PUBLIC ENEMY STILL RAGING AGAINST THE MACHINE
/- Originally published in the Birmingham Post, August 4, 2004
A t 44, Chuck D may be one of hip-hop's elder statesmen but the blazing energy which rocketed him and his band Public Enemy to worldwide acclaim 18 years ago - and turned hip-hop into a global phenomenon - shows no sign of flagging.
Joining Asian Dub Foundation on stage at a London gig last month, this pudgy man of middle years was able to visibly rev up the excitement level of an already enthusiastic crowd of teens and twentysomethings.
The clear, articulate authority of his raps has something of the hellfire preacher about it, something of the slightly frightening teacher. When he speaks, you listen: but in this lesson you're allowed to dance.
And he's not slowing down. Having flown over for one night to do the ADF concert, he squeezes in an interview in his London hotel the following morning before zipping back to the airport for his next appointment.
He obviously likes to work a full day, because you can see recording equipment for his internet radio station Bringthenoise.com set up on his dressing table, and his manager bustles in at regular intervals to remind him of all his other engagements.
And there are lots of these. Because, busy as he is with music, Chuck has many other irons in the fire. The articulate advocacy of black America which marked out Public Enemy's lyrics turned Chuck into a public figure, a role which he has eagerly embraced. These days when he's not making music, he's out on the college lecture circuit or appearing on American news programmes.
Another musician might get tired of being constantly called on to be a spokesman and guru. Not Chuck.
'Oh no, I'm pretty sure that I can step right up to the plate when it comes to speaking for a generation, speaking for musicians, speaking for the music itself,' he says.
'Then again I'm not a child. I think when you're grown, there are a lot of things that you can say and do to represent life in general.'
Chuck is fired by righteous indignation, and he shows no sign of running out of fuel. Does he feel as angry as he did as a young man?
'Of course, but I've never been angry for anger's sake,' he says. 'Whenever one looks around at things like slavery and post-slavery effects across the world, how the West has treated much of the planet, one can get very angry.
'Look at how the environment is being treated, how the powers that be still f*** over the everyday person, how celebrities are put up on this false pedestal and they look down on the average person and they think that don't mean s***. You could be angry at a lot of different things.'
Another thing making him angry is the second Gulf War and its aftermath, as expressed in his new single, MKLVFKWR, which is a collaboration with Moby. (Adding vowels to the title makes the message pretty clear.) 'Last year, touring around the world, this was a theme. Many people are stuck within their own domains, in their heads but also in their own country. Touring last year made clear that American opinion is a smaller part of the planet than we might imagine. Obviously, the Bush administration figures highly in being the target of that.'
It seemed a good theme to keep hold of when Public Enemy were asked to take part in the Unity album being put together for this year's Olympics, and released on Monday August 2. The idea was to bring together musicians from opposite ends of the musical spectrum. A half-smile plays on Chuck's lips when he reveals the original plan was to collaborate with gender-bending grungers Placebo. This, he explains, 'should happen sometime in the future. I'm always up for things that go against the odds'.
But, in the end, Moby was a more obvious fit. 'I've always dug everything that Moby has done, and his beliefs as well. And he was somebody I'd wanted to work with for quite some time, and vice versa.'
The result is going to be rather hard for radio stations to play, but it's a driving groove which blends Moby's feel for a catchy hook with Chuck's militant lyrics.
Having championed hip-hop from very early on as a kind of 'CNN for black people', you wonder whether he isn't a little disappointed by the apolitical stance of most of today's rap superstars.
He becomes surprisingly diplomatic at this point, avoiding criticising individual performers and laying the blame for the lack of militancy in today's hip-hop firmly on the music industry.
'Public Enemy sold a lot of records back in the day because the genre was newly discovered and they had no choice but to take everything that came with it.
'Now there's so much of it that people can pick a segment of it and say, 'Well, this makes money'. It's McDonald's to a certain extent. They're meant to shift units, they might as well be widgets or dog food.
'Is that the artists' fault? It's not the artists' fault, it's companies. Companies gotta take the lowest common denominator and just keep it moving.'
It's for this reason that Chuck has, in recent years, become involved in the internet. As well as his internet radio station, Bringthenoise.com, Public Enemy pioneered bands' use of the web to reach their fans directly.
'In the middle of the 90s I saw it would be the perfect apparatus for sight and sound, to get to people. It's like the last form of freedom. It's open source, open form, where I can go directly to masses of people around the world without subjugating my art to some record company.'
And getting out a message is clearly something he feels he has a responsibility to do.
Asked if having children - he has two teenage daughters - has changed his attitudes, he says: 'Yeah, but even kids that ain't mine biologically, I feel I have to be somehow an older, parenting voice. Are you going to say something out there that would be pertinent for a kid to use, and have a good road map to be an adult?
'Entertainment and all that s*** comes later. I'm a black, grown-ass man in the world. Everything I do afterwards is what I do, but what I am is this'
