“What we need is awareness, we can’t get careless”
Hip-hop versus America
ONE DAY IN THE AUTUMN OF 1988, four men sat down to lunch in an Indian restaurant in Greenwich Village. One was the thirty-one-year-old film director Spike Lee. The other three—Carlton “Chuck D” Ridenhour, Hank “Shocklee” Boxley, and Bill Stephney—were members of Public Enemy, whose It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back album had just made them the most prominent hip-hop group in the country.
Lee had initiated the meeting to discuss the soundtrack to his next movie, Do the Right Thing. The movie’s location would be Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood on the hottest day of the year; the theme, racial unrest. Lee, Chuck D remembers, said he needed “an anthem to scream out against the hypocrisies and wrongdoings [of] the system.” There was talk of the group working with Lee’s regular collaborator, jazz composer Terence Blanchard, perhaps on an update of James Weldon Johnson’s “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” but Public Enemy had other ideas. They argued about it over lunch, and at a subsequent meeting. “I had a three-hour fight with him,” Hank Shocklee told Blender. “It was heated. I was in his office in Brooklyn saying, ‘Spike, kids don’t listen to “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing.” Open this window, stick your head outside and listen to the sound you hear coming out of cars and boxes.’”
In October, Public Enemy headed to Europe for a tour with Run-D.M.C., and Chuck wrote the bulk of this new song on planes and buses between shows. “Usually I would write from the title,” he says, and he borrowed this one from the 1975 Isley Brothers hit, “Fight the Power,” which he remembered because it was the first time he’d heard a curse word on the radio. The flashpoint in the movie is an argument between obstreperous radical Buggin’ Out and bullish Italian restaurateur Sal over the absence of black faces on the pizzeria’s wall of fame, which led Chuck to chew over the underrepresentation of black icons in U.S. culture: “Most of my heroes don’t appear on no stamps.” He remembered an old narrative track, “Rapp Dirty,” by the ribald funk performer Clarence “Blowfly” Reid, in which a Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan tells a black man, “Motherfuck you and Muhammad Ali.” “I was like, wow,” says Chuck. “So I decided to reverse the charges of the song.” He opted to take down two of white America’s Olympian icons with one explosive shot: “Elvis was a hero to most / But he never meant shit to me, you see / Straight up racist that sucker was simple and plain / Motherfuck him and John Wayne.”
“Whooo! You said that?” Shocklee responded when he heard the lines. “I’m not sure about that one, Chuck.” Chuck anticipated controversy—that was the whole point—but what he never saw coming was a far greater furor that would cast a toxic cloud over Public Enemy during the spring and summer of 1989, such that by the time the film came out in June critics felt justified in labelling the group “virulently anti-Semitic” and “Afro-Fascist race-baiters.”
In an interview with the Washington Times on May 9, Public Enemy’s minister of information, Richard “Professor Griff” Griffin, explained that he refused to wear gold chains because he believed Jews, who dominated the U.S. jewelry industry, were guilty of shoring up apartheid. When the reporter, David Mills, pressed him for clarification, Griff chuckled. “I’m not saying all of them. The majority of them, the majority of them, yes.”
“Are what?” asked Mills. “Are responsible for…”
“The majority of wickedness that goes on across the globe? Yes. Jews. Yes.”
And all hell broke loose.
THE FIRST PROTEST SONG that Chuck D remembers hearing was Stevie Wonder’s version of “Blowin’ in the Wind.” Born in 1960, he was older than most of his hip-hop peers, with vivid memories of the Black Power era. He remembers the devastated hush in his grandparents’ house when Malcolm X was shot; his mother wearing black to work the day after Martin Luther King’s death; an uncle who never came home from Vietnam. He remembers singing the “Free Huey” song and “Say It Loud—I’m Black and I’m Proud.” “As a youngster in school we sang that record like there was no tomorrow,” he wrote in his memoir, Fight the Power.
Born in Queens, Chuck moved to the predominantly black Long Island suburb of Roosevelt in 1969: a middle-class area, aspirational and community-conscious. His mother, Judy Ridenhour, was an Afro-wearing radical who sent the eleven-year-old Chuck to join the Afro-American Experience summer program at Hofstra and Adelphi universities. Among the other children attending lessons in Swahili, African drumming, and black history were his future bandmates Hank Boxley and Richard Griffin.
Chuck started writing rhymes in 1977, during hip-hop’s infancy. While he was studying graphic design at Adelphi, his commanding baritone caught the attention of Shocklee’s DJ crew, Spectrum City, and he became both their regular MC and their flyer designer. He also brought two friends from Adelphi, Bill Stephney and Harold McGregor, into the Spectrum City fold. When Stephney became program director of campus radio station WBAU, he secured Chuck and Hank their own Saturday night hip-hop show.
After Spectrum City’s Chuck-fronted 1984 single, “Lies”/“Check Out the Radio,” flopped, the crew was bitterly disillusioned, working go-nowhere jobs at department stores and courier companies. Stephney, however, landed a job at Def Jam, a new hip-hop label set up by Russell “Rush” Simmons, the brother of Run-D.M.C.’s Joseph “Run” Simmons, and a long-haired Jewish NYU student called Rick Rubin. Rubin started pestering Chuck in the hope of getting him to rap for Def Jam group Original Source. Chuck, who was now more interested in becoming a sportscaster than a rapper, repeatedly declined. Rubin kept pushing. Eventually, Stephney convinced Chuck and Hank to bring Rubin a four-track demo tape, which so wowed Rubin that the group left the Def Jam offices with an album deal.
Public Enemy would be a group like no other, modeled more on a football team or the Black Panther Party than on a traditional band lineup. Chuck, who is rarely pictured without his New York Yankees cap, talks in terms of sports: offense and defense, teamwork, everyone playing his part. His first signing was an eccentric WBAU DJ, William “Flavor” Drayton, whom he renamed Flavor Flav. Richard Griffin, who ran Spectrum City’s Unity Force security team became Professor Griff, Minister of Information, while Unity Force became the Security of the First World (S1W), Chuck’s concept being that “we’re not Third World people, we’re First World people, we’re the original people.” Hank recruited his brother Keith, Eric “Vietnam” Sadler, and Spectrum City DJ Norman Rogers (reluctantly rechristened Terminator X) to a production team known as the Bomb Squad. Aspiring journalist Harry McGregor was now Harry Allen, “media assassin.”
At Hank Shocklee’s suggestion, the band took its name from the James Brown–inspired demo track “Public Enemy #1.” To drive home the concept, Chuck designed a logo featuring a silhouette of labelmate LL Cool J’s sidekick E Love in a gunsight. Stephney wanted the group to be a hybrid of Run-D.M.C. and the Clash: “Let’s make every track political. Statements, manifestos, the whole nine.” He worried that Flavor’s cartoonish antics would dilute the seriousness of the enterprise but, as Chuck explained, that was the whole point. Flavor is “totally a visual character with audio bonuses,” Chuck says with a rumbling chuckle. “I knew that people were coming to the concert to see rather than hear so I knew we had to come up with an audio-visual experience.” Hence Flav wearing a giant clock around his neck. Hence the S1Ws wearing uniforms and Black Panther berets while executing curiously camp dance moves and brandishing replica Uzis.
The crowd’s initial reaction to this paramilitary flamboyance, Chuck says, was “WTF?” “Love and hate is the same emotion,” he says, smiling. “What we didn’t want was somebody being ambivalent to it.”
THE “MESSAGE RAP” FAD triggered by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five had proved flimsy and short-lived, fuelled more by opportunism than conviction. Following the breakthrough success of Run-D.M.C.’s 1986 Aerosmith collaboration “Walk This Way,” hip-hop had its sights set on crossover, not combat. But the messages coming out of Public Enemy’s 1987 debut album, Yo! Bum Rush the Show, were altogether different.
On the album cover, the group members cluster under the harsh glare of a single bulb like menacing basement conspirators, poised for a revolution rather than a party. At the foot of the image runs a ticker-tape message: “THE GOVERNMENT’S RESPONSIBLE…THE GOVERNMENT’S RESPONSIBLE….” In truth, Public Enemy’s music was not yet up to the standards of their presentation. Recorded in 1986, the album was held back a few months—long enough for hip-hop to take a giant evolutionary leap via new developments in sampling technology (the juicy funk break on MC Shan’s “The Bridge”) and vocal delivery (the fluid, jazzy cadences of Long Island rapper Rakim). In a stroke, Public Enemy’s stiff rhyming and primitive tape loops sounded outdated. Chuck’s lyrical preoccupations included such old stand-bys as inadequate “sucker MCs” and the excellence of his automobile. Only one song, “Rightstarter (Message to a Black Man),” cut to the chase: “Give you pride that you may not find / If you’re blind to your past then I’ll point behind.”
Spooked by the new competition, and disappointed by lackluster sales, the group headed straight back into the studio that April on a mission to raise their game. Opening with the sonorous rhetoric of Jesse Jackson at Wattstax, “Rebel Without a Pause” instantly redefined Public Enemy with its squealing hook (a saxophone tweaked until it sounded like escaping steam) and fist-swinging momentum. As Chuck imperiously trashed President Reagan and timid, rap-wary black radio stations, while declaring “Panther power,” Flav cried out in shocked admiration: “Yo, ya got to slow down, man, you’re losin’ ’em!” This was the way forward: don’t just call for a riot, sound like a riot. “An important message should have its importance embedded into the way it’s relayed,” Chuck told the NME’s Sean O’Hagan. “You hear Public Enemy, you hear a tone that says ‘Look out! This is some serious shit coming!’”
On the following year’s Nation of Millions, the Bomb Squad’s production achieved a thrilling, claustrophobic density. The aim, said Chuck, was to be “relentless—no escape.” Where other producers went with the flow of their purloined grooves, Shocklee talked of creating a “hailstorm” of samples, in heavy and constant motion. The music conducted its own dialogue with black history, layering chunks of James Brown and Sly Stone between fragments of speeches by Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam’s self-proclaimed “truth terrorist” Khalid Abdul Muhammad, punctuated with air-raid sirens, jagged bursts of turntable scratching, cries, and grunts. Classic protest songs were embedded in the mix: a line from “Living for the City” here, a refrain from “Get Up, Stand Up” there. These elements didn’t merge so much as collide. In keeping with Chuck’s alarm-call analogy, Public Enemy used dissonance and rupture to blast the listeners awake and take them, to quote one song title, “to the edge of panic.”
Chuck’s lyrics were equally thick with meaning. Like the Last Poets’ street poetry, or even Woody Guthrie’s talking blues, hip-hop enabled lyrics to burst their banks and foam in all directions. Any rapper needs to master the art of producing words for words’ sake, but Chuck weighted each phrase with significance, creating an information overload that took several exposures to process. “If you’re going to deal with that volume and quantity of words you’d better fill those words up with something,” he says. “The most difficult thing about a song is not in its expansion but in its condensing.”
Chuck was both preacher and pugilist, promising to “teach the bourgeois and rock the boulevard.” As a child of the Panther era, he had both the conviction and the platform to deliver a crash course in his updated Black Power philosophy, complete with heroes (Louis Farrakhan, Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X), villains (radio, TV, the FBI, the CIA), and a way forward in the shape of black unity. “Party for Your Right to Fight” explicitly appointed Public Enemy to finish the job the Panthers started: “This party started right in ’66 / With a pro-Black radical mix.” On the album’s opening track, Professor Griff declared: “Armageddon has been in effect.”
MEANWHILE ON THE WEST COAST, Armageddon was taking a different shape. In the mid-1980s, two different MCs hit upon a new form of rap storytelling: the gang narrative. In Philadelphia, Schoolly D released “P.S.K.—What Does it Mean?” (1985) named after the local Park Side Killers crew, while in Los Angeles Ice-T recorded a brutish picaresque called “6 in the Mornin’” (1986). These songs invented gangsta rap, Boogie Down Productions’ Criminal Minded album cemented it, and a crew from Compton, Los Angeles, blasted it into the American mainstream. If Public Enemy were the Clash, seeking to build something new from the ruins of the old order, then Niggaz With Attitude (N.W.A) were the Sex Pistols, bent on dancing amid the debris.
Compton was one of several black working-class suburbs plagued by a crumbling economy, failing infrastructure, and soaring crime rates. After the crumbling of the Panthers in the early 1970s, the power vacuum in South Central Los Angeles was filled by a potent new criminal gang known as the Crips, who inspired a wave of rival gangs, some of whom coalesced under the banner of the Bloods. More like networks than single gangs, the Crips wore blue for identification, the Bloods favored red, and the two groups set about carving up turf throughout black Los Angeles. By the start of the 1980s, with recession ensuring that the only black business booming was crack cocaine, the city was home to 155 gangs with 30,000 members.
This was the terrain charted by Ice-T: a hard-edged existence in which danger was omnipresent and only the tough and savvy survived. In 1987, it also inspired eighteen-year-old rapper O’Shea “Ice Cube” Jackson to move from silly sex rhymes to something more documentarian. Local drug dealer and hip-hop scenester Eric “Eazy-E” Wright wanted to assemble a supergroup of South Central talent, signing up Ice Cube along with DJs/producers Andre “Dr. Dre” Young and Antoine “DJ Yella” Carraby (Lorenzo “MC Ren” Patterson joined later). By far the most gifted lyricist of the bunch, Cube brought Eazy-E a song which evinced a perverse form of local pride. “Boyz-N-the Hood” was pure South Central, with a cast of carjackers, crackheads, brutal cops, and gun-toting girls. Although it ended in a shootout with the law, the heroes were no Eldridge Cleaver and Angela Davis but a hood and his loyal moll.
The single’s massive success cleared the way for N.W.A’s debut album in 1989. Straight Outta Compton was a brutal, bewildering mix of hedonism and rage. Powered by Dre’s battering-ram drums and ominous horn blasts, the title track was rap’s “Anarchy in the UK”: a war cry framed as a hard-nosed statement of local identity. It is shamelessly, gleefully unpleasant, a calculated affront to any liberal ideas of self-improvement. Although “Express Yourself” counsels focus and integrity over a benign 1970s funk loop, the courtroom drama of “Fuck tha Police” is the album’s only real protest song, aimed squarely at the oppressive tactics of LAPD chief Daryl Gates. Even then, its message is compromised by gangsta posturing. One minute Ice Cube is bemoaning police harassment (“Young nigga got it bad cuz I’m brown”), the next MC Ren and Eazy-E are bragging about their firepower. As protest, Straight Outta Compton is blithely uninterested in causes or solutions, only in the reality of “street knowledge.”
Straight Outta Compton came across like Nation of Millions’ renegade twin. Public Enemy harked back to the days of black unity; N.W.A, a few significant years younger, came of age in a society atomized by neglect. Chuck D described himself as a Communist; N.W.A were red-in-tooth-and-claw libertarians. Public Enemy followed the Panthers; N.W.A moved amid the Bloods and Crips. Chuck was thoughtful and disciplined; N.W.A were “crazy as fuck.” Public Enemy demanded that their listeners read up on their history and take action; N.W.A asked only that they make the best of what was available. “N.W.A said and did things that they knew would strike an attitude with the demographic that they weren’t necessarily a part of,” says Chuck. “They had a sensibility that really hit street cats but they were not those cats.”
In interviews, N.W.A trotted out the disingenuous line that their lyrics were clear-sighted reportage, but their lurid tales of fucking and fighting were never colored by the bluesy anguish of “The Message.” “We just wanted to do something new and different and talk about what we wanted to talk about,” Eazy-E later explained. “Like dick-sucking.” Dr. Dre was equally blunt: “Everybody was trying to do this black power and shit, so I was like let’s give ’em an alternative.” It was protest only in the sense that it told America it would reap what it had sown: You treat us like animals? Fine, we’re animals.
Unsurprisingly, it got a reaction. During the summer of 1989, police departments fumed over “Fuck tha Police.” They refused to provide security at certain N.W.A shows and, in a case of life mirroring art, busted the tour bus looking for evidence of gang connections. The FBI wrote to the band’s label, Priority, arguing that the song was “both discouraging and degrading to these brave, dedicated officers.” So far, so predictable, but N.W.A also drew flak from socially conscious hip-hop DJs who believed the group was confirming every possible negative stereotype about young black men. Hip-hop’s liberal defenders saw it as the music of the oppressed, but in the violent, misogynistic, homophobic work of N.W.A, the oppressed became the oppressors, so what then?
SPIKE LEE SHOT THE VIDEO for “Fight the Power” on the streets of Bedford-Stuyvesant on a cold, wet day in the spring of 1989. It opened with a talismanic image of the civil rights movement—crowds singing “We Shall Overcome” during the March on Washington—then cut to Chuck D addressing his own audience through a megaphone and promising, “We ain’t goin’ out like that 1963 nonsense.” The sacrilege was calculated. Among other things, Do the Right Thing was a referendum on the civil rights movement. After the climactic riot, the movie ended with two competing quotations regarding the validity of violence as a means of dissent, one from Dr. King, one from Malcolm X. Each viewer got to decide which one better suited the times.
Few of the Brooklyn residents at the video shoot would have needed telling why the movie was relevant. During the mid-1980s, New York became a racial tinderbox, with each year bringing some fresh disaster. In October 1984, NYPD officers shot dead a sixty-six-year-old black woman, Eleanor Bumpurs, while evicting her from her Bronx apartment for non-payment of rent. Two months later, white electronics repairman Bernhard Goetz shot four black teenagers on a downtown express train, claiming that they intended to mug him. Five days before Christmas 1986, Trinidadian construction worker Michael Griffith was chased by a white mob onto a highway in Howard Beach, Queens, where he was knocked down and killed by a car. A few days later, the activist firebrand Al Sharpton led a 1,200-strong crowd of demonstrators through the streets while white bystanders hurled racial abuse.
These events must have been somewhere in Chuck’s mind when he sat in his airplane seat, scribbling the lyrics to “Fight the Power.” “I was trying to say something along the lines [of] New York black talk radio,” says Chuck. “I used to listen to WLIB with Gary Byrd and Mark Riley, and they would be up to the minute on those injustices that were taking place. So I wanted a song which would deal in that manner.” He came up with a call for “mental self-defensive fitness” and, in one deft line (“swinging while I’m singing”), absorbed Malcolm X’s critique of freedom songs (“It’s time to stop singing and start swinging”). One of his targets, however, was a soft one: Bobby McFerrin’s indefatigably cheerful a cappella hit “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.” “I knew Bobby McFerrin was a nice guy,” he says, laughing. “It had nothing to do with Bobby McFerrin. It had something to do with radio and TV. It’s like, ‘The only way we can have these negros on is that they got to be happy.’”
Public Enemy recorded the song in Manhattan’s Greene Street studios, starting with a groove that Keith Shocklee had been toying with—one with, in Hank’s words, “a defiant, aggressive, I’m not gonna take it feeling.” They worked with the physicality of a rock band, jamming ideas, layering samples, giving the song as much weight as it could bear. This was shortly before the copyright crackdown which forced hip-hop producers to license every sample, and the opening bars alone swarm with so many found sounds that not even the band can now identify them all. They pushed their equipment to its limits, snapping the ends off their samples or fraying the edges to create a rough, aggressive, mechanoid sound. “The key of PE’s style was that it was clean and dirty; it was tight and messy,” Hank Shocklee told Mix magazine. “Everybody is pitching in ideas, and the idea that was stronger is what ended up on tape.”
It was just weeks after the video shoot that the trouble started.
VIEWING PUBLIC ENEMY as an information portal, Chuck made himself an enthusiastic and engaging interviewee—he once joked that his interviews were better than some rappers’ records. He was pushing albums, of course, but also ideas. Critics agonized over their conflicted fascination with a group that was at once incalculably thrilling and ideologically troubling, the one quality inseparable from the other. Were they violent? Fascistic? Racist? Anti-Semitic? What did they mean when they said “two wrongs are gonna have to make a right”? After one long, fractious interview, Melody Maker writers the Stud Brothers called the band “morally abhorrent” and compared them to Leni Riefenstahl. And they were fans.
Anybody close to Public Enemy knew that if a storm was going to come it would most likely blow in from Griff’s direction. It was Griff who had introduced Chuck to the teachings of Louis Farrakhan back in the Spectrum City days; Griff who told the band’s Jewish publicist Bill Adler that he had been reading Henry Ford’s notoriously anti-Semitic tract The International Jew; Griff who told the Stud Brothers in 1988 that “if the Palestinians took up arms, went to Israel and killed all the Jews, it’d be all right” (at which point Chuck broke in, “Listen Griff, let’s not even talk about this”).
To an extent, it was Griff’s job to be extreme. As Chuck explained to the NME, “I’m like the mediator in all this. Flavor is what America would like to see in a black man—sad to say, but true—whereas Griff is very much what America would not like to see.” But his anti-Semitism was beginning to worry people in the Public Enemy camp. Five years earlier, Jesse Jackson had derailed his White House run by referring to Jews as “Hymies” and New York as “Hymietown,” and relations between blacks and Jews had been delicate ever since.
So when Griff conducted his calamitous interview with the Washington Times’ David Mills on May 9, 1989, it was an outburst too far. Mills faxed the article to other media outlets. News programs pounced on the comments. Movie distributors voiced reservations to Spike Lee. Bill Adler begged Chuck to publicly criticize the stubbornly unrepentant Griff, but Chuck hesitated. There was a principle at stake: his belief that Griff should be able to speak his mind, even if what was on his mind was poisonous nonsense. There was also a practical issue. Exhausted from touring, the band was in ornery spirits, and Chuck, who always saw himself as a team player, was reluctant to appoint himself the disciplinarian leader that the situation required. He was a musician suddenly called upon to make a politician’s choice: back Griff or sack him. He did neither.
Eventually, six weeks after the interview, he called a sullen press conference at which he announced Griff’s suspension and insisted, “We are not anti-Jewish. We are not anti-anyone.” He could have predicted the response: praise from the mainstream media, and angry disappointment from black critics who accused him of buckling under pressure. In despair, he promptly announced that Public Enemy was finished, but after what was meant to be their final gig, they received some sage advice from Farrakhan himself: sit tight, keep quiet, ride it out.
In the midst of the meltdown, Do the Right Thing reached cinemas. Hank Shocklee was walking down the street when he met some friends who had been to a screening and broke the news: “Yo, ‘Fight the Power’ is all over it!” Lee, who hadn’t even got back to the group to tell him he liked the track, had made it the dissonant heartbeat of the whole movie, from Rosie Perez’s opening-credits dance sequence to the final conflagration at the pizzeria.
Predictably, it drew flak from those who had reservations about Lee’s message. “Maybe we should stop emphasizing the negative, maybe we should emphasize the positive,” Bronx judge Burton B. Roberts told the New York Times. “Why can’t we fight for power, rather than fight the power?” But the song instantly caught light. When a riot broke out in Virginia Beach that summer, black students faced ranks of police with cries of “Fight the power!”
Public Enemy’s demise lasted all of six weeks. On 1 August, they announced “The show must go on.” In November, they bounced back with “Welcome to the Terrordome,” a single which crunched the events of the summer into a tight ball of frustration. “I wasn’t angry as much as I was perplexed,” says Chuck. “There was a lot of inside-outside turmoil. I don’t know what bothered me more, the inside or the outside, because they combined and created that sort of confusion. People left ‘Fight the Power’ alone and kept their distance. ‘Welcome to the Terrordome’ they looked into.”
There was a lot to look into. In his most personal lyric yet, Chuck began with a line straight from a 1972 funk record by Joe Quarterman—“I got so much trouble on my mind”—and proceeded to defend his behavior in the Griff case, kick out at his foes (with problematic lines about “the so-called chosen” who “got me like Jesus”), and pull back to reference recent upheavals: the murder of Yusuf Hawkins by a white mob in Bensonhurst, the killing of Huey Newton by a drug dealer in Oakland, and the Virginia Beach riots. He rapped what he called his “Leave Me the Fuck Alone song” like a boxer circling the ring.
The New York Post, zeroing in on the most contentious lines, promptly called for a Jewish boycott of the band. Prior to that summer, Public Enemy were commentators on the battle for black advancement; now they were on the frontline. The Terrordome, Chuck explained, was “the house of the 1990s.”
THE BOMB SQUAD spent the first month of the new decade making Public Enemy’s Fear of a Black Planet and the second recording AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted, the solo debut of N.W.A’s Ice Cube. These productions vibrated with urgency, enhanced by new sampling techniques. Where Phil Ochs and John Lennon once talked of “newspaper writing,” this might be called “newscast writing,” studded with snatches of radio and TV reports, including those concerning Public Enemy’s recent tribulations. Using a kind of musical jujitsu, the group was absorbing strength by incorporating criticism. The black history with which they were engaging now included their own.
Fear of a Black Planet, which sold a million copies in its first week, thronged with even more grievances than its predecessor: inadequate emergency services in black neighborhoods (“911 Is a Joke”), stereotyping in movies (“Burn Hollywood Burn”), police harassment (“Anti-Nigger Machine”), and institutional racism (“Who Stole the Soul?”). “Fight the Power” was positioned at the end as both a summation and a tentative resolution of everything before it, sublimating all of the record’s discord and unease into one bulletproof battle cry.*
Chuck D may have been in the mood for soul-searching, but Ice Cube was ready for war. “He came from the school of ‘tell a nigga like it is and not give a fuck’ and his ‘not give a fuck’ was so ecstatic, so real, so concentrated that it was like wow!” Hank Shocklee told Cool‘Eh magazine. On the cover of AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted, Cube wore a scowl that could turn milk to yogurt. Inside, he turned his shrivelling glare on the police, radio stations, treacherous girlfriends, and mainstream black “sell-outs.” Lacking Chuck’s oratorical sweep, Ice Cube had a clenched, pug-nosed delivery, jabbing at each syllable as if it were a punchbag. He was still more bad-tempered gangsta (“The Nigga Ya Love to Hate” to quote one song title) than radical until, while filming John Singleton’s movie Boyz N the Hood in Los Angeles, Cube met Khallid Abdul Muhammad, who encouraged the rapper to join the Nation of Islam. While N.W.A prided themselves on looking no farther than the next block, Cube now positioned himself as part of a wider black nationalism.
His next album, 1991’s Death Certificate, was concerned with just one thing: the well-being of the black man. When that is threatened by shoddy medical care or gang warfare, his raps have the force of underdog protest. But just as often, black masculinity is undermined here by Jews, homosexuals, bourgeois blacks, or insufficiently obedient women. Cube boiled all the compassion out of Public Enemy’s template, leaving only unforgiving, strength-in-adversity toughness.
The most shocking song on the record was “Black Korea,” which opened with a tense exchange from Do the Right Thing then proceeded to torch the movie’s ambivalence in a jawdropping assault on Korean shopkeepers: “So pay respect to the black fist / Or we’ll burn your store right down to a crisp.” Billboard called for a boycott of the album, claiming it had crossed the line separating art from incitement to violence, but Ice Cube only apologized when Korean grocers threatened his endorsement deal with the malt liquor brand St. Ides. “Call him Ice KKKube—a straight-up bigot simple and plain,” decided Robert Christgau in the Village Voice. “Young people who are very upset and angry about things come to rap artists as if they were scholars and have the answers to all these incredible questions,” reflected Michael Franti of Bay Area duo the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy. “A lot of times they don’t and they end up putting their foot in their mouth.”
Sent reeling by Ice Cube’s wrecking-ball wrath, liberal defenders of rap were grateful to find a battle worth fighting in the shape of Public Enemy’s 1991 single “By the Time I Get to Arizona.” Martin Luther King Jr. Day had been signed into law by a reluctant Ronald Reagan in 1983, but by 1991 two states still refused to endorse the holiday: New Hampshire and Arizona. After Arizona voters blocked it yet again, Chuck D wrote a song about marching on the state to assassinate Governor Fife Symington III (who in fact supported the holiday). The video, which climaxed with a car bomb, caused predictable outrage, but this time Chuck was well equipped to defend himself in a panel discussion on ABC’s Nightline. “Our whole philosophy is that controversy is good if you can handle it,” he writes in his memoir. “You can’t have controversy take over because controversy can kill your shit.” He elaborates: “The media is not just this anonymous organism. It’s made up of a whole bunch of perpetrators and participators from lots of different angles so you always feel like you’re in the middle of a thicket. It’s like playing paintball.”
By coincidence, the “Arizona” video featured two rappers, Sister Souljah and Ice-T, who were about to walk into controversies too big for hip-hop to handle.
THE EVENTS OF 1992 put political hip-hop at the center of the culture even as they killed it as a mainstream proposition. Four years earlier, Nation of Millions and Boogie Down Productions’ By All Means Necessary album had inaugurated a minor boom in socially alert records: the Nation of Islam rhetoric of X-Clan, Brand Nubian, and the Poor Righteous Teachers; the bracingly stern sermons of Gang Starr; the Afrocentric optimism of De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest, and the Jungle Brothers.* Arrested Development came from Atlanta, Georgia, with a preachy, feel-good, whole-grain breed of rap, which hoovered up praise from critics who were tired of defending Ice Cube, but only ended up proving that hip-hop cleansed of complications was pretty vanilla. More entertainingly, Philadelphia’s the Goats stirred abortion rights and the genocide of Native Americans into the usual protest-rap brew on their “hip-hopera,” Tricks of the Shade. Best of all, the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy updated the cerebral street poetry of Gil Scott-Heron and the Watts Prophets. On their sole album, Hypocrisy Is the Greatest Luxury, pensive front man Michael Franti delivered a damning litany of America’s ills. “We had CNN on in the studio and I was writing shit straight off the TV,” he says. “I was so angry that [the Gulf War] was happening, and so that record became a reaction to television and media.” As if sensing the coming storm, he numbered among the problems a crackdown on freedom of speech.†
On April 29, a jury in LA’s Simi Valley acquitted four white police officers who had been accused of using excessive force against black motorist Rodney King a year earlier. Because videotape of the beating had been on constant rotation for months, black Los Angelenos took the verdict as an implicit endorsement of Daryl Gates’ racial profiling and heavy-handed policing. Within four hours of the acquittal, crowds at the intersection of Florence and Normandie in South Central Los Angeles were looting and burning the neighborhood. Within six, Mayor Tom Bradley had declared a state of emergency and Governor Wilson had called in the National Guard. By the time the curfew was lifted on May 4, fifty-three people were dead, over four thousand wounded, and twelve thousand arrested in a disturbance which eclipsed even the Watts riots of 1965.
President George H. W. Bush called it “purely criminal.” Those sympathetic to the rioters’ grievances preferred the term “uprising.” “This whole thing is not a reaction to the Rodney King case,” said Michael Franti, “it’s a revolt, an insurrection as a result of 12 years of conservative, militaristic programs that have sucked money out of the communities.” Although rappers played no part in the violence, this was exactly the kind of conflagration that the likes of Ice Cube had predicted. On the title track of his new album The Predator he named the four officers in the King case and declared “no justice, no peace.” Officer Laurence Powell’s notorious comparison, on the day of the assault, of a dispute between black men to something “right out of Gorillas in the Mist” inspired two songs called “Guerrillas in the Mist”: one by Cube confederates Da Lench Mob and another by militant San Francisco rapper Paris.
The most contentious comment on the rampage came from Sister Souljah, a young black activist who had became the first female member of the Public Enemy camp two years earlier. A few days after events in LA she spoke to David Mills, the same journalist who had elicted Professor Griff’s peculiar views regarding Jews. Asked about the beating of truck driver Reginald Denny on April 29, an incident captured by airborne news crews, Souljah replied: “If black people kill black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people?”
The full quote made it obvious that she was imagining the mind-set of a frustrated gangbanger rather than advocating violence herself, but that was forgotten once the interview made its way to presidential candidate Bill Clinton, who read out the quote at the convention of Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition in June and asked: “If you took the words white and black and you reversed them, you might think [Ku Klux Klan politician] David Duke was giving that speech.” The analogy was nonsense but it allowed Clinton to woo moderate voters by distancing himself from black radicalism, a move so blatant and effective that any similar tactic is now dubbed a “Sister Souljah moment” by Washington pundits.*
Ice-T was another victim of the feverish new mood. In 1990, he had written a deliberately overheated revenge fantasy called “Cop Killer” for his heavy metal side-project Body Count. In March 1992, he released the song on the band’s debut album, adding topical references to Rodney King and Daryl Gates. Just days before Clinton turned on Souljah, police organizations called for a boycott of Time Warner, which released Body Count’s records through its Sire imprint. Tipper Gore, wife of vice-presidential hopeful Al and founder of the PMRC, wrote an editorial disingenously comparing Ice-T’s music to slavery and Nazism. Conservative heavyweights President Bush, Vice President Dan Quayle, Charlton Heston, and Oliver North queued up to damn the song (this was, after all, an election year). Time Warner executives were besieged by death threats and angry shareholders as timid record stores pulled the album from the shelves.
It bore all the hallmarks of a full-blown moral panic, in the teeth of which arguments about First Amendment rights were doomed. Clearly, the target was not one song but the whole hip-hop industry. After some initial resistance, Ice-T buckled, removing “Cop Killer” from the album and replacing it with a new protest rap mordantly titled “Freedom of Speech.” “I don’t hold anything against them, man, it’s business,” he said equably. “I was costing them money.”
Whether he was being defeatist or just phlegmatic, Ice-T cut to the truth of the matter: free speech comes a poor second to dollars and cents. After losing the battle of “Cop Killer,” hip-hop lost its nerve. Paris, who called himself “the Black Panther of Hip-Hop,” had recorded a thrillingly intemperate song called “Bush Killa” for his new album Sleeping with the Enemy, illustrating it with a mocked-up photograph of himself lurking on the White House lawn with a rifle in his hand. Once the artwork reached the tabloids, Time Warner forced Tommy Boy Records, whose releases it distributed, to drop Paris, who was eventually forced to release Sleeping with the Enemy independently. Political rap didn’t die, but it was forced to either soften its message into generic cries for peace and understanding or move to the fringes and preach to the choir. As a means of mainstream musical revolt, it was cut off at the knees.
“Of course it scared people off,” says Chuck D. “Because rappers want to be successful and they’re given ultimatums—this is what they have to do, and this is what they’d better not do. If you look at the Sex Pistols, they were art kamikazes. Black artists ain’t doing that. They’re trying to be loved, they’re trying to be successful, and they’re trying to be ahead of the battle.”
By the time Public Enemy released their fifth album, 1994’s Muse Sick-n-Hour Mess Age, they were marginal figures, elbowed aside by the brash swagger of gangsta rap (now reinvigorated and depoliticized by Dr. Dre’s colossally successful The Chronic) and the clammy, noirish storytelling of young New Yorkers such as Nas, the Wu-Tang Clan, and Mobb Deep, and their fire dampened by the departure from office of such hate figures as President Bush and Daryl Gates. Younger activist groups such as Dead Prez and the Coup were destined to be niche concerns.
Those who believe that hip-hop has sold its rebel soul have since romanticized Public Enemy’s rage, exaggerated their righteousness, and simplifed their contradictions. But they were powerful because of those contradictions. The natural certainty of Chuck’s voice was misleading. The truth was in the wild confusion of the noise they made, a noise which offered more questions than answers, and which contained shards of ugliness that could not be wished away. Public Enemy’s message was too diffuse, conflicted, and sometimes bizarre to withstand the hot glare of media scrutiny indefinitely, but the noise could not be disputed, and it triggered more musical reverberations, awoke more consciences, than that of any band since the Clash.
“You have to be able to do something within the time that you’re granted” says Chuck D. “You can’t create the time. You can create the product, you can create the song, but you cannot create the time.”
“Fight the Power” planted political hip-hop in the mainstream of U.S. culture for three eventful years. After “Cop Killer,” that time had passed, never to come again.