A conversation with Chuck D
January 21, 2016
Chuck D — a cofounder and core member of one of the most influential and long-lasting groups in music history, Public Enemy — was recently in the Twin Cities to speak at Augsburg College as part of its Martin Luther King, Jr. Day Convocation on January 18. "It seems like the coldest day of the year," Chuck remarked about the day's subzero temperatures. "When you guys say it's cold, we have to pay attention and nod our heads to that."
Although it was cold outside, Chuck D's warmth and sincerity were as present as ever. Before his speech at Augsburg, Chuck D sat down with The Current's Sean McPherson for a conversation about music, race and community. Here is their conversation.
Sean McPherson: Public Enemy have been going for over 30 years, and you've been touring and recording the whole time, and it's a group that's run democratically. That's quite an achievement — what tools do you use to keep the group together, prolific, and also most importantly, creatively?
Chuck D: Berry Gordy, founder of Motown and one of our cultural heroes, said, "Logic is the boss in any forward situation." So we try to have everybody have a voice. And logic is like: you have your position, you have your job; if you're speaking up for what you're doing, it all fits together like spokes on a wheel.
Sean McPherson: You said in 2014 on the Combat Jack show, "You can't be a black person and have an opinion." … If it's true that a black person can't have an opinion in this country, why is that so forbidden, why is that so dangerous in your opinion?
Chuck D: Well, a black person can have an opinion, but I sarcastically said we cannot have an opinion, even especially since President Barack Obama was elected in 2008, it seems like the categorization of black folks and people of color are scrutinized a little bit more so, with the excuse of, "What are you guys complaining about? You should be happy."
We're individuals as well as a collective; we're looked upon as being a collective, but really, human beings are individuals who want to collect with good forward movements, but once that's restricted and keeping a certain amount of people out — still, to this day, because of their visual characteristics — it makes you feel that way.
Sean McPherson: So what do you think could be done to not have America view black people as a singular entity and maybe give more agency for individual black people to have opinions and have that be welcomed and respected?
Chuck D: It would be helpful if USAers — because I've reduced myself from calling people in the United States "Americans" because that's a little bit arrogant; it's like, this is North America, which is Canada and there's Central and South America and the Caribbean — USAers can actually be taught and be more open to the rest of the world than we are, but it seems like the powers that be, the politics that are at hand, are about reducing and separating the United States from the rest of the world. And when it comes down to what can people do to understand the point of view of people who still feel a bias from society, they'll have a better understanding if they take the whole world into consideration, and just the movements and the mindsets of human beings. Humans are a great thing to be in.
Sean McPherson: I certainly want to talk about race and about music today. I do have a more musical question: Growing up and hearing a lot of James Brown, when you heard it, did you hear it with the noise and atonal stuff that you put in the treble registers, and did you hear it with the low, drum-machine stuff that you put below it? Because the way Public Enemy used James Brown samples is unlike any other group, and you guys really made it your own sonically. Before I met with you today, I was thinking, was Chuck D hearing James Brown's music always in that context before you started messing around and putting things together sonically?
Chuck D: It wasn't just James Brown. We were brought up to pay attention to all those sounds in the '60s, and the Bomb Squad is no different than the Assembly Line of Motown: everybody had their piece to add to something that's going to be a collage of sound, and Hank Shocklee was the admiral of that ship. Basically the person who we all agreed that we should — you know, like Phil Spector — we should be kind of like The Art of Noise. And we had that ability because we had the technology at the time, just making a turntable mix would collide sounds differently with a certain lined-up pitch than any instrument beforehand. So we learned those tools very well.
And we came up in the '60s, so it was always hearing something else while you were hearing it anyway. If you had James Brown and you had Steely Dan and Janis Joplin and Gladys Knight and the Pips — four records in a row — automatically you were getting a mash in your head. I mean, how do you go from Sly and the Family Stone to Gordon Lightfoot in three minutes? So you're going to come up with something that's going to be a bizarre mix, especially in the '80s.
Sean McPherson: So if you guys were like the Motown Assembly Line with a lot of people from The Bomb Squad doing different stuff, what was your role early on, sonically? What did you bring to the mix?
Chuck D: Sonically, since I wrote the lyrics, my job was to find things that coincided with the lyrics, be it a sound, be it a voice sample, that would ride alongside it that was a reference from a historical background, and also bring it into the mix. I didn't deal with the subsonics; Hank dealt with that because he has the greatest ear, I think — the weirdest ear! Somebody like Keith Shocklee always has that feeling of feel and funk that you really can't put into words. Gary G-Wiz played drum machine like a drummer. Eric "Vietnam" Sadler played the drum machine like the musician that he is. The conversations — music versus not music — is what bent into something that became music. Everybody had their position, and arguments pursued to have something that appeared like coal come out as a diamond.
Sean McPherson: Thinking about Martin Luther King, Jr., on this day, J. Edgar Hoover, as head of the FBI throughout the 1960s, spent a lot of time tracking and threatening Martin Luther King for the last few years of King's life, using his COINTELPRO group. You recently stated that hip hop that affirms being disrespected is the new version of COINTELPRO. Can you explain what you mean by that, and how it relates to the COINTELPRO activities of the 1960s?
Chuck D: Well, I'll be brief. Hip hop is used as a COINTELPRO — a counter intelligence program — because it already had that natural tendency to sweep people into it, because it's culture, it's music, it's a vibe, it's a vibration. But if it can't dictate or govern itself, that means it can be co-opted by a company that might say, "OK, we one percent control 99 percent of the revenue and the structure to get it across to the masses."
Ninety-nine percent of the artists out there are independent, but they have one percent of the revenue, and attention span is split unless they come across as really crazy and shocking. This is where the shock comes from; the shock is coming because it's not fair, and they want to be heard, and artists want to be seen and respected as artists. Therefore, if shock is the only thing left, then shock on.
What I mean by COINTELPRO is that the government is in control of the communication systems. The FCC, in 1996, they made a deal to have radio stations collude in big situations to buy up all the radio stations nationally, so there was no longer this area of locality that helped local artists. I have a very clear point: if the community doesn't support the arts, the arts cannot support and protect the community. And nowhere is it quite evident as has been the inability for the airwaves and the local media to make local artists have a suitable living in their radius.
Just think about it: radio is still powerful because it's free and you can turn it on. Internet radio is powerful, but if you don't pay your bill, it going to be hard to obtain. But if a Minneapolis or a St. Paul artist, or a Twin Cities artist, if they can be heard on blast as much as the artist that's never going to come to Minneapolis — which is most of them, unless they want to come into Target [Center] to do the big, big thing — if they're on a playlist situation like in Canada where they have to adhere to 30 percent of the playlist being Canadian artists, and you had a local situation that says, "Well, 150 miles in our radius, we have to have 40 percent of the playlist be artists within that radius," you'll see a lot more musicians and artists making a living. Not just audibles, but you'll see all kinds of local people make a better living. But because it's consolidated big business, they rarely ever speak to the local signal unless they want to consume the consumer, or make them into consumers, and that's been blasphemous to the arts community and the musicians' community for the last 20 years now, since 1996.
Sean McPherson: Now you speak a lot about community when you're talking about some ways the music world might be better, maybe if it had more similarities to some of the programming in Canada. Somebody came at you and said, "Nobody elected you the president of hip hop" when you started saying some things about the operations of commercial radio, and I really enjoyed your response — you said, "Hip hop doesn't need a president. Hip hop needs socialism." So my question is, talking about Canada, talking about community responsibility, talking about artists who can actually reach the community they live in and do well for that community and have that conversation back and forth, if that was happening on a national level in the United States, how do you think hip hop would be different?
Chuck D: It would be different because it would be accepted as a learning mechanism as opposed to just this thing that people have to go out and buy. It has all kinds of variables when it comes down to what it can do for you. It's music. It's a culture. It feeds the soul. Good friends of mine are in these towns — people like Brother Ali and Atmosphere — they've been fine examples for years now. Twenty years Rhymesayers has been putting its staple on the map, and it's still the untold or the lesser-told national story. The world probably speaks a louder tale of Rhymesayers than the country, which is still polarized by big corporations in New York and Los Angeles. Hip hop can stand better on governing itself when each one of these cities' and states' arts and musical movements happen to be supported and recognized.
Sean McPherson: Thank you so much for sharing all this information and for taking the time to visit the Twin Cities and for speaking on The Current.
Chuck D: Thanks for warming me up. And people can tweet me at @MrChuckD. Past 50 years old, I tell there's a rule that only one soc med past 50. My family runs the other aspects, but I'm on Twitter — but I'm not a twidiot.
Produced by Sean McPherson, Kryssy Pease and Luke Taylor. Special thanks to Stephanie Weiss of Augsburg College.
