by Jeff Chang
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.”
Doing Contradiction Right
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 sa
ys 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
The New School Rises
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.
The record did decently in the south and the midwest, but New York City wasn’t feeling the group. Melle Mel heckled the crew at their first show at the Latin Quarter. Mr. Magic played “Public Enemy #1” only once, making a point of saying that he hated it. And in Queens, Magic’s DJ, Marlon “Marley Marl” Williams was making them look played-out with his sonic innovations.
Marley had been a studio apprentice to Arthur Baker, watching him struggle with the early, prohibitively expensive Fairlight sampler. In 1983, Marley launched his own producing career with a classic single, “Sucker DJs (I Will Survive),” featuring his smooth-rapping then-girlfriend, Dimples D. On his early dance records, like Aleem’s 1984 club hit, “Release Yourself,” he used a sampler to repeat and pitch up and down vocal snippets: “Release yourself! Re-rerererere-rererere-release yourself! Yo-yo-yo-yourself!” While trying to sample a voice for another song on his affordable new E-mu Emulator, he caught a snare snap. Punching it a few times, he suddenly realized the machine’s latent rhythmic capabilities.
On the 1986 hit “The Bridge” by MC Shan, he revealed the fruits of his discovery, with a booming loop of The Honeydrippers’ “Impeach the President” drum break. No more tinny, programmed DMX or Linn drums, which stiffened the beat and reduced most rappers to sing-songy rhyming. On top, Marl kept his vocalists bathed in billowing Rubinesque arena echoes, but on the bottom, the groove suddenly felt slippery. Inevitably, his rappers responded with more intricate rhymes.
By contrast, Hank, Eric and Keith had made “Public Enemy #1” the old-fashioned way—with Eric banging out the drums in real time, and a long two-inch tape loop of “Blow Your Head” that stretched across the room and around a microphone stand. Marl’s sampler breakthrough forever altered rap production techniques. It wasn’t clear Public Enemy could stay competitive.
The Black Belt had bred a new school, and these artists—Biz Markie, De La Soul, JVC Force, Craig Mack (then known as MC EZ) and EPMD, even their homies, Son of Bazerk, Serious Lee Fine, True Mathematics and Kings of Pressure—were breathing down P.E.’s necks. And then there was Marley Marl’s roommate, a DJ from the Black ‘burbs of Queens named Eric Barrier, and his rapper, a Five Percenter from Wyandanch, Long Island, named William Griffin, Jr. (no relation to Professor Griff) who called himself Rakim Allah.
Can’t Hold It Back
Rakim was about to graduate from high school, where he was the star quarterback, when a mutual friend introduced him to Eric B. The two hit it off, and Barrier asked Marl about recording something in their studio. They headed into Marl’s studio and cut Rakim’s demo, “Check Out My Melody.” MC Shan sat in.
Rakim obviously had lyrics, battle rhymes funneled through Five Percenter millenarian poetics. He didn’t just slay MCs, he took them out in three sets of seven. “My unusual style will confuse you a while,” he rhymed. “If I was water, I’d flow in the Nile.”
Shan and Marl weren’t sure they understood this guy. At the time Shan’s excitable high-pitched style ruled New York City. But Rakim refused to raise his voice. “Me and Marley would look at each other like, ‘What kind of rap style is that? That shit is wack,’ ” Shan recalled.25 “More energy, man!” he yelled at Rakim.26
Figuring “My Melody” was too sluggish, they gave Rakim another beat that was almost ten beats-per-minute faster. Based on Fonda Rae’s “Over Like a Fat Rat” and James Brown’s “Funky President” and alluding to Marl’s by-now famous jacking of “Impeach the President,” the concept became “Eric B. Is President,” Marl and Shan listened to Rakim’s intro in amazement:
I came in the door I said it before
I never let the mic magnetize me no more
In the lyric, Rakim described the act of rhyming as if it were a pit bull on a long leash, an undertow pulling into a deep ocean of words—above all, a dangerous habit from which there was no return:
But it’s biting me, fighting me, inviting me to rhyme
I can’t hold it back
I’m looking for the line
Rakim rocked a weird mix of braggadocio and self-consciousness, a metarhyme—encompassing the paralysis of stage-fright and the release of the moment of first utterance, all delivered with an uncanny sense of how to use silence and syncopation, lines spilling through bars, syllables catching off-beats, it made them believers. Rap had found its Coltrane.
Rakim came from a musical family. His mother was a jazz and opera singer. His aunt was R&B legend Ruth Brown. His brothers were session musicians who had worked on early rap records. He was a gifted saxophonist and had participated in statewide student competitions. He switched from tenor to baritone sax because he preferred the deeper tone.
The Griffins had left Brooklyn to come to Wyandanch, an unincorporated town of seven thousand, one of the oldest in the Black Belt and deteriorating into one of the most troubled. Blacks began moving there during the 1950s, expanding southward toward the wealthy white beach community of Babylon. By the end of the decade whites in Babylon rezoned its northern border from residential to industrial. From there, Wyandanch went downhill.
William was a smart student with a lean athleticism and a nose for trouble that kept him close to the streets. By his teens, he was a graffiti writer turned stick-up kid, getting high, staying paid, holding down corners in Wyandanch and spinning drunkenly out of the projects in Fort Greene, before he became righteous, took the name Ra King Islam Master Allah, recircled Strong Island and Brooklyn to build from cipher to cipher.
The graf burners on his bedroom wall were covered over by primer. Photos of Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X and Minister Louis Farrakhan went up. He met Eric, Marl and Shan, cut the record, abandoned a football scholarship to the State University at Stony Brook, signed with Rush Management, and became a rap legend.
Rakim never smiled. Draped in African gold, inside Dapper-Dan customized faux-Gucci suits, he stood tall in a way that assured he was in supreme control of his body. He was, as he put it, “serious as cancer.” He asked rhetorical questions like, “Who can keep the average dancer hyper as a heart attack?” Chuck D and Rakim had come from similar circumstances and had similar aspirations for themselves and the race, but they had different ways of seeking their utopias. As Greg Tate wrote, “Chuck D’s forte is the overview, Rakim’s is the innerview.”
Rakim had joined the Nation of Gods and Earths, better known as the Five Percenters, in 1985, the year that Supreme Mathematics signified as: “Build Power.” Founded in Harlem (renamed Mecca) in 1963 by a charismatic former student minister of the Nation of Islam, Clarence 13X, their core belief was taken from Lost-Found Lesson Number 2. Eighty-five percent of the people were unciv
ilized, mentally deaf, dumb and blind slaves; 10 percent were bloodsuckers of the poor; and 5 percent were the poor righteous teachers with knowledge of self, enlightened teachers of freedom, justice and equality, destined to civilize the uncivilized.
Like Bambaataa, Rakim was now on a lifetime mission to lift the word from the street into the spiritual. Whether he could escape the social prisons represented by Fort Greene and Wyandanch was immaterial. Rakim told a journalist, “You’re dealing with heaven while you’re walking through hell. When I say heaven, I don’t mean up in the clouds, because heaven is no higher than your head, and hell is no lower than your feet.”27
“It’s 120 degrees of lessons,” he told Harry Allen, “and you gotta complete it by Knowledge, which is 120, Wisdom, another 120, and Understanding, which is 360 degrees. That’s what I’m saying. 360 degrees I revolve. And 360 degrees is a complete circle—a cipher. So you must complete it.”28
Closing the Circle
In rhyme, Chuck compared himself to Coltrane, but he had more in common with Miles Davis, whose earthy middle-class rage always boiled beneath the mask of blue minimalist cool. The streetwise mystic Rakim was closer to Coltrane, and “I Know You Got Soul” was Rakim’s “Giant Steps,” a marvel of rhythmic precision and indelible imagery, a masterful declaration of transcendent black identity and a certifiable crowd-pleaser.
Based on the Bobby Byrd song of the same name and featuring a monstrous Funkadelic drumroll by Ben Powers, Jr., “Soul” began with unusual flattery to its audience—an apology for keeping them waiting. It described writing as a difficult sacrament, but a necessary rite to uplift the race. In the end, the performance of the words—like a triumphant Ali title bout—became an act of deliverance.