hank and Bill were preparing to launch SOUL. By the fall, Griff, still a source of tension, had landed a record deal with Luther Campbell's Luke Records and
left the group. Chuck, Flavor, Keith and Eric holed up to start work on the new Public Enemy album.

But the controversy would not die. Chuck's words were now under close scrutiny. His next single, “Welcome to the Terrordome,” did not disappoint. “Terrordome” was the sound of 1989, not as Chuck had imagined it for “Fight the Power,” but as it actually went down. It was full of indirection and blind rage.

Two lines in particular—”Told the rab to get off the rag” and “Crucifixion ain't no fiction, so-called chosen frozen, apologies made to whoever please, still they got me like Jesus”—caused the JDO and ADL to renew calls for boycotts. Even Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, who had taken Chuck on a tour of the Holocaust Museum, was wondering what had gotten into him.

The
New York Post
devoted a lead editorial to the boycott: “Jews should make their attitude toward this ugly development clear and unmistakable—by boycotting Public Enemy. Blacks and other foes of racism who fail to join the boycott effort should not continue to expect the sympathy and financial support from Jews they have come to rely on.”
⁴⁹
Public Enemy, it seemed, had now become important enough to compel mainstream tabloids to pronounce judgment. In an odd way, it was a measure of how far the cultural radicals had moved in just a few years.

Chuck called his detractors “paranoid” and defended his lyrics in the
Washington Post
, “ ‘Apology made to whoever pleases'—I came out and made the apology but ‘still they got me like Jesus,' which doesn't imply that the Jewish community is crucifying me, but that I got crucified by the media and the media hype coming afterwards. I'm not comparing myself to Jesus.”
⁵⁰

The controversy overshadowed the fact that “Terrordome” included some of the most personal lines Chuck had ever penned. It began with the group's formation and implosion, then moved on in the second and third verse to confront his accusers. The allegedly anti-Semitic middle verses had garnered all the attention. But much of the first verse seemed to be directed at his own crew, perhaps even Griff, Hank and Bill Stephney:

Now I can't protect a paid-off defect

Check the record

And reckon an intentional wreck

Played off as some intellect

Made the call, took the fall

Broke the laws

Not my fault that they're falling off

Known as fair square throughout my years

At the top of the last verse, he rapped, “It's weak to speak and blame somebody else, when you destroy yourself.” Then he closed the song by returning to the big picture: the murder of Yusuf Hawkins; the Labor Day anti-police riots at the annual Black Greek festival in Virginia Beach where thousands had defiantly chanted “Fight the power!” He reaffirmed his ideal: that rap had the power to unify and confront through a revolution of the mind. “Move as a team, never move alone,” he concluded, “but welcome to the Terrordome.”

Perhaps because he has worked so hard in the intervening years to reconcile with all of his old friends, Chuck will not confirm that some of lines in “Terror-dome” were aimed toward his own crew. Instead he says, “It was directed toward everybody. It was my ‘Leave Me the Fuck Alone' song! It was with that song that I assumed leadership of everything. For real. This is what it's going to be whether you like it or not.”

Harry Allen stepped in as the group's publicist. Armed with an arched brow, a Macintosh fax program and stacks of files and books, Harry immediately got to work. Taking a page from the conservative Heritage Foundation, he used weekly faxes to strike back at the group's attackers and to force the discussion of Public Enemy back into the context of race and racism.

Harry shocked white critics by enclosing with the advance cassettes of the new album photocopies of author Frances Cress-Welsing's “Cress Theory of Color Confrontation and Racism”—a two-decade-old Afrocentric tract that was enjoying popular revival in Black communities. Cress-Welsing believed the roots of white world supremacy lay in the white race's melanin deficiency. Their neurosis over being a shrinking numerical minority, she argued, led them to establish a system of racial oppression.

White critics were mystified. Did these guys really believe this claptrap? Were they spoiling for another Griff-type fight? Harry and Chuck played it coy. “Does the word
oversimplification
mean anything to you?” Harry joked in a letter to them.
⁵¹

The album was entitled
Fear of a Black Planet
. For better or worse, it was going to be a hip-hop world now.

Eazy E: Aiming straight at your arteries.
Photo © B
⁺

 

 

We want “poems that kill.”

Assassin poems, Poems that shoot

guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys

and take their weapons leaving them dead

—Amiri Baraka

They shot bullets that brought streams of blood and death. Death. From the age of seven on, Jonathan saw George only during prison visits. He saw his brother living with the reality of death, every day, every hour, every moment.

—Angela Davis

When nineteen-year-old O'Shea Jackson returned to South Central Los Angeles in the summer of 1988, he was hopeful. All he had ever wanted to do in life was rap, and now it looked like he might be able to make something of it. Arizona had been hell—hot, dry and boring. Still, his architectural drafting degree from the Phoenix Institute of Technology might get moms and pops off his back for a few months, and within that time perhaps he could write some rhymes, make some records, cash some checks and soon move out of his folks' house.

Just two years before, he had been a junior at Taft High School, bused from his home in South Central to the suburbs of San Fernando Valley, slipping out on the weekend to grab the microphone at Eve's After Dark nightclub in Compton as the rapper named Ice Cube. He and his partners Tony “Sir Jinx” Wheatob and Darrell “K-Dee” Johnson had a group named C.I.A. (Criminals In Action). They dropped sex rhymes to shocked, delighted crowds over the hits of the day.
It was a silly act—Dolemite karaoke over UTFO beats—but it was getting attention. Eve's was owned by Alonzo Williams, and because of Alonzo, Eve's was the place to be. A smooth-talking type who had secured a contract from CBS Records for his recording project, the World Class Wreckin Cru, Lonzo used the money to build a studio in back of the club to lure producing and rapping talent.

Eric Wright was in the crowd every weekend, prowling for talent. Wright had seen the South Central hip-hop scene mature around him in the early eighties. Now the diminutive twenty-three-year-old drug dealer hoped to make some quick cash on rap, a way to go legit after years of hustling. At Eve's, Wright would catch Antoine “DJ Yella” Carraby and Andre “Dr. Dre” Young spinning records. They were members of the Cru, had a mixtape side-hustle going and were learning to make beats in Lonzo's studio. They were also two of the first DJs on KDAY's AM hip-hop radio station to join the taste-making Mixmasters Crew. New tracks that they played on the weekends often became Monday's hottest sellers.

Dre, his cousin Tony and O'Shea had been neighbors in the South Central neighborhood near Washington High School, and Dre had taken a liking to the C.I.A. boys, especially Jackson, with whom he formed a side group called Stereo Crew. He got them a gig at Skateland where he was DJing. He told them how and what to rap—filthy, dirty-down X-rated rhymes. After they stole the show and got invited back, he helped them make mixtapes to get their name out, got them a shot a Eve's, and eventually, a deal to do a single for Lonzo's Kru-Cut Records.

Dre kicked in the bass for C.I.A.'s three cuts. “My Posse” and “Ill-Legal” were Beastie Boys' bites that replaced references to White Castle with lines about cruising down Crenshaw. On the third track, “Just 4 the Cash,” Cube rapped, “It's all about making those dollars and cents.” Now they were indemnified to Lonzo, who gave them all tiny weekly stipends instead of royalty checks.
¹

Wright had begun talking to Dre, Yella and Jackson individually. Wright told Jackson he would put them all together and form a South Central supergroup. Why not? Jackson figured. “Eazy had a partner named Ron-De-Vu, Dre was in the World Class Wreckin Cru, I was in C.I.A.,” recalls Jackson. “We all kinda was committed to these groups so we figured we'd make an all-star group and just do dirty records on the side.”

So one night early in 1987, Young and Wright were in Lonzo's studio with a stack of rhymes that Jackson had penned. Wright had bought some time for an East Coast duo called HBO that Dre had found. The idea was that the duo's slower New York–styled cadences and accents would be more marketable than the uptempo techno-pop rhymes that sold everywhere else—Seattle, San Francisco, Miami, Los Angeles. New York, after all, was supposed to represent the epitome of authenticity. But this notion would soon be obsolete.

In the early 1980s, one prominent node on the Los Angeles hip-hop map was a downtown club called Radio. It was modeled on the Roxy's “Wheels of Steel” night, and presided over by local rap kingpin Ice T and jet-setting Zulu Nation DJ Afrika Islam.

New York–style b-boying went off there, but West Coast styles dominated the dancefloor. There was locking, a funk style dance started by the Watts crew, the Campbellockers, in the early ‘70s; popping, a surging, stuttering elaboration of The Robot, pioneered by Fresno dancer Boogaloo Sam, that would later show up in New York as the Electric Boogaloo; and strutting, a style that had come down from San Francisco's African-American and Filipino ‘hoods to take hold with L.A.'s Samoan gangs.
²