TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/111191/1111440.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 5.8 KB | 118 lines

                                                                                MUSIC, Page 98

The Empire Strikes Black


With a hot new album, the rap group Public Enemy raises its
message of social outrage to a blistering pitch

By JAY COCKS -- With reporting by David E. Thigpen/Oakland


    You don't need an addressable cable box or a fancy
monitor to beam in on the most exciting TV in the country. Even
a screen is superfluous. All that's necessary is a tape deck or
a CD player and a finely tuned ear. Let Public Enemy supply the
images.

    "Rap music is black America's TV station," says Chuck D,
the group's lead voice, chief lyricist and moving force. It's
a solid metaphor. Rap is cool music in a cool medium, carrying a
blisteringly hot message of social outrage, as instantly
accessible as the nightly news. It is also, frequently, as
perishable: contemporary music that not only describes and
comments on its time but passes with it. Rap is music for the
emphatic now, rhythm without a past or future. In rap there is
only the present, and the present is tense indeed.

    Not even the recent welcome spate of films by black
filmmakers can put the street situation right in your face with
the force of rap, which is one reason why most of those films
use rap on their sound tracks to muscle up the drama. Public
Enemy itself was heard, memorably, in Do the Right Thing, but
nothing in that deft and righteous movie can match the immediacy
of a cut like Nighttrain on their new album, Apocalypse 91: The
Enemy Strikes Black. Out only a month, Apocalypse has burned
into the Top Ten and sold a million copies; it hit No. 4 on the
Billboard chart, with Can't Truss It sitting high at No. 3 among
the singles. The heat, in every sense, seems to be following the
group on its current tour. Disembarking from the band bus for
a recent date in Oakland, Chuck D looked at the flames in the
near distance and observed, "This is it. It's Apocalypse '91."

    And Apocalypse is different from standard-issue funked-out
dance-club rap: in its thick sonic layering, which is playful,
graceful and brutal by turns; in its roughhouse lyrics, which
are part editorial and part rage, raw but keenly focused; and
in its politics. "I think people got a connotation that
hard-core rap had to have cursing or gangster stories," Chuck
D, 31, reflects. "We've got neither. I wanted to show we could
make a hard album without those connotations -- a positive
hard-core record." A first step was to cool out on the language,
which had been overworked and overbaked by the Geto Boys and the
recent N.W.A. album. Explains Chuck D: "Cursing and all that sis
played out anyway."

    In case that decision might sound like a bit of self-
justifying commercialization, it should be kept in mind that
another lively cut on Apocalypse is titled How to Kill a Radio
Consultant. Radio has not bridled. Public Enemy can get away
with saying what it wants, whether it's lambasting shock-effect
journalism (A Letter to the New York Post) or coming down hard
on black drug dealers who exploit their fellow blacks ("Got tha'
nerve as hell, to yell brother man") and on liquor interests
whose black-oriented sales pitches are "selling us pain."
Rebirth, with its observation that "You can't see who's in
cahoots/ Cause now the KKK/ Wears three-piece suits,"ought to
be faxed straight to David Duke's campaign headquarters.

    Chuck and fellow band members Flavor Flav (the gentleman
who perpetually wears a large clock around his neck) and
Terminator X have succeeded in making a narrow strip of the
'hood into a wide swath of territory that serves nicely as an
image of contemporary urban America, sundered by poverty and
racism. It's a place the band knows intimately, if not exactly
by birth. Chuck D, born Carlton Ridenhour, was the eldest of
three children of a middle-class family in Roosevelt, N.Y. He
started getting deep into music while dejaying at Adelphi
University, where he also drew a comic strip for the campus
paper and casually considered a career like his father's, as a
graphic designer. He met producer Hank Shocklee and Flavor Flav
(then William Drayton) at the campus radio station, and graphics
soon got subsumed into graphic language and a grandiose beat.

    Shocklee and Chuck D deejayed on the party circuit,
appeared at local clubs and concocted a local video rap show.
When they cut their first single, Public Enemy No. 1, in early
1987, their sound was already incendiary. Their first album, Yo!
Bum Rush the Show, sold 400,000 copies later that same year
without benefit of airplay. Each succeeding record displayed new
fire and fresh momentum, culminating in Fight the Power, which
soared up the singles charts in the summer of 1989 and became
the signature song in Do the Right Thing.

    That was also when Public Enemy got burned by its own
flame. A nonperforming member of the band, Professor Griff, used
a newspaper interview to vent some unsavory racial theories
(among them: that Jews are responsible for "the majority of
wickedness that goes on across the globe"), which caused enough
criticism for Chuck D to fire Professor Griff and disband the
group. The Professor, Chuck D remarked later, "almost burned
down the house." When the group re-formed two months later, its
leader was careful to say, "We are not anti-Jewish. We are not
anti-anyone. We are pro-black, pro-black culture and pro-human
race."

    That stance is clear from even a cursory listen to
Apocalypse, a record with enough power of persuasion and
electronic concussion to set the bluesiest soul rapping. "If
there's an overall message," Chuck D says, "it's the destruction
of the evil forces within the black community. The time to face
them is now." Face up and dance.