by Jeff Chang
This harsh critique of the civil rights movement is most pronounced amongst Black youth. . . . Many believe that traditional Black leaders lack the capacity, desire, and ingenuity to address the contemporary crises that destabilize Black working-class life and destroy Black neighborhoods and families.
As a consequence, an entire generation is now profoundly disconnected from Black civic action and civil rights activism. And because traditional social and civic organizations in the Black community have failed to reach out and engage this new generation of post–civil rights citizens, the future of Black institutional and organizational leadership with the vision, capacity, and innovation necessary for the twenty-first century is bleak.13
Hip-hoppers embraced the ideas of the exiled and martyred icons of the past while rejecting the legitimacy of their living elders. After Scott La Rock was gunned down on a Bronx street, KRS-1 posed for Boogie Down Productions’ second album cover alone, looking from behind a window curtain for enemies below, gripping an Uzi as Malcolm X had his rifle two decades before. In “Rebel Without a Pause,” Chuck had declared himself a supporter of JoAnne Chesimard, the former Black Panther and Black Liberation Army member who was about to resurface in Cuba as an exile under a new name, Assata Shakur, and watched her autobiography became a Black bookstore best-seller.
He decided to work Minister Farrakhan’s name into his next track, a B-side commissioned for the movie adaptation of Brett Easton Ellis’s Gen-X novel, Less Than Zero. That song, “Don’t Believe the Hype”—with its line, “The follower of Farrakhan, don’t tell me that you understand until you hear the man”—was rejected. But the next one they submitted, “Bring the Noise” was accepted and it was even more explicit: “Farrakhan’s a prophet and I think you ought to listen to what he can say to you. What you ought to do is follow for now.”
The kids had dumped their gold dookey ropes for African medallions. Some were reading George G. M. James’s Stolen Legacy and Carter G. Woodson’s The Miseducation of the Negro. Even the hustlers in Harlem had changed their style. Hip-hop journalist Reginald Dennis recalls, “Cats that were straight murderers were playing ‘Self Destruction’ on their new 10,000-watt Blaupunkt systems.”
When Public Enemy came to Philadelphia, the city declared it “Public Enemy Day” and gave them a parade. “We’re in open cars, coming down on Market Street, waving at folks and stuff,” says Stephney. “But what struck me, we saw these guys who were at that point in their mid-forties. They had all run back, it seemed, into their apartments and homes and two-story brick houses in Philly and gotten all their old Panther shit out. Got the berets, got the black leather jackets, got their camouflages out and everything. You’re seeing these graying forty-something Black men, tears in their eyes, throwing the Black power salute like the revolution has come back.
“I was just like, ‘Shit. Okay,’ ” he sighs. “Yeah, we’re the ‘Black Panthers of rap.” But when you’re as young as we were doing all of this stuff—at that point, I was twenty-five—you don’t have a clue as to the sort of impact you truly are generating.”
Ready or not, leadership was being thrust on the hip-hop generation. The problem of how the new young Black elite would direct its rage and where it would take the race in the new century would be entirely their own.
Natty Cult-Nats vs. Rap Rebels
In a seminal 1989 essay, “The New Black Aesthetic,” novelist Trey Ellis celebrated the sons and daughters of the Black middle class who were now at the cutting edge of American cultural and intellectual production. “All those Ezra Jack Keats Black children’s books, Roots parties, For Colored Girls . . . theater excursions and the nationalist Christmastide holiday of Kwanzaa worked,” he wrote. “Having scraped their way to relative wealth and, too often, crass materialism, our parents have freed (or compelled) us to bite those hands that fed us and sent us to college.”14
Yet Ellis also saw a division developing in that rarified group, as plain as questions of style. At a birthday party for Andre Harrell, he noted, “Suzuki Samurai jeeps, Moet champagne, complete Gucci or Louis Vuitton leather outfits, Kangol hats, ‘[heavy] duty gold’ rope necklaces, four-finger rings, and crotch-first machismo are all, for the moment rap de rigueur. Most all young, Black intellectuals, on the other hand, wear little, round glasses, Ghanaian, kinte-cloth scarves and, increasingly, tiny, neat dreadlocks.”15
Bill Stephney straddled the line, trying to bridge the Black Belt with the East Village. He recalls, “I was called an ‘art-nigger’ because I insisted that we all go see She’s Gotta Have It.” Undaunted, he tried to get his homies to join the Black Rock Coalition. After one meeting they decided they weren’t having it. “In the mid-eighties, young Black working-class males from Nassau County, Long Island, weren’t the most broad-minded people in the world,” he chuckles.
Also straddling the line was Village Voice critic Greg Tate, a cofounder of the Black Rock Coalition. Tate was a kente-cloth diaper baby. His parents were prominent cultural nationalists whose work with H. Rap Brown, Eldridge Cleaver and Amiri Baraka meant, he says, that “I kind of grew up with these Black super-heroes around me.”
As a teenager, Tate shared Chuck D.’s ambition to become a Black comic book artist. He invented a character, a trumpet player, and went to the library to learn everything he could about music. There he came upon Baraka’s book, Black Music, which changed his life. He tuned in to Howard University’s radio station, WHUR, and its groundbreaking “360 Degrees of the Black Experience” format, and heard the artists Baraka discussed—Coltrane, Coleman, Cherry, Shepp. He got his parents to take him to see Parliament-Funkadelic, War, Man-drill, and Graham Central Station. He attended Howard University during the late 1970s and became part of an avant-garde-in-training, working with jazz artists Geri Allen and Greg Osby, director Julie Dash, and cinematographers Ernest Dickerson and Arthur Jafa. He dropped out to become a father, moved to New York City and tried to make it as a writer.
Tate was raised on cultural nationalism, but had come to agree with the political rads about what he would call “the jiver parts of their program (like the sexist, anti-Semitic, Black supremacist, pseudo-African mumbo jumbo, paramilitary adventurist parts).”16
He says, “That movement had its own issues with sexism, homophobia, with multiculturalism. But at the same time, cultural nationalism really created a way to think about everything that people of African descent did as having a basis in a cultural experience, having a philosophical intent behind it. It was a way of responding to a racist environment.” High on the possibilities of postmodernist and poststructuralist theory, he vowed to popularize an “anti-essentialist essentialism” and called himself, with a knowing smirk, a “reconstructed cultural nationalist.”
When he came on staff in 1987, Tate helped turn The Village Voice into the central organ of a new Black public intellectualism, something like a post-integration Crisis. Boosted by editors like Thulani Davis and Robert Christgau, Tate and writers like Lisa Jones, Stanley Crouch, Harry Allen, Nelson George, Joan Morgan, Barry Michael Cooper, Carol Cooper, Ben Mapp, Lisa Kennedy and Donald Suggs aggressively complicated black politics and aesthetics from a dazzling diversity of positions—queer, feminist, progressive, conservative. The Voice became a spearhead of radical multiculturalism. If Yo! Bum Rush the Show was largely interpreted through white popcrit skepticism, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back came out amidst the blooming of yet another Black New York cultural renaissance.
Tate was one of the earliest and loudest supporters of Public Enemy. He played the advance cassette of Nation of Millions at his own house party in Harlem, and saw firsthand how it shocked a crowd of natty cult-nats into a hyperactive conscious party. He defended Chuck against those who called him a mere “bullshit artist,” saying he had “as formidable a poetic mind as African-American literary tradition has ever produced.”17 “The thing about Nation of Millions,” he says, “was that it dramatized Black identity in a way that it hadn’t been since the sixtie
s. It almost seemed like there was a mythic inevitability to it.”
But as he listened closer, he also felt a shudder of ambivalence. By the end of “Party for Your Right to Fight,” it was clear that Public Enemy’s ideology was swinging from revolutionary nationalism to cultural nationalism, political radicalism to cultural radicalism. There was talk of masonry and hidden books of knowledge, “grafted devils” and “the original Asiatic Black man.” The Black Panthers represented the past, the Black Muslims the future. By their next album, Fear of a Black Planet, the shift would be complete.
In a now-famous review, Tate used Griff quotes to skewer the crew:
To know PE is to love the agitprop (and artful noise) and to worry over the whack retarded philosophy they espouse. Like: “The Black woman has always been kept up by the Black male because the white male has always wanted the Black woman.” Like: “White people are actually monkey’s uncles because that’s who they made it with in the Caucasian hills.” Like: “If the Palestinians took up arms, went into Israel and killed all the Jews it’d be alright.” From this idiot blather, PE are obviously making it up as they go along. Since PE show sound reasoning when they focus on racism as a tool of the U.S. power structure, they should be intelligent enough to realize that dehumanizing gays, women and Jews isn’t going to set Black people free.18
Tate’s critique was different than John Leland’s anti-political salvo. It hit a lot closer to home. The week that the review hit, Chuck was calling Tate a “porch nigger” from concert stages.
Black Artists As the New Black Leadership
Greg Tate and Chuck D were continuing in the tradition of Adam Clayton Powell Jr., Jackie Robinson and Malcolm X, talking the Black liberation struggle in scathingly personal terms. But there was a new sense of scale to the debate. The discourse was migrating from the realm of the political to the cultural, from the intimacy of street corners and race papers to the fishbowl of the global media.
Integration had begun to offer a new kind of power. Within two months of its release, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back had already sold a million copies and perhaps set off an equal number of debates. The rap rebels and the cult-nats might never leverage the lumbering political system that had begun rolling back over them, but they might figure out how to mobilize lightning-quick, idea-dumb capital for its uses.
So the question returned: what was the role and responsibility of artists to the liberation struggle? For the Panthers, and even for Karenga, artists were revolutionaries first. As “cultural workers”—a Marxist construct that meant to validate art-making as a form of labor—their job was merely to support the revolution, not to theorize, strategize, or steer it. But in the urgency of the moment, given the irreparable break in political leadership development, rappers were now being asked not just to be mirrors to the people, but to be their leaders.
The Stop the Violence Movement was an example of what rappers could do well. In 1987, gang fights broke out during a U.T.F.O. show in Los Angeles, a boy was stabbed to death at a Dana Dane show in New Haven, Connecticut, and two teenaged girls were trampled in an after-concert stampede at a show in Nashville, Tennessee, featuring Eric B. & Rakim, Public Enemy and NWA. Violence was also on the rise in rock concerts, but the media suddenly had a new reason to stigmatize youths of color, and calls for rap show bans spread.
On September 10, 1988, the violence came home to the Black Belt. One youth was killed and dozens others were hurt at a Saturday-night homecoming show for Eric B. & Rakim, Kool Moe Dee and Doug E. Fresh at the Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Uniondale. Frustrated with the sensationalist media coverage and worried about its effect on the emerging rap industry, journalist Nelson George, Jive A&R exec Ann Carli, publicist Leyla Turkkan and a number of execs met the following week. “It was time,” Nelson George wrote, “for rappers to define the problem and defend themselves.”19
They conceived a project that would include a benefit record, video, book and a rally around the theme “Stop the Violence,” the title of KRS-One’s ode to his fallen partner, Scott La Rock. Working quickly, the ad hoc committee assembled an all-star group of rappers and producers to become the “Stop the Violence Movement.” They cut a record, “Self Destruction,” shot a video and staged a march through Harlem. The song went gold and added $200,000 to the National Urban League’s anti-violence programs. The well-executed marketing strategy significantly shifted the terms of the debate over rap concert bans.
But Stop the Violence was always less a movement than a media event. The project was never intended to be a political campaign against the Black-on-Black crime; that was for a civil rights organization like the Urban League to build. Stop the Violence meant to counterspin the mainstream media, reassure the entertainment business, show that rap artists could be responsible, and that hip-hop was a self-policing and stable industry. Nothing more should have been expected.
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.
Do the Right Thing
In the summer of 198
8, 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.