In the early Nineties hip-hop was a mystery to me when I took on the assignment at Keyboard Magazine to interview Hank Shocklee of Public Enemy. If anything, I’ve become even more out of touch with it as the genre has progressed. But one spin through the group’s new album at the time, Fear of a Black Planet, enlightened me to the fact that regardless of what label you attached to them, these artists were doing revolutionary work that no one could ignore.
Urgently, angrily and eloquently, each track on Fear reflected a need to push beyond expectations and traditions. Complex overlays of electronic texture and samples created an impression of chaos over which they delivered their messages — Flavor Flav with a comic yet dead serious edge, Chuck D thundering from a furious sky.
I think that story in Keyboard helped me connect with Chuck, for which I am most grateful. This may have been the most substantive of all the interviews I did for the Allmusic Zine. Each of us listened and responded fully. We even shared some nostalgic thoughts about the magic of radio DJs, already a fading presence in the Nineties, and a few metaphorical reflections on basketball.
Among the many regrets I have about what might have been is that Chuck and I followed this interview with a discussion on having him become a regular contributor to the Zine. We had already lined up an imposing roster, whose reflections on all things musical we saw as a very significant part of what we’d hoped we could offer as a pioneering online publication. By working connections I had developed at Musician, I had brought the great Charles M. Young onboard. I believe it was Zine editor Jas Obrecht who had recruited Ben Fong-Torres. And my staff colleague Thom Jurek delivered Dave Marsh. Adding Chuck to the team would have done wonders in terms of credibility, perspective and depth.
All that promise was lost when the project ended abruptly in early 2000. Luckily, I’d made it a routine to print and file all my work for them before then, so I was able to spirit it out of the office before they relieved me of my pass. Pure luck, for which I am grateful to whoever my angel was at the time.
One quick note: Our discussion about the “big four” labels, so current at the time, says a lot about where this business has come, or gone, these past twenty-plus years.
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Your exploration of new means of distributing music seems to stem from your own history of turbulent relations with record labels.
Well, you always try to figure out who protects you against whoever you’re supposed to be working for. Back in 1986, Def Jam had a shit-me-down deal. So if they got a shit-me-down deal, they gotta make a double shit-me-down deal to their artists. So my whole thing is like, “Damn, why do I have to sign this contract at all? That’s how the majors operated.”
But Public Enemy was one of the biggest acts on Def Jam. How could they get away with offering you a lousy deal?
Oh, we wasn’t the biggest thing they had. They had LL Cool J and the Beastie Boys, but they got screw jobs too. I had somebody negotiate my contract, and out of five points off we had to try to get eight. Def Jam had only ten to offer. I always looked at that shit as being a two-year program of my ass. That was how it was back then. It was like, “Well, why do they have to have this right? Why do they have to have that right?” First you get on the locomotive and you start it up. You master the locomotive. Then all of a sudden the motherfucker starts running without you. Then that locomotive is running you.
It took me a good three years to slow Public Enemy down to a crawl. It was intentionally done. It wasn’t like all of a sudden we fell off the map. I tried to slow Public Enemy down in ’92. Then in ’93 and ’94 and ’95 I slowed it down to enough of a crawl to allow me to set myself in other areas that would solidify my future as a person in the business, as opposed to a person who is leaning on one situation. I had some ulterior motives. If I did this with this particular act, that means we’d make inroads and try to build some other service areas.
What do you mean by slowing down?
Turning in product and not committing myself to it as fully as they would like. I was always outside of the loop, so the pressure didn’t mean anything because they would have to call around me and find me in order for me to respond to their pressure. Not that I lived in the city and always saw them. I did none of that. My whole thing was to build an environment where I was able to do six or seven different things in the music business. The reason I always did that was because it gave me the opportunity to tell somebody to go fuck themselves: “I don’t need your ass.” When you depend on just one situation, although it’s a situation that you built that happens to sell a million records or whatever, that situation isn’t providing any alternatives. You have to pull back and regroup, regardless of how it looks to the public.
You must have been pulling back over money issues rather than issues over creative control, since there’s no evidence in your catalog of succumbing to commercial pressures.
Initially, my biggest dance was, if I’m gonna do a record, I’m gonna do it under my own terms. I ain’t gonna be A&R’ed; that ain’t never gonna happen. In the areas of money, my whole thing is that anything under 60/40 ain’t the music business; it’s music employment. If you’re dealing with twelve or fifteen percent, it’s employment.
So your records were always exactly what you wanted to release, with no compromise to the label or other interests.
Oh, exactly. And I was never the type of artist who kept shit in the vault for the company. If I die, they ain’t pullin’ shit out on me. There ain’t gonna be nothin’ there. If you look in the archive of Public Enemy, you won’t find anything. You might find various different mixes, but you won’t find, “Damn! Here’s all this material that’s unreleased!” Nope. We never recorded a record where you do fifty tracks and you take the best ten. What the fuck is that shit about? I’ll take twelve and execute twelve, and just do ’em right.
“Americans are world-dumb.”
Did your experiences in the industry make you resolve to treat artists differently once you formed your own label, SLAMJamz?
Right. I wanted to be able to work on systems where we would deliver five to seven cuts and make albums for maybe twenty thousand dollars. The key was that the profit margin was gonna be able to extend into the international system as much as possible. The problem was that the situations were dinosaured: One hand didn’t know what the other hand was doing. One hand didn’t even know it was connected to the other hand. And the United States was purely [i.e., the only targeted] marketplace — a three-thousand-mile box.
Why were the marketing plans limited to domestic sales?
Because all the people who worked within the domestic systems were typical Americans. See, Americans are world-dumb. They’re trained to be world-dumb. People in the structure didn’t know what was going on in the rest of the world. And they gave less than a damn about it. So here I’m trying to institute a system within a traditional system, and it was just not gonna work: “It’s gotta be financed. It’s gotta go to the ‘black department.’” I’m trying to sell records in Belgium through the Sony system but the mo’fucker doesn’t give a fuck about that. And the funding has to come from domestic to sell international.
With all that shit within the politics of the record company, that’s when I realized that if these motherfuckers could sell hubcaps with a slice of cheese on it, they would. They’re just into P&L [profit and loss] and that’s it, although [Columbia Records president] Donny Ienner is a very cool cat. It’s just that the system he worked with, which worked well for Donny, didn’t work for me. Hey, I’m trying to play football on a baseball field, so it’s gotta be a whole new way. It’s the same thing with [Mercury president] Danny Goldberg, who signed on the [Chuck D solo album] Mistachuck situation. Danny Goldberg is a most honorable person, but the system of PolyGram and Mercury was totally driven by lawyers and accountants. And I ain’t with that.
But wouldn’t corporate types be open to ideas that would expand their markets and profits? Isn’t that their language?
You gotta underline they. Above Donny Ienner and Danny Goldberg is a whole list of lawyers and accountants who pull different levers. There’s a big schism between the creative people and the business people.
You’re saying that the business people don’t want to take even potentially profitable risks.
Exactly. They’re playing with stockholders’ money. At the end of the day, they’d rather pay themselves seven-figure salaries than try to reinvent the wheel or rock no boats. You’re not gonna write no new rules up here, because that would also mean contract adjustments. Record company contracts on technologies and freedoms are oxymorons. I mean, how many people in the accounting and sales and legal departments actually listen to the music they sell? The Big Four have turned into Sears Roebuck, JCPenney, Target and Macy’s, you know? You go to Furnishings and you go, “I’m looking for cologne. What section is that in?” “Uh, I think it’s in … I think it’s back there somewhere” [laughs]. Well, I’m lookin’ for Ja Rule’s album and I ask some person and it’s like, don’t even ask what it sounds like!
Record Label Woes
“Swindler’s Lust,” from the new P.E. album, delivers a pretty clear message about the position of artists on labels these days.
And that comes from the artist.
Of course, a lot of your listeners who haven’t dealt with music industry issues may have problems relating to your story.
Well, more people are acclimated on how the business works. Fifteen or twenty years ago, people questioned Entertainment Tonight: “Do people really want to know about the insides of the entertainment business?” It turns out that they do. More people want to be able to find out about the music business and how it works and the impossibility for some kind of opportunity in there. So when people ask questions about the music business, we should be truthful about how some of these things happen.
Beyond that, you can only write about things that are actually going on in your life — which in your case means the music business.
Exactly. I mean, come on, half of the sports section is about Kevin Garnett’s triple-double and the other half is about his contract. But also, if you don’t tell ’em certain aspects [of the music business], people think it’s fantastic. You have ignorant statements like, “I thought you got paid for doing a video.” Or, “Are all those girls in the video yours?” “Damn, that’s really your house?”
You want to be able to tell people not to believe everything they see on TV. All of a sudden you have kids jumping out of windows, thinking they can be Superman, you know? You have to have some kind of honesty to come across and say, “Hey, this is what it is. You think I’m making a million dollars off of this? This is exactly what I’m making.” Or, if you think that this kid at seventeen years old is making a million dollars because he happens to have a video and a record that’s number one that night on the radio, you need to know why you still see him on the bus going to his apartment in the projects.
The Lost Art of Radio Jocks
You arguably got your start in the music business by working as a radio disc jockey while attending Adelphi University on Long Island. What got you interested in that line of work?
Well, I always loved the music and I always loved radio. I loved radio back in the Seventies because I wanted to become a sportscaster — I was a big Marv Albert fan. Then from sportscasting I got more involved in the DJ aspect of the radio because I come from listening to black radio in the Seventies and Sixties, when it was really exciting and jocks were painting a picture and giving you information that you needed as a person. Whereas in the Eighties, when it got co-opted by corporations buying those stations, it became less personal and more money-driven. Coming up, when we did rap music, it was like taking music that was ostracized and also going back to the roots of radio, back when the jocks were like [in radio voice], “That’s right, you’re listening to Super 16, where the was never relaxes.” They’re playing the jams you like and they made you like the records even more. We used that technique in the early days of rap radio because there was no such thing.
To me, doing bringthenoise.com network shows like Suitcase Radio or Where the Shit Hits the Fans, to actually get a CD from a cat in the middle of Tennessee, and then going to Pittsburgh where some other person has pressed a CD, and then playing this shit around the world … I don’t think there’s anybody else reaching into a barrelful of sent CDs and hoookin’ ’em up like regular records. Hey, why not? I don’t know how much glory there is in it, but there’s a love for the artist. It’s like if a person wants to do a blues show, and he goes from Howlin’ Wolf to Leadbelly and into Muddy Waters, and he actually goes into the historical content.
I like to look at myself as doing the same thing with rap music and hip-hop. There’s no bigger joy than laying rap joints across the radio. But I’m not gonna conform to the standards of bought radio and say, “Well, I can’t say this. We gotta watch out for the sponsor.” Fuck that.
The classic radio DJs also created a sense of community for listeners. Wolfman Jack used to do that when he was broadcasting out of Mexico in the late Sixties.
Right, on XERB. He was playing shit he wasn’t supposed to play. Or even Tom Donahue doing his thing, playing album-oriented cuts. I’m a big fan of jocks. But the technique of radio disc jockeys is lost. I like to bring these techniques to the table when I’m playing rap music and hip-hop. The closest thing to the jocks of the Sixties and the personality jocks is what rap DJs do on the college stations.
“Although this is the Information Age, there’s so much misinformation out there that people can’t draw their own conclusions.”
You’ve written about Public Enemy’s boycott of black music stations. Is this because of their shift away from spotlighting the DJ?
Right. “More music, less talk.” That leads the public to use their interpretation on what something is. To me, you can’t do that all the time, especially if you’re playing music for kids. You can’t leave it up to their interpretation, because they might not have the mentality to digest what they’re hearing. Explanation has to be done with everything. That’s one thing the jocks can do: They not only play, but they explain and say, “Hey, this is what you can get out of this. This is a good song. The topic is good.” If you tread upon that technique, then you pretty much have a lot of records that are saying the same thing and nobody knows what it is. As a matter of fact, they’re not even saying the name of the record, you know?
Then you got jocks who don’t have any personality or voice. The first thing they do is, like, “The weather is nice. It’s overcast and 37 degrees here in Washington, D.C. We’re gonna do another ten-cut superset on the station that gives you more music and less talk.” Who gives a fuck, you know? I mean, Casey Kasem could be a better rap jock than the people who play rap records on urban stations, because he’d give you the information, tell you where it’s from and what that person did before, and this is what the song means. He’d get you into the song.
If you want to talk about sales, that’s what sells records, because you’re connecting to a spirit and a soul. If you can’t connect to a spirit or a soul as a DJ, then you’re leaving it up to public interpretation. We can’t give the public credit for being more aware than it’s been. Although this is the Information Age, there’s so much misinformation out there that people can’t draw their own conclusions.
When people send you music to play on When the Shit Hits the Fans, how do you decide what to play?
I put as much shit on the air as I can. I try to do ten joints every weekend.
Does that include music you don’t personally like that much?
Art is subjective, so I just pick what I think is the best thing on the particular album. Sometimes I might ask for some suggestions of what they would want me to play. Like, if a cat sends me a CD with two cuts on it, I kinda know. If they’re sending me an album, I’ll try to ask them to underline the cuts. Or I’ll go to my own discretion. Then l’ll play it like anything else.
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When you were working as a college radio DJ, were you also doing your own music?
We were cutting our own music for the people in the neighborhood. We were making it on drum machines and other instruments because there wasn’t enough rap records to play over a nine-hour span on a weekend.
Did your radio gig affect your approach to performing?
Oh, yeah, most definitely. As a DJ, you know what people want. You know the vibe. You know how they feel. Although you have your own personal tastes, you know not to place that above the fifty percent line.
Since you did your radio work in a studio, were you nervous at all when you began doing your music live?
No, because we were mobile DJs before I was a radio guy. Hank [Shocklee, producer] recruited me in 1979, so from then to 1982, when we started the radio station, we were by far the most popular mobile DJs on Long Island and parts of Queens. So my experience in front of a crowd actually happened before that three-year period. The radio station was an afterthought.
People were really amazed that the people they looked up to as being the main mobile DJs had taken to the airwaves. Everybody wanted our Spectrum City tapes, so when we actually went to the airwaves, that allowed people to get them for free. We went from selling tapes for maybe a couple thousand to ten thousand people listening to us and getting the shit we do on tapes for free.
Building On The Beat
Public Enemy has always set the standard for complexity in hip-hop. Describe the seeds from which these elaborate works grew.
It never begins the same way. Each and every record has a different technique. One thing, though, is that the idea comes up and I always find the marriage into the perfect track over a process of searching and feeling some things out.
The building part is an assembly-machine method. We never try to do the same technique twice. I’ll go through a whole series of tracks or beats, or I might already have some things written. I might do something on a track to a beat, but with the ProTools system we might ditch the track and find something else that matches it. So it’s all of the above.
A very passionate piece, like “41:19” from Poison, would have to begin with the work rather than the music.
Flavor wrote that song. It’s like “911 Is a Joke” [from Fear of a Black Planet]: He’ll sit with something that really affects him. He lives in the Bronx, and he’s had run-ins with the police up there. The same guys he’s had run-ins with related to the Amadou Diallo situation. [The attack on Diallo, in which police fired at the unarmed victim 41 times and hit him 19 times, is the subject of “41:19.”] So he had some things he really had to say. He had those things as words floating around, and he happened to place them on that track. It pretty much got built the day before he had to finish up the sessions.
What role do you play when Flavor is the main source for a new piece?
I become more a part of the production team and try to arrange it the best I can.
For your work, do you often start with a pencil and a piece of paper?
Sometimes. I write words all the time, so I keep a log of sentences, fragments, phrases, topics. When it comes down to writing, I try to condense all that into a song. A lot of my work is done on paper a whole year before execution. I choose to work off a topic and a title; I don’t really work off the top of my head, formulating a story. Or I’ll do it in reverse, like with “Kevorkian” [from There’s a Poison Goin’ On …]. I just wrote about a particular thing. I didn’t have a title, so I picked “Kevorkian” for it. But in the case of “I” [also from Poison], I said, “Number one, I want to make a real short title.” Then I said, “Well, what does this mean?” And I’ll go in and try to carve out the title with as many references as possible. I’ll try to attack the title with something that, if you look at it on paper, would make sense and also be able to logistically play into an arrangement of sounds that would actually be relevant.
By the way, did you somehow shave off a portion of the first beat of each bar in “Kevorkian”?
Hey, it’s a possibility. Where people used to use ProTools [only] to master a record in the past, we use it as an application for everything, so anything is possible now.
There’s a sense that you’re always rushing the first beat on that song.
That’s good. Reminds me of Keith Moon [laughs].
“I” is a beautiful narrative — and it all came from that one-letter title?
Yeah. I was inspired by Springsteen’s “Streets of Philadelphia” video. Like I tell cats in rap all the time, there’s no such thing as pure rap and hip-hop. Hip-hop is the embodiment of all music because it starts by overdubbing different things as reference points. A lot of these rap journalists, I tell ’em, number one, “You can’t just be a rap journalist. You gotta know about music! I can’t throw Grace Slick at you and go over your head.” I come up with Herman’s Hermits and they’re like, “What the fuck are you talkin’ about?” Well, how can you call yourself a journalist? “I just come from rap and hip-hop.” Well, rap and hip-hop started off with the arrangement of records! Grandmaster Flash found music from Thin Lizzy to Aerosmith to Billy Squier, as well as James Brown, Joe Tex and Chic.
It comes from deejaying. That was the beginning of rap music. Rap music is rap over music. It’s not a music; it’s an accumulation of music. It starts from the technique of Jamaican toasting, which was vocals over dub plates, which were instrumental. So how can you not know the history of music and call yourself a rap journalist?
See, I call myself a student of sports and music. When I did the He Got Game soundtrack, I did metaphors that went over the heads of guys who called themselves hip-hop heads. They like to judge metaphors, but if I’m saying metaphors that are going over your head, that means you gotta catch up! Like in Muse Sick N Hour Mess Age, I did a lot of metaphors that just zoomed past people. I might have been inspired by the Beatles in Hamburg in ’63. I might have been inspired by some Richie Havens shit.
It’s like how T.S. Eliot integrated Eskimo phrases and other obscure elements into The Wasteland.
Right! Hip-hop is the embodiment of all those ideas. But if you have a hip-hop magazine, and now you have a hip-hop industry, you’ve got to understand that those people have got to fill in those gaps. And they’re not necessarily the best-equipped people to do that. That’s why a music journalist can understand where I’m coming from more so than a hip-hop journalist, because the hip-hop journalist is always gonna limit it.
Maybe the hip-hop press feels obligated not to spread its focus beyond its audience’s interests.
Yeah, but at the same time, you’ve got to make comparisons. Like, for example, I did “There’s a Poison Goin’ On,” right? Now, somebody who knows all music might say, “Sly Stone, right? ‘There’s a Riot Goin’ On.’ No brainer.” But he’s a hip-hop journalist. He’s twenty-one years old. The only thing he knows is beats because he got into music in ’91. He has no idea that there’s a connection between the two. He doesn’t know anything about Sly Stone. So when he hears a beat go [Chuck articulates the Sly Stone groove from “There’s a Riot Goin’ On”], it’s like, “Yo, who made that sad-ass beat?” He doesn’t know where this shit came from.
Rap Gaps
Is there a generation gap emerging between you and some of your audience?
There was a generation gap from day one [laughs]. I was twenty-seven when I started, and people were saying that you couldn’t make rap records if you were over twenty-one. My whole thing was to come into the game and present something different, and that thing would be so jarringly different that a curiosity factor would draw people into it and they’d pick up information about many things, whether it be about themselves, rap, race or whatever. Also, we’ve always kept ourselves young, so it’s not really how old you are; it’s how young you are in certain aspects. You could be forty but really twenty-five. Or you could be twenty-five and really forty, physically and mentally. But I’m really kind of preserved [laughs].
You once described rap as CNN for black listeners. Is that still true?
That changes year by year. There are now so many information streams about the black community out there that you can pick, from the movies down to television down to video. You didn’t have as much exposure to black life in ’86 and ’87 as you have now, so that lets people go back into the music and say, “Well, this should just be one big party!” That’s cool too, but can you take ten thousand parties? Maybe you want a thousand records here and a thousand parties there.
Rap music and hip-hop are going through the same revolution that rock ’n’ roll went through. Yes, we have our share of hair bands out there [laughs]. We have our Led Zeppelins and our Rolling Stones. You’re lucky if you come at a period that defines you as being legendary to the genre. It’s debatable whether the Who was good in 1964, but they came in a period of the Rolling Stones, the Beatles and all those cats. The legend of that era grew onto them. For the rock bands that came out in the Seventies, like Meat Loaf or Boston, they went through another classic period. But are the Poisons and the Whitesnakes and the Slaughters gonna be remembered like the Rolling Stones and the Beatles and the Kinks? Most likely never.
Timing, then, has as much to do with an artist’s legacy as talent.
That’s why I was lucky to come through a period where my status was frozen in that time, so it will never play out, because that period was so strong. Now, you could have a strong group come up out of ’98, but because they came in a different period, they might get relegated to hair-band status, even though they did some good music. They’re very good, but there’s eighteen thousand guys like them. I mean, I got cats in the studio now and they’re real good. But as far as the niche, there’s ten thousand guys who can do it just like them.
“What I bring to the table is, like, being rap music’s version of Pat Riley.”
No single generation is going to be short on talent.
The talent is never gonna disappear, but there’s definitely a drop-off in skills. The manifestation of talent is skill, and a lot of groups are not skilled enough to have their talent work for them and take them to the next level.
But why would skills drop off from one generation to the next?
Because people don’t know the techniques to keep their art alive over the course of time. Skills drop off because people don’t know the basics. Skills are missing in the NBA! What I bring to the table is, like, being rap music’s version of Pat Riley.
Lessons of B-Ball
So you think the Kareem-era Lakers could have taken the Jordan-era Bulls because skills were stronger in the past?
Yup. That’s no knock on the Bulls, but Michael Jordan would tell you so. Michael Jordan was here in the Eighties — and could he get past the Celtics? Nope. He had to wait until they got old and disappeared before the Bulls could use those similar techniques. And nobody could beat the Bulls, because the Bulls maintained a level of the basics that was necessary for the [kind of] dominance that led to that classic era of the Celtics and the Lakers.
Now, I couldn’t stand both of those teams. I was a Knicks fan. But you know what? Straight up? The Knicks don’t have the skill level. That’s why the ’27 Yankees could beat the mo’fuckers of any era. The Jordan Bulls could be a mo’fuckers of any era, except maybe the Eighties when you had guys like [Bob] McAdoo coming off the bench for the Lakers. Really, you can’t compare them, but you can compare the levels of skills.
Today, talent-wise, mo’fuckers are doing incredible shit, dunkin’ backwards and all that. But they can’t hit a free throw. Same thing in music: You got mo’fuckers who can do incredible rhymes but they can’t give you three records that are distinctly different on the same level. Or better yet, even if they are trying to give you a song, they can’t nail down the basics of trying to project that song onstage.
Going back to rock as a model, you’ve got guitarists playing more notes per second than ever. But nobody can hit the groove like Keith Richards.
Exactly. Half of the pain of experience is getting your ass smacking and coming out with scars.
Look, back to ball: Michael Jordan, before they won those six championships, was getting battered in the lane. They were not gonna win that way. Same thing with music: Some people are gonna win in a particular time, just by doing a video. But look at Snoop Dogg: He presented a record and a video but he never performed live because people were so afraid of that West Coast style of gangsta rap that they were afraid to even come out. So they settled on saying, “He’s just gonna be a video and a song, and we’re gonna buy three or four million units.”
My whole thing is, you gotta be best in all facets of the game. Make the strong record, do the strong video, have a strong personality, which he did. But he had a missing aspect: He didn’t perform. When he came out and finally did perform, he had to go through the rookie phase as a veteran artist.
Dangerous Lyrics
Creative artists in all genres face another problem. The McCain/Lieberman “21st Century Media Responsibility Act” mandates sticking for violent content, a ban on non-labeled imports and fines of up to ten thousand dollars for violations.
Yeah, but all American rules are hijacked by the fact that the black market will definitely increase through the Internet. You’re not gonna stop the flow unless they stop the modems.
In any case, the bill strikes in the face of freedom of choice. I don’t believe in regulation. I believe in navigation. I do believe in navigating messages to kids. You have to interpret the world to children.
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Wow, great interview ! Thanks a lot. I'll never forget that moment when I went to see Do the right thing at a movie theater with my father and we were hit with Fight the power by Public Enemy. Huuuge surge of NRG!
"We never recorded a record where you do fifty tracks and you take the best ten. What the fuck is that shit about? I’ll take twelve and execute twelve, and just do ’em right."
As a songwriter, I feel the same, yet everyone now tells you that crap.
The real professor of Public Enemy. Those Bomb Squad tracks still sound like nothing else. Hearing his perspective of rap as "accumulation of music" makes total sense.