Word: chucks
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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...
...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...
...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...
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...
...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...