Public Enemy are on a U.K tour with some european dates thrown in and some dates with The Prodigy. David at Gigslutz got the chance to interview the legend that is Chuck D whilst at the same putting a massive tick on his bucket list! Read on to find out what Chuck things about the Beatles, Christopher Columbus and why they named Elvis as a racist…
David – Hi Chuck how are you?
Chuck D – busy, lots of people calling
DH – first off thanks for the inspiration. Difficult to describe the influence P.E have had on me musically. My brothers and I would study every line of Nation of Millions and I’d walk to the grocers and back with the 12” sleeve under my arm facing the traffic!
CD – oh wow thank you!
DH – no probs, this is an honour for me. Let’s talk about the tour, I know some excited peeps in Liverpool for example who are looking forward to that one in particular!
CD – yeah well that’s a month away and as much as I’m paying attention to it, today is the first date of the tour with The Prodigy so I got other things on my mind.
DH – played with them before?
CD – No never
DH – well they’re heavy
CD – well I’ll see
DH – the Summer went well and you’re still getting the recognition you deserve with some top slots
CD – well we consider ourselves like Led Zep, the Stones and The Who so..
DH – me too
CD – yeah so I won’t take anything less. Can’t quite say the Beatles yet though!
DH – the UK seems a second home for you. I watched an Otis Redding doc recently where he said that coming and playing here for the first time; he immediately felt accepted and there were no colour boundaries, was that the same for you since day one?
CD – yes. the UK has always been our base. It was our base before the US was our base. Some of the reasons are that with our music we struck a worldwide point of view, especially for the ‘under-voice’, especially at a time when you guys had Thatcher, and this rift between Ireland and Northern Ireland and Nelson Mandela was in prison and Bush & Reagan were in the states so there were a lot of things that people felt but you know they didn’t have a lot of outlets for them to talk about it. And 5 to 10 years post-punk, we answered some of those calls.
DH – yeah right. So what gives you the impetus to keep performing? Is it a love of the art or is it a belief in the messages or is it an awareness that the voices of dissent that may be out there, have a marginalised chance of being heard?
CD – life is our art, God is time, time is art and art is God
DH – OK. The voices of dissent are being squashed down?
CD – yeah they’re being put in a box. They’re always trying to convince young people that it’s all good when obviously things remain the same, some things are different but some things remain the same.
DH – I saw a doc this week called Inventing The Indian, about the US government and Hollywood and what they did to native Americans, and Burn Hollywood Burn which blew my mind when I first got hold of that..
CD – Well number one it’s like, it’s derogatory calling indigenous people Indians anyway just cos Columbus
DH – got lost!
CD – yeah the dumb ass. heh heh! Dude got lost and all of a sudden wants to call people what he wants to call them.
DH – straight up crime. Do you feel different now as an African American than you did when P.E was born.
CD – well you know I feel different cos we’re thirty years later
DH – same problems?
CD – similar problems you know, we’d have to go into a really long conversation you know, which goes past what we can talk about as musicians. A dissertation to say what’s changed. I mean people might say from the outside looking in “well you guys got a black president for the 7th year so shouldn’t you feel good about that?” and the answer is “yes” and you also have to answer “no” about certain things. We’d end up too long past this article.
DH – I watched an interview with you recently talking about the death of the group in hip hop, which I think transcends all genres but for me in hip hop I think the best era was ’85-’95. Is that just nostalgia or do you think it’s ‘cos the group was still prevalent?
CD – Nah I think ’85-’95 was a good period, ‘cos in ’85, ’86 and ’87 we still followed the blueprint, and at the turn of the ‘90s we still followed the blueprint but had to understand that the corporate world was coming into dominance and so we had fight the system we are in, and you know, or at least go and change the system as much as we could. We’re in there fighting ‘em every day. We were fighting ‘em not for ourselves, we were fighting them so they would actually come right, ya know? The difference is that over a longer period of time, people started feeling comfortable with their record contracts like they were with their ‘masters’ so to speak. “These are our masters so we have to listen to everything they gotta say”. We just thought that was…poppycock! heh heh.
DH – I DJ’d once for an indie band called Babyshambles, really young rock n roll crowd, 15, 16 years old, pointy shoes n leather n all of that, and I put on Fear of a Black Planet from the start and by the middle of Terrordome they were queueing around the booth saying “what the hell is this?!”, loving it, and I told them “Public Enemy” and you could see something happened for some of them that night. My question is, at that age we would have already known about Public Enemy, do you think the lack of exploration and discovery in music consumption now has lead to a lack of knowledge?
CD – I think it’s scattered. Music back when maybe when you were young, was about audio. It maybe had a visual component but one of those was live. Today, audio is the 4th component of musical entertainment. It’s about style, story, sight and THEN sound, so style story sight and then sound, the 4 s’s. If you ask what their favourite artist might be the answer could be “well what are they about? What do they look like? what controversy?” Ya know?. I’m not saying these things surround Public Enemy cos we kinda honed around a sound, the aspects of who we were and what we were about, maybe controversial but we didn’t set out to be controversial we set out to be forthright n very confident about what we talked about but today I just think, every single act in the last 2 or 3 generations the sound is probably their 4th priority as far as what they’re searching for. But you have vast resources so we can’t generalise so easy either, because young people go to YouTube and will sit and listen to the Beatles and Hendrix like it was yesterday. No big pun intended!
DH – haha! Nice one. A few quick fires if that’s ok. Who are you listening to at the moment?
CD – MF911 and all the artists on our SLAMjamz SpitDIGITAL labels. That’s where I spend most of my time and also Rap Station. We built a super station with eleven channels for hip hop across the world and we have eleven station channels there. So you go to Rap Station and you go to our record label and networks. Ok well i’m on that.
DH – what book are you reading at the moment?
CD – I’m reading, and thanks to the ipad I carry my book collection so I’m really savouring the technology when it comes down to books so Our Noise, the story of Merge Records, the indie label that got big and stayed small.
DH – I know it’s a cliche question but I really would love to know what your desert island album would be?
CD – oh ummm…
DH – tough one?
CD – not that tough. I mean if you got an album you’d need electricity so you might as well take an ipod with 13,000 songs on it right? haha. my desert island ipod would probably be the entire 1960s. And A Revolution of The Mind by James Brown is a good place to stay energised.
DH – cool. What’s your favourite Public Enemy track?
CD – That’s like picking children. Pick your favourite child. Only people that don’t got kids would ask summit like that you got kids?
DH – yeah one. 18 month old daughter.
CD – ahhhhh! So your favourite child is your one and only child?
DH – yeah I don’t have to choose man!
CD – if you had 3 you wouldn’t ask the question but anyways if I had to pick one…Welcome to The Terrordome
DH – yeaaaaah!
CD – cos it signified a midpoint for us.
DH – well you know what every time I hear that record even now it still makes me stand up
CD – yeah yeah it’s like “let’s get this shit started!”
DH – yeah. We’ve often debated over the years among brothers and friends; the line about Elvis being a racist, was he?
CD – well that was because of the USA icon above all the creators, they said 50 million fans couldn’t be wrong well FUCK DAT ya know?
DH – yeah he stole the soul!
CD – ya know what, I’m a big Beatles fan so..
DH – right, another rumour we used to debate was when we used to sit and watch the Fight The Power video on VHS! The rumour that it was organic and spontaneous so how much of it was?
CD – Spike Lee told Brooklyn a movie was taking place so he invited the neighbourhood down and it was smack bang in the middle of a lot of things that were happening in the New York area so it was very organic. Matter of fact it was 85% organic but ya know Spike Lee had to get the neighbourhood together so he had to go through some clearances but that was the only part that was staged.
DH – ok one P.E gig I went to was at the Kentish Town Forum years ago and I took some people who weren’t into rap music or hip hop and it completely converted them. They still talk about it to this day. They walked out saying that it was the best rock n roll gig they’d ever been to. There was a young kid playing a guitar solo that Hendrix would’ve been proud of and Flava did an incredible drum solo, and people that hadn’t seen you wouldn’t necessarily know what an incredible band you are. Will there be more of the same on this tour? Liverpudlians are known of their love of music so you’ll be dishing that up?
CD – yeah yeah. We have to, we are a band, B.A.N.D, an outgrowth of the first stuff we did with turntables and a DJ and stuff like that but in 1999 we had to expand in order to go further so Public Enemy is split into 2 different areas, and DJ Lord replaced Terminator X in ’99 but the unit that’s around him are more like a rhythm section, it’s about playing Don’t Believe The Hype and then, taking it apart and then putting it back together while you’re rockin’ it ya know.
DH – Liverpool England consider yourself warned!
CD – yeah yeah, well we’re from Roosevelt Long Island so we understand what it’s about. We’re from New York and not from New York y’understand what I’m saying? We understood. Remember, I was a child when the Beatles emerged and when they hit the states I was 4 years old and from that point on they always had an impact on me and then of course to find out later that Liverpool wasn’t London was a thing heh heh.
DH – ok well my last point is a bit of a lifelong ambition for me to say, I’ve always loved the ending of that album and wanted to say it so here goes, “eh yo talk to me about the future of Public Enemy…”
CD – Yeah. well the future of what I do with Public Enemy is pushing our brand areas and that’s SpitDIGITAL, you go to spitdigital.com and we distribute many situations, Rap Station and then Public Enemy so we provide services with the brand that we have and we wanna be able to be hip hop and rap music handling itself just like rock
DH – right so lots of food on the plate
CD – yeah yeah, a lotta duty, a lotta duty.
DH – listen Chuck thank you so much, you’re a hero and a gentleman, there’s a photo of you on my daughter’s wall, you and the boys,
CD – heh heh ok, I’ll see if I can uh, be of service in any kind of way
DH – inspire
CD – yeah
DH – there’s you, Rosa Parkes and Nadya Tolokonnikova the Russian rebel
CD – heh heh heh!
DH – speaking to you Chuck has been full circle for me since I was a boy I’m nudging 40 now and I’m so appreciative of your time I really am
CD – nah man hey I hope to see you a night on the tour and we can chat some more, I’ll be there early for soundcheck and let’s hook up and have a good time
DH – well it would be fantastic to do that so..well, show em watcha got!
CD – yes sir.
DH – big love
CD – alright thank you I appreciate it.
For Public Enemy’s remaining dates go here: http://www.publicenemy.com/tour
Rap Station: www.rapstation.com
SpitDIGITAL: www.spitdigital.com
SlamJamz street wear: www.slamjam.com
David Ham
@gigslutz_radio
