Chuck D, PE still fighting the power and pushing the envelope

By Michael Patrick Welch
Contributing Writer

For more than 25 years, rap group Public Enemy has pushed an Afrocentric musical agenda in a never-pausing effort to “Fight the Power.” Recently inducted into the Rock n’ Roll Hall of Fame, Public Enemy continues to push boundaries sonically and politically — and so might have seemed to some a strange fit to play on the first Friday of the happy-go-lucky New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Fest. When asked his thoughts on how politically charged rap fits into Jazz Fest, Chuck D uncharacteristically says via phone, “I haven’t thought about it,” adding, “I’m pretty sure that we’re gonna come to New Orleans and know more about New Orleans than a lot of the other bands on the bill.”

And Public Enemy is indeed a band. On stage, Chuck D remains flanked by his paramilitary ninjas the S1W’s, plus his provocative sidekick Flavor Flav (perhaps better known as a reality TV star, despite that Flav basically invented the hype-man role in hip-hop). For the last dozen or so years now, P.E. has also incorporated a full live band, called the Banned, currently led by guitarist Khari Wynn, and revolving around the sampled beats of DJ Lord, the world-champion turntablist who replaced Terminator X in 1999.

CHUCK D

Public Enemy began relying on more organic instrumentation following their two seminal albums It Takes A Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back and Fear of a Black Planet. In the late 90s, sampling as an art form came under attack in the courts, and Public Enemy’s style of chopping up 30 different soul songs to make one rap song became too expensive. The live band today makes Public Enemy sound like, as Chuck puts it, “a cross between RUN DMC and Rage Against the Machine.” The Banned makes Public Enemy shows more fluid and more musical; a verse of “By the Time I Get To Arizona” can suddenly pivot into a Curtis Mayfield jam doused with turntable scratching—perfect for Jazz Fest.

Back in the P.E. fold since the early 2000s, Minister of In­formation Professor Griff was famously suspended from the group in 1990 for supposedly making anti-Semitic comments to several prominent publications. These days, in his free time off from Public Enemy, Griff tours on his own, giving lectures about subliminal sexual messages in cartoons, and the connections hip-hop celebrities like Kanye West and Jay Z have to the New World Order and Illuminati.

Griff, Flav and Chuck have always kept ties to New Orleans. The song “Timebomb” from Public Enemy’s 1987 debut album Yo! Bumrush the Show, was built on a sample of the Meters’ “Just Kissed My Baby.” After Katrina, Chuck D shut down Tucker Carlson’s opinions on New Orleans as a CNN talking head. During that same time, Public Enemy recorded the Katrina charity single, “Hell No We Ain’t Alright.” Chuck and Griff also donated money from their 2009 House of Blues show to local charities, then spent the next day visiting with local performing arts high school students, and touring the destroyed Lower 9th Ward.

As the leader of the first group to ever release an album on the Internet (1999’s There’s a Poison Goin On), Chuck still runs his Internet-first SlamJamz record label, the all-purpose rap supersite www.Rapstation.com and several other trailblazing small musical web enterprises. Chuck has spent the last two years working on combining all of his long-running Internet territories into one portal.

“It’s been a 30-month process,” says Chuck, “creating a conjunction of all of our sites into one site, called RapCentralStation.com.”

While their golden age hip-hop peers continue to disappear, Public Enemy has never broken up, and rarely stops touring. The group has remained alive—and not a nostalgia act—mostly by thinking beyond America. “It’s a bigger world than it is a country,” says Chuck D, who now overseas a team of dozens of producers in studios worldwide, all under the umbrella of the Bomb Squad, the original team that produced “Bring the Noise,” “Welcome to the Terrordome” and almost every other P.E. classic.

“We never have anybody leave us,” says Chuck D, “we just have transitions.”

This article originally published in the May 19, 2014 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.