"Internetwork Yourself": An Interview with Public Enemy's Chuck D

by Scott Thill

Some people need no introduction. But a reminder is always good for everyone.

Back in the mid- to late-'80s, Chuck D and Public Enemy launched a surround-sound assault not just on hiphop convention, but on convention itself, rewriting the rules of engagement regarding everything from popular culture to sociopolitical awareness. And almost twenty years later, ain't a damn thing changed. A cursory listen to "Son of a Bush" or "Get Your Shit Together" from PE's newest album, Revolverlution, can tell you that much. Chuck's increasingly high profile can tell you more: from jump street, he's been a champion of the underrepresented and the underrated, going so far as to buck the music industry he helped revolutionize by taking Public Enemy completely into cyberspace and back to the people -- Revolverlution is the first album to be released from an online label, as well as being the first fully interactive Internet recording: many of its remixes come from fans that downloaded Chuck's acapella version from Public Enemy's site.

So while 911 -- the phone call, not the national tragedy, so settle down -- might still be a joke to PE, technological innovation isn't. In fact, according to Chuck, it's the ultimate form of fighting the power. As the man argues, by seizing the means of production, artists across the world can achieve a greater control over their work and its success -- or failure.

Scott Thill: So talk about the new PE album. It's awesome that a band that helped shape hiphop is still together.
Chuck D: My whole thing is that a musician never really stops doing anything. Musicians aren't like athletes. It's not like you do it for a ten-year run and then retire because you physically can't handle it no more.

ST: Or trade teams.
CD: Yeah, you do it whenever you want. I'm involved in a lot of projects. We've got four studios, our online label, one of the best online music service sites for rap artists and hip-hop artists, RapStation.com. And the things that we've done for PublicEnemy.com, our group site, have been monumental. We have BringtheNoise.com with radio networks, so in those areas we keep excelling. We've been on panels for years and now we are going to actually hook up and get more muscle behind our area, our micro-niche -- hip-hop and rap music.

So doing an album is a no-brainer. I'm always recording, anyway. We release MP3 singles on Slamjams.com, which go into the vault. I don't necessarily believe in albums per se, because there's a lot of albums in the marketplace today. And I just believe that less is more. Or at least the albums don't have to all be 14 or 15 new cuts.

Bringin' the noise... "The music business is run by lawyers and accountants, and they don't really care about the integrity of art."

ST: You can get a series of songs across several albums.
CD: Right. For example, I'm a Ray Charles fan but I wouldn't be wanting to hear 12 new songs by Ray Charles. (Laughs). I wouldn't mind hearing a Ray Charles album if it had a combination, like Ray doing "Georgia" or "What I Say" live. And then a remix or remake. You know what I'm saying? That's how I think rap artists over seven years old can achieve a higher level of success, a more mature rap foundation.

You also have to be diverse musically to accept the drum 'n' bass, trance or trip-hop that comes with the remixes. And I think you also have to be able to say, "OK, you know we're an older audience." There's a drop-off factor that's not necessarily going to support a Lil' Romeo, but at the same time wouldn't mind spending some of that disposable income on something that relates to them. The older, more mature rap audience has left the music because the music hasn't grown with them.

ST: In a way, having fans do remixes is allowing them to take classics that sparked their imagination years ago and update it with whatever music they've got in their environment these days.
CD: Right. I think technology has allowed hundreds of thousands of people to actually have their own studios. Whereas when Public Enemy first started recording, if you didn't get into a top-notch studio you weren't making a record.

...and still louder than a bomb. "The American public is taught by industry and corporations to be conformist, to be sheep who've lost their way, to have a Pavlovian response to something as opposed to really looking at it from all sides."

ST: Or getting distribution.
CD: You weren't making a record, period. Technology has allowed artists to immediately move from the demo stage into the record world. But how do you service that ability to actually create records or those creating them? That was the main goal behind the building of our supersites -- service areas that allow the public to interact with us.

ST: Do you think technology's intrinsically democratic approach -- where now I can build a site or a studio to distribute my stuff -- is the main point missed by the recording industry when they come down hard on Napster, Kazaa and other peer-to-peer networks?
CD: No. I think, number one, they're not missing or catching anything. They're not really trying to take any other side in this other than to say it's a threat to their business, bottom-line.

ST: It's just a dollar thing.
CD: It's a dollar thing. The music business is run by lawyers and accountants, and they don't really care about the integrity of art or anything. Me, I'm from the other side, caring about the integrity of art, because I know that it's passion got me involved and it's what's going to take me through. Because this is something I do and something I've always done. I got involved with rap music and hip-hop three years before there was such thing as a rap record. So obviously I didn't get into it for the money. It's just like a jazz cat would play jazz, you know? What makes a fisherman fish, you know? Does he fish just to eat or does he fish to actually…

ST: Get some inner peace.
CD: No doubt. He might catch fish and eat, but he's not going into it saying he's gotta eat or he'll be frustrated many days. Seeing zero in the pan and in the bucket. But the people who run the music business, they don't really care about what it does for the public. All they know is they're juxtaposed against technology companies that really don't give a damn about the content. They're two different worlds, but they overlap in entertainment distribution. So, hey, of course the record companies are going to be against everything. For example, even to this point the biggest friction has been that MP3s are still the favorite compression format of the public. It's unanimous, damn near. And the fact that the record labels say, well it can't be protected and they're trying to come up with…

The homegrown revolution will not be marginalized. "It was disheartening to see dotcoms go through sixty or seventy million dollars when we're actually still running off of seed money and the lint in our pockets. We do it because we enjoy doing what we do."

ST: With anti-piracy encryption where you can't burn your own discs.
CD: Yeah, but that's only for the CDs that are retrofitted for it. One thing about music, there's better music behind us than what's in front of us, because we don't know what's in front of us. We only know what's behind us. And the minute they digitized music in 1985-86 from the first CD in '83, it was a double-edged sword. It saved the music business but at the same time it opened up a Pandora's Box. For example, they're making this item that costs very little to manufacture and are saying, "Do we have to price this the same as cassettes and vinyl? No, let's double the price." The accountant, lawyer, bean-counter mentality says, "Fuck it, we can get paid." In retro, they never really paid the artist any more. All it did was pad the salaries for executives.

ST: I talked to Guy Picciotto from Fugazi and he was telling me -- because they have their own label, Dischord -- that he doesn't think the American public really understands how cheap it is to make a CD. You shouldn't be paying $20 for one at Virgin Megastore when it probably costs 25 cents to make.
CD: That's basically what it is. The American public is taught by industry and corporations to be conformist, to be sheep who've lost their way, to have a Pavlovian response to something as opposed to really looking at it from all sides.

ST: Getting all the information...
CD: And being an educated consumer. There used to be this company that said things like, "Well, you know the educated consumer is our best customer." That's a goddamn lie! (Laughs). If companies could get people to buy the same thing over and over again endlessly without questioning it -- that's what they want.

ST: And people do. You have New Tide and then Newer Tide -- it's the same product but they just put the word "New" on it.
CD: Exactly. I remember when Honda came out with the Civic in '83. Did you know the Honda Civic in '83 was the car that never broke down? In Japan, they said, "Hey, look man, we're going to make a car that's going to be unbeatable." But the thing about it -- the car never broke down! (Laughs). Then they got hip to the American way -- you have to make a car that at least breaks down somewhat.

PE CENTRAL

ST: It's got to be in the shop.
CD: The '83 Honda Civic was invincible. People are driving that car now. It was just made to be invincible. The American Way is to dumb everyone down to consume for their happiness.

ST: The whole dotcom freakout was blamed partially for the recession that we're having -- if we didn't have the September 11 attacks it would probably be blamed entirely for it. But sites like Rapstation.com are what the internet was all about before everybody tried to get rich. It was about getting out the word, getting out your product, spreading the information.
CD: You know, Rapstation and Bring the Noise and the areas we deal with are based off of passion. And passion is what fueled and drove people to use it in the interests that they were used to. Then everybody came in. The business people came in and said, "This is the thing that's going to replace TV or the movies."

ST: Or shopping for groceries.
CD: Yeah. Blew smoke up all the bankers and VCs' noses and it became a total mess. You know, we're not opposed to the income that is actually needed to fuel some of these things. But to go into it like, "Hey, you know, we're in it because we want to get paid!" It was disheartening to see dotcoms go through sixty or seventy million dollars when we're actually still running off of seed money and the lint in our pockets. We do it because we enjoy doing what we do.

ST: One more question and then we'll wrap it up. As a successful webmaster …
CD: Or working at it.

More Morphizm

"White folks tend to see these criminals as "evil," deviant, or otherwise not like them. To be sure, most black folks will not identify with a Muhammad or a Malvo, but fear being identified with them."

"You can make nicely crafted things, whether they're poems, sculptures, paintings, records, CDs, whatever. But they'll just be that -- nice. They won't be unwieldy as personal expression often can be."

"I think that there's been a lot of difficulty in defining what is American, what is considered American. There's a lot of difficulty with acceptance within our community of foreignness at this time."

"That's an issue I'm dealing with here: what is going to happen with this next generation of kids? What is their culture but media culture? What hasn't been sanitized and homogenized?"

"America embodies mimetic relations of rivalry. The ideology of free enterprise makes of them an absolute solution. Effective, but explosive. Competitive relations are excellent if you come out of it the winner. But if the winners are always the same then, one day, the losers overturn the game table."

"Word comes that brother Cat Stevens refuses to lend his support to our virtuous jihad. May this turncoat's Peace Train be laden with explosives and rammed into the Mountain of Mohammed, peace be upon him. "

"The powerful anniversary of the September 11 attacks has come and gone, but democracy everywhere is still under attack. Which means that even though America's scars are healing, others in more oppressive countries -- like China -- are still wide open."

ST: Well, pretty damn close. You've got what, three, four, five sites going now?
CD: Yeah, but the key is to make them all interconnected.

ST: Internetwork.
CD: Internetwork. A system that actually functions as a service and exposure area -- it's something that actually makes us do our thing real well. But we're not serving ourselves: we're trying to service an industry.

ST: What kind of advice would you give to resurgent onliners like Morphizm trying to build a publication based on getting the word out for the stuff that they love?
CD: Well, number one, internetwork yourself. I think superlinks are the way to go in building a community of information. A lot of sharing with sites you would consider along your interests. I hope that we can do something together.

ST: Absolutely.
CD: In music, I tell people to build a label site, which actually immediately involves you in the music business. Where they can make and cut their music, deliver it to communities in similar situations. I encourage a lot of artists and producers to construct label sites. It's a new terminology, where you say, "I got a label". You really don't have a label if you can't afford to get CDs pressed and distributed, but you can build a label site and distribute MP3s.

ST: Then it's just a question of the artwork really. Even that I can do on Photoshop.
CD: Exactly. I mean the thing about Slamjams.com is I do all the covers for the MP3 singles. So, you know, now people can download the covers. So my whole thing is getting music is something that people want to achieve. They don't want to just be coerced into buying music.

ST: At an exorbitant price.
CD: Well, getting music and buying music to the fans is the same shit. So, maybe in MP3 website world, our whole premise is to tell people that they can get music and there can be a business model that follows that. As opposed to having to BUY music, which is a retail type of thing -- "You come here and BUY. You ain't leaving with free shit", you know? You have to be able to develop your own rules. I think the thing to do is to develop your own rules, find those common sites like yours, build a bigger community. And then go after that public aggressively.

27 November 02
(photos: Public Enemy.com)