Public Enemy: Def or Dumb?
WHAT UP?
Known as the poetic lyrical son
I’m public enemy number one
—”Public Enemy No. 1″
Perched on a stool, a red, black and green medallion of Africa hanging around his neck, Chuck D. stares at the video monitor. After a moment the taut face of Malcolm X appears on the screen. The steel voice utters the famous words: “We pledge to get our freedom by any means necessary.” The pulse of a drumbeat begins. Next to Malcolm on the monitor, a car pulls up; B-boys dressed in fatigues pour out onto a New York City street. They are Public Enemy, the musically and politically radical rap group; a video editor is trying out this juxtaposition of images as a possible opening for the band’s latest assault, an hour-long video of Public Enemy in concert.
“Then we’ll have the titles, okay, Chuck?” asks the video editor.
Chuck is Carlton Ridenhour, Public Enemy’s lead rapper, chief lyricist and marketing genius. Three years ago Ridenhour conceived of the group with two friends, Hank Shocklee, a record producer, and Bill Stephney, a record-company executive. Since then, Public Enemy has enjoyed spectacular success. The band’s first album — Yo! Bum Rush the Show — released in 1987 by Def Jam, sold 300,000 copies and was widely hailed. The second, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, tripled those sales while reaping several critical awards. Def Jam’s distributor, CBS Records, predicts that Public Enemy’s next album may top the two-million mark, an amazing achievement for a group whose music defies melody and whose lyrics praise the Nation of Islam minister Louis Farrakhan.
This success has left Ridenhour in a state of constant busyness. This mid-May afternoon, for example, he has half a dozen things on his mind besides the video: a new single, “Fight the Power” (the lead song in Spike Lee’s movie Do the Right Thing); the next album (titled Fear of a Black Planet, it is scheduled to come out this fall); the band’s touring duties; and negotiations with major record companies for Shocklee, Stephney and him to set up their own production company (the first step toward realizing their dream of creating a new Motown).
Before Ridenhour can tell the editor his opinion, the telephone rings.
“What up?” Ridenhour answers, using a B-boy expression to greet a record-company executive on the other end of the line. Nearing 30, Ridenhour — shorter, slighter, older and also more tired in person than he appears onstage — is married, the father of a one-year-old and the owner of a house in suburban Long Island. Still, he presents himself as a B-boy by personal choice and professional necessity, complete with street language and a baseball cap to shade his expressive face.
Ridenhour gets down to business: He wants to make sure a colleague isn’t being stiffed. When the executive equivocates, Ridenhour cuts him off. “I don’t mind nickel-and-diming everyone else, but not him,” he says, reasonable yet unrelenting. “So we go back to what we agreed and we’re straight, right?” Ridenhour wrests an okay from the man and signs off instantly, closing the discussion: “Peace.”
Ridenhour hangs up, ready now to attend to the video. The scene seems ideal: the artist in command of his career and work. But from the first, Public Enemy — his masterwork — has been a creature of contradiction, a black-nationalist group that counts on white support, a political organization unsure of its program.
Soon these conflicts will all come to a head. In two weeks the Washington Times will publish an interview with Richard “Professor Griff” Griffin, the band’s Minister of Information, in which he launches into an antisemitic tirade, saying Jews are “wicked” and responsible for “the majority of wickedness” in the world. In response, Ridenhour will at first announce the dismissal of Griffin, then the dissolution of the group; then he will reverse himself — all amid a cacophony of name-calling and cowardice that will leave the band in disarray, its future in jeopardy.
***
NOISE
Our solution — mind revolution
Mind over matter — mouth in motion
Corners don’t sell it — no you can’t buy it
Can’t defy it cause I’ll never be quiet
—”Rightstarter (Message to a Black Man)”
Two things brought the founders of Public Enemy together: rap and Long Island.
Rap may be the rhyme and rhythms of the urban streets, but the B-boys of Public Enemy spent their childhoods on the tree-lined avenues of New York City’s suburban frontier. They enjoyed front yards instead of stoops, rode in automobiles rather than subway cars. They are genuine crossovers, raised on the black-liberation movement along with the junk food of American culture — television, sports and comic books. The sophisticated offspring of a cultural mix that left them critical of both black and white societies, they devoted themselves to a distinctive mission: to send a message of self-respect and defiance to black youth by mastering the marketing devices and business strategies of the music industry.
Shocklee — he’s a few years older than his colleagues — brought the others together in the early Eighties. A student at Long Island’s Adelphi University at the time, he was supporting himself as an entrepreneur, producing rap parties, hiring DJs, setting up his own nightclubs. Ridenhour was also at Adelphi, studying graphic design. Shocklee believes in the importance of the visual aspect of rock — “You have to be able to see things in records,” he explains — and he employed Ridenhour to help promote his events.
“I started applying my knowledge to the music,” says Ridenhour. “I marketed it and made it look like ‘Hey, these motherfuckers are the fucking spearhead of this.’ So we grew into promoters. We’d hire groups and make them look bigger than they were.”
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