Public Enemy – Interview with Chuck D.

Politics and music joined hands decades ago with revolutionaries like Bob Dylan and John Lennon, and the tradition continues with one of the most revolutionary and outspoken bands of today, Public Enemy.

Never have they allowed music to be secondary to their political agenda, yet never have they been without something to say. Public Enemy was going strong long before Sean was Puff and the music business got its corporate stripes.

Spike Lee calls Public Enemy’s lyrical terrorist “…one of the most politically and socially conscious artists of any generation….” For Chuck D., every street poses a potential fight, but he knows that battles are better won with insight than with might. Every song, every line, is a verbal assault on your mind. Provoking thought is his weapon; inspiring knowledge is his gift.

I was lucky enough to catch him at home. My first three calls found him indulging other interviewers. Finally, as he promised, Chuck and I hooked up.

How’s everything?

Hectic, man. I’ve got twelve interviews, and when the interviews overlap you get thrown off.

How are the web sites going with bringthenoise.com and publicenemy.com?

It’s fantastic. The bringthenoise.com is probably my greatest joy I’ve been involved in. Especially Suitcase Radio.

So you are directly involved?

Yeah. I mean, people think that I actually program these things. I don’t do that, but I’m involved. I try to be the dark Dick Clark. (laughs)

What was it about Atomic Pop that made you want to work with them?

The right combination of technology and music, one on one savvy and vision that we had. I worked with Al Teller on two significant occasions in the past, and he was one of the first conversations I had, telling him where we were going, and he was one of the last.

You said that it was important to keep your master copies of your music this time around. Is there something in that which the up-and-coming artist should know?

When you keep your masters, you can do whatever you want with them. When you see artists with major labels, the reason they sign is they sign over the rights of their masters, which means if they take a song and ask to put it on a soundtrack on their label, they have to ask their label for permission. So all the songs that Public Enemy has made before are still owned by Universal. So if I wanted to take one of those songs and put it out, I would be sued by Universal if I don’t get their permission, because they own it.

So Public Enemy is pretty much doing this on its own?

You still have to use apparatuses to get it out. The whole thing is internet first, not internet only. I killed my contract with Sony, my SLAMJamz Records, I pulled it out of there in ’97 in lieu of making it an internet first situation. But I’m always going to do a blend, with having it internet first and then a distributor that will release it worldwide into the stores after the fact. So, with my SLAMJamz situation I have about twenty-six or twenty-seven artists, but maybe five will participate offline and the others will keep participating until they rise to the top.

So you are doing MP3s.

Yeah. MP3s and also introduce their records to the marketplace in different technologies and different forms. Like There’s A Poison Goin On will be released on zip (available now). I mean, with a zip you’ll get it playing in your shit and you’ll see the video at the same time. The whole thing is trying to have a record into the market place, like shrapnel from all sides, and still try to reinvent more areas to get to the marketplace, instead of the conventional one where you go to the store and buy it. ‘Cause once you do that you are a victim to the politics that go beyond your spending dollar.

All the major labels are really afraid of MP3s cause they have no control over copyright.

Yeah. That is the record companies’ concerns because they want to own every little thing. And the majors are run by lawyers and accountants, so why wouldn’t that be their worry?

Exactly.

That isn’t my worry because I make art. Artists make art or records and record labels sell records. That is two different things. If you have an artist concerned about what they are selling, then they should know what is happening with the sales department.

Do you think that MP3s are going to allow for artists to get their music known universally without the need for record labels?

What it is, and I tell people all of the time, there are a million athletes in America, from Little League up to the World Series, but you never hear people say, ‘There are too many athletes.’ So, you’ll see a million artists in the marketplace and you’ll see five hundred thousand labels in the next two years. But the thing about it is that people in the marketplace will be able to recognize some rites of passage. No longer will you see a major having the exclusivity of saying, ‘We made the selection, so this is going to be the star today.’ No. The majors will still be around and the independents will still be around, but they have to adapt to the ways of the next century and that there is a greater talent pool to choose from. They know they can’t have everybody and they can’t have the exclusive way of distributing the music to the people, which they’ve had for so long. This is inevitable. This has been done by artists before Chuck D. and Public Enemy, and we feel that we can bring more light to the situation and it helps us out a whole lot. We feel that we’ve got to put this shovel in the dirt to make this highway for many artists to tread, and we are probably the most fearless known ones to do it.

I really like what Atomic Pop is doing.

It’s a brilliant combination of music business savvy and technology. And that is something that you need to do art and get records to the public.

I was curious about the title of the album. Does that have to do with the fear of Y2K and the millennium?

Something about that. But poison is elements of society that kills people slowly, whether it’s spiritually, mentally, or even eventually physically, that we don’t even recognize but that we do day to day and just keep doing the same thing. And as we get closer to the wall, which is the year 2000, there will be a lot of people that won’t be able to scale the wall and adapt to the ways of the 21st century. Mentally, spiritually, and physically there will be a lot of people left in the 20th century trying to do things the old ways.

Do you think Y2K is more hype?

Well, on one of the songs on [There’s A] Poison [Goin’ On], called “Crash”, I think I explain some of the things that might happen. It’s gonna be a wild month in January, 2000. You won’t see me traveling.

Especially overseas.

Definitely not. I plan on wrapping up my tour on December 15th and go to the crib. I think after January 2000, things will pick back up, but it will be interesting to see that first couple of weeks, and I don’t really want anything to happen. There are going to be a lot of systems that are going to go down. The simplest of things are going to be going down that will effect the populous.

Yeah, little things that we take for granted, like microwaves.

Yep, like microwaves, water purification systems. Beyond things like people thinking their atm machines won’t be working. Like stoplights. You’ve probably gotta see the problems before you can fix it. So, that is going to be interesting. As long as they take care of the major things, like air traffic control or hospitals with people on respirators. I mean, that is going to be a problem.

Are there any songs on the new album that you really enjoy the most?

Songs are like children, so they are all yours. “[Do You Wanna Go] Our Way” is my signature statement. I dig “Crayola” and I like “I”.

What’s “Crayola” about?

Well, yeah, payola, playola is radio and crayola is colored radio. “I” is just a fucked up walk through the hood. And it’s the reverse of jiggy; I have nothing. Ya know, I just walk through the hood and I was inspired by Bruce Springsteen’s “Streets of Philidelphia”. So how is that for inspiration? It’s me walking through the hood and I’m seeing all this shit. I don’t even have a car. It’s below “It Was A Good Day”, by Ice Cube. So I’m walking through the hood and making money cleaning windshields. I woke up in a place, I forget, far from a meal and a cot. I woke up in a parking lot. It’s like, who gives a damn about the homeless? We talking about flashing this and flashing that and the person who rides in this Lexus, that happens to be twenty-one years old and has an expensive car, drives right by a hundred foot line of people trying to get a meal. How about that?

What do you think about the fact that your songs have inspired so many artists?

Well, this being the highlight of my career with moving it to the wild web with force and reckless abandon, I hope to build up the inspiration, and it’s happening by the minute.

So on your site you have message boards. Do you get on there and chat with fans?

That’s why it’s popular. That’s why we’ve had as many as ten million hits go through it. It’s popular because they’ll see my head up on it. So, yeah, I go through it often.

Is there a question that no one has asked you that you’ve waited to be asked?

In my career?

No

I’ve had like ten thousand interviews. (laughs)

Like recently with everything that has been going on.

There are questions about the record that I haven’t heard. The thing about it, and this is an often asked question (puts on a mock-snotty-female voice), ‘The hip-hop community doesn’t have computers,’ and I’m like, ‘You don’t count now, you count what’s to be.’ There was a time when the hip-hop audience didn’t have cellular phones.

Besides, computers are getting cheaper every day.

Right. Soon you’ll see computers for two hundred dollars and you can get everything. That might happen by the middle of next year. So, I mean, my whole thing is, should I be a victim of technology or should I use technology to the benefit of people can be as well informed as possible? Hip-hop has always run parallel with technology anyway. So, if it weren’t for technology, it’d be questionable whether hip-hop would exist. I wouldn’t have been dragged into hip-hop in 1976 if I didn’t see two turntables and this mixer and this microphone. It was music coming across in a different way. That is what turned me out. I thought the two turntables were in case one broke down, then the motherfucking other one would be used. So it’s totally technological. I mean, if Panasonic didn’t make Technics, who knows if a lot of those techniques in backspinning and shit like that would have been invented. This is inevitable.

+ charlie craine