TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/020590/0205440.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 9.2 KB | 201 lines

                                                                                MUSIC, Page 60

Yo! Rap Gets on the Map


Led by groups like Public Enemy, it socks a black message to the
mainstream

By JANICE C. SIMPSON


    Spike Lee knew just the right thing. While shooting his
racially charged movie Do the Right Thing last year, the
director realized how crucial it was to find appropriate music
for the song that ignites the film's climactic riot scene. "I
wanted it to be defiant, I wanted it to be angry, I wanted it
to be very rhythmic," says Lee. "I thought right away of Public
Enemy."

    Word, Spike. Few groups pulsate with more in-your-face
aggression than the four young black men known as Public Enemy,
rap music's self-proclaimed "prophets of rage." For the sound
track, they concocted Fight the Power, a swaggering mixture of
combustive rhythms and rebellious rhymes ("Got to give us what
we want/ Got to give us what we need/ Our freedom of speech is
freedom or death/ We got to fight the powers that be"). The
song not only whipped the movie to a fiery pitch but sold
nearly 500,000 singles and became an anthem for millions of
youths, many of them black and living in inner-city ghettoes.
For these listeners, rap in general, and Public Enemy in
particular, is more than entertainment -- more, even, than an
expression of their alienation and resentments. It is a major
social force.

    "Rap is the rock 'n' roll of the day," says pop-music
publicist Bill Adler. "Rock 'n' roll was about attitude,
rebellion, a big beat, sex and, sometimes, social comment. If
that's what you're looking for now, you're going to find it
here." The basic sound, propelled by a slamming polyrhythmic
beat, is loud and raw. The lyrics, a raucous stew of
street-corner bravado and racial boosterism, are often salted
with profanity, and sometimes with demeaning remarks about
whites, women and gays. The fact that they are delivered by
young, self-consciously arrogant black men in a society where
black youths make many whites uneasy doesn't help either.

    Nevertheless, rap -- hip-hop to its true fans -- has grown
into the most exciting development in American pop music in
more than a decade. Nearly a third of the records currently on
Billboard's chart of the top 100 black albums are by rap
artists. The biggest pop single of 1989 was a rap song by
Tone-Loc, Wild Thing, which sold more than 2 million copies.


    Not bad for a genre that got its start as renegade street
music back in the mid-1970s. Turned off by the blandness of
disco and the slickness of rhythm and blues, disk jockeys in
black dance clubs began manipulating their turntables to blend
instrumental riffs from different songs, dragging the needle
across a record to create an even harsher sound. While these
brash mixes played, M.C.s, or rappers, would exhort the crowd
with chants: "When I die, bury me deep;/ Put two speakers at my
feet,/ A mixer at my head,/ So that when you close the casket/
I can rock the dead."

    From bootleg cassettes, rap moved onto commercial recordings
and into the acts of savvy performers. Yet even those from
middle-class homes -- like the group Run-D.M.C., or some
members of Public Enemy -- accentuated the funkiness of the
music by dressing in sweatsuits, baseball caps and other street
wear. They evolved a hip lingo that turns ordinary meanings
upside down ("stupid" is a compliment in rap argot) and adopted
flashy aliases like LL Cool J that could pass for graffiti
signatures. Youngsters rallied to these homeboys who, unlike
smoother sequined and glittery entertainers, seemed so much
like themselves. "Rap is the sound of urban youth," says Bronx
native Fred Brathwaite, who as Fab 5 Freddy hosts the cable
show Yo! MTV Raps. "People identify with rap. You feel that you
can look like that, that you can be a part of it immediately."

    A whole generation of young performers reared on rap is
taking the music in new directions. Their music is more
complex, their lyrics are more subtle, and their style is more
adventurous. Female rappers like Salt-N-Pepa and Queen Latifah
wage a feminist assault on the macho world of hip-hop. Mellow
fellows D.J. Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince bring a Cosby-like
calm to the music. The laid-back rappers De La Soul put out a
hippie-style hip-hop. Los Angeles' N.W.A. (Niggers with
Attitude) get down to a gritty realism and sometimes
hair-raising hostility. And groups like 3rd Bass add a white
soul flavor to the rap mix.

    But no group has had a more radical effect on rap music than
Public Enemy. "Once Public Enemy got in the door, that really
turned the rap world upside down," says Cynthia Horner,
executive editor of Right On, a magazine for black teens. "Many
rappers come out with lyrics that are just boastful, but Public
Enemy goes several layers beyond that. They try to set a kind
of model for black youths to follow."

    And what a model. Fans liken Public Enemy to the Black
Panthers, and it is an image that the group cultivates. A
precision-stepping, paramilitarily clad backup group known as
S1W (the Security of the First World) stands at attention
onstage during all their performances. Lead rapper Chuck D
(Carlton Ridenhour) and his comic sidekick Flavor  Flav (William
Drayton) philosophize about the everyday problems of urban life
and are unabashed in their declarations of black pride,
peppering their songs with references to Nat Turner, Marcus
Garvey, Huey Newton and Malcolm X.

    Public Enemy isn't the only rap group to tackle political
issues. Longtime rapper Kool Moe Dee pushes the importance of
getting a good education. Kris Parker, also known as
K.R.S.-One, is a committed activist whose Stop the Violence
coalition has helped raise $150,000 for the National Urban
League. Parker, who spent several years living on the streets
of New York City, also devotes time to the homeless. Nearly all
the groups preach against drugs. What sets Public Enemy apart
is the militancy of its views and the insistently defiant manner
in which it expresses them both in and out of its songs.

    This militancy has resulted in charges of anti-Semitism
against Public Enemy. Jewish groups were alarmed last spring
when Richard Griffin, then the group's "Minister of
Information" and head of the S1W squad, told the Washington
Times that Jews were responsible for "the majority of
wickedness going on across the globe." Ridenhour promptly
condemned the statement and said that Griffin, known as
Professor Griff, would leave the group. A few days later
executives at Public Enemy's record label, Def Jam, announced
that the group would disband. In the end, however, the group
stayed together and Griffin stayed on, albeit in a demoted
position. Griffin, a devoted follower of Black Muslim leader
Louis Farrakhan, now says he went too far in blaming all Jews.

    Less than six months later Public Enemy released a new
single, Welcome to the Terrordome, on which Ridenhour, in an
apparent reference to the earlier incident, says, "Crucifixion
ain't no fiction;/ So-called chosen, frozen./ Apology made to
whoever pleases./ Still they got me like Jesus." Upset by the
references to deicide and the term so-called chosen, the
Anti-Defamation League wrote a protest letter to CBS, the
record's distributors. The company eventually issued an internal
memo instructing its employees to ensure "that none of our
recordings promote bigotry." But Public Enemy and its
supporters remain unapologetic. "This is Chuck's point of view
as an African man living on this planet," says Harry Allen, a
self-described hip-hop activist. "The notion of saying things
to Europeans to make them comfortable is not part of the game."

    Despite the controversies swirling around Public Enemy, rap
continues to move into the mainstream, gaining acceptance among
audiences well outside its black constituency. Not too many
years ago, radio stations, both black and white, refused to
play rap records. And when the press wrote about rap, it was
usually to chronicle a violent incident at a concert. Now hip
young whites have hijacked rap to downtown clubs. Suburban
teens, on the lookout for something new, have carried it out
to the shopping malls. Fashion designers have picked up on the
baggy pants and dark sunglasses of rap couture, while
advertising executives have copied its semantic style ("Reeboks
let U.B.U.," declares one ad in fluent hip-hop).

    Over the past few years major record companies like Columbia
and RCA have scrambled to hook up with rap labels. MTV, once
criticized for ostracizing hip-hop videos, gives Yo! MTV Raps
30 minutes on its daily schedule. Master rappers D.J. Jazzy
Jeff and the Fresh Prince have appeared on the David Letterman
show. The Grammy Awards got into the act last year when it
created its first rap-music category. Meanwhile, mainstream
musicians like pop producer and jazz trumpeter Quincy Jones are
including rap tracks on their new albums.

    The epicenter of rap still lies in black urban communities,
and it is from such communities in Los Angeles, in Seattle, in
Miami, that the new talent is rising. "Hip-hop is a black
thing," says Fab 5 Freddy. "But if you want to get with it,
come on over." Yo, home. Listen up.