If generations of fans and outsiders have nevertheless yearned, ever since the late 80s, for hip-hop to rediscover its political essence, that is the result of Public Enemy’s lasting legacy, and also the result of a certain amount of wishful thinking. Explicit political commentary has played a consistent but relatively minor role in the genre’s evolution. To generations of listeners, Public Enemy were the ideal vision of a hip-hop group: fiery and politically engaged, marching through the streets to demand change. Fight the Power, the group’s defining track, appeared in the Spike Lee film Do the Right Thing, and Lee shot the music video, which showed the group leading a political march through Brooklyn in April 1989, repeating an all-purpose slogan of resistance: “We’ve got to fight the powers that be.” He was relatively old – 26 – when the group made its debut, and in the boisterous world of hip-hop, Chuck D’s seriousness made him unusual. The group emerged from Long Island, shaped by Chuck D’s commanding voice and militant sensibility. Public Enemy were an unlikely success story – successful enough to change the public perception of what hip-hop was supposed to do, and sound like. Spike Lee (centre) with Public Enemy’s Flavor Flav (left) and Chuck D (right) filming the video for Fight the Power in New York in 1989. And yet, for most of its history, hip-hop has been regarded as the kind of music that you love despite its alleged flaws – a guilty pleasure. It may be the quintessential modern American art form, the country’s greatest cultural contribution to the world. Hip-hop remained proudly unreformed, but it kept seducing listeners. It’s not hard to understand why many concerned listeners and musicians – including Chuck D – have wanted to reshape hip-hop, hoping to transform it into a genre that would be a more unambiguous force for good in the world. The key to the genre’s continual rise has been its insistence on being, decade after decade, outrageously entertaining. In fact, hip-hop has not always told the truth often, the practice of rapping has seemed less like reporting and more like bullshitting. But as an analysis of the music, it is not particularly insightful, not least because it doesn’t make hip-hop sound like much fun. “The only thing that gives the straight-up facts on how the black youth feels is a rap record.”Īs a defence of hip-hop, this may be effective – a way to push back against all the people who say that rap records were worthless, or even harmful. “Rap is black America’s TV station,” Chuck D told Spin magazine in 1988. Just as Bob Dylan helped popularise the idea that singers should be truth tellers, Public Enemy helped popularise the idea that rappers should be revolutionaries.Ĭhuck D, from Public Enemy, encouraged listeners to think of hip-hop as an authentic reflection of life in some of the US’s toughest neighbourhoods, and as an indispensable chronicle of the African American experience. Starting in the late 80s, Public Enemy honed a form of hip-hop that was militant and incandescently righteous – the group’s records made rapping seem like serious business. T he fake protesters who interrupted the Black Sheep album, complaining about the “ho zone”, reflected the influence of one hip-hop act in particular. “Rap music don’t have to teach you anything.” Hip-hop is entertainment, but more than other genres – more than country, or R&B, or even rock’n’roll – hip-hop has often been asked to provide something greater than mere entertainment. “Nobody else has stereotyped any other particular music as being something that has to teach,” he said. In 1992, in an interview with the Source, for years hip-hop’s most important magazine, Mista Lawnge, the Black Sheep’s resident producer, complained that too many hip-hop acts were rushing to meet the demand for “message”-oriented music. For similar reasons, rappers are eager to engage with their detractors – more than singers, they must worry about social standing, because that standing is what gives them the right, and the credibility, to speak and to be believed. And so rappers spend lots of time explaining who they are, what they’re doing and why they deserve your attention. But rappers are more exposed than singers, because their form of expression is more similar to speech. Singers can hide their words – no matter how formulaic or spurious – beneath a tune.
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