"It's a start, a work of art to revolutionize
make a change, nothin's strange"
Fight the Power
It's impossible for me to overestimate the profound effect on my life of the music of Public Enemy and, more importantly, the lyrics of the band's leader, Chuck D. At a time when one's response to rap often defaults to the negative, I constantly have to remind myself that I was ushered into manhood by Malcolm X on one hand and Public Enemy on the other.
My brother Paul had introduced me to Public Enemy's first album, Yo! Bum Rush the Show, in 1987. I liked it, but I was still caught up in the dream that I would be a great soul balladeer in the vein of Luther Vandross and Teddy Pendergrass, so I seldom listened to any other genre. But on closer inspection of Public Enemy I began to hear sentiments - views seldom expressed outside the black political meetings I was beginning to attend. Pulic Enemy's attempt to look at the black condition and request - no, suggest - that we "up our game" through self-reliance and self-improvement was surprising, to say the least. White society had given us permission to speak about race only through the prism of an accepted version of Martin Luther King's doctrine of integrationism. But to be speaking from the prism of self-declared black nationalism - and doing it in the mainstream - well that struck me as more than interesting; it was bloody exciting.
After listening to their second album, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, it dawned on me that a fearless new form of rap, created and led by Chuck D, had come into existence. Here was a lyricist not emasculated by the commercial demands on black male entertainers of the day to sing only of love, sex or dancing, but one charging himself and his music with nothing less than the re-education of a miseducated community. Chuck D challenged the listener to sign up to the greatest challenge of the day - the emancipation of the black mind - and to do so without fear of the anticipated white backlash.
In the song Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos, from It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, the all-familiar narrative of black imprisonment was articulated with rage and rebellion. But it also held political sophistication that matched anything the forefathers of rap - those political, poetic pioneers of the previous generation - the Last Poets, had created. "They got me rottin' in the time that I'm servin' / Tellin' you what happened the same time they're throwin' / Four of us packed in a cell like slaves - oh well / The same motherfucker got us livin' in his hell / You have to realize - that it's a form of slavery / Organized ..." Chuck was schooling, teaching and vibing, while at the same time creating great, vibrant art that was selling to the multitudes.
The next album, Fear of a Black Planet, contained what was the anthem of my generation, Fight the Power. I felt as if Chuck D were speaking to me directly when he screamed: "My beloved let's get down to business / Mental self-defensive fitness / Yo bum rush the show / You gotta go for what you know / Make everybody see, in order to fight the powers that be."
At that point I began to fear for him, fear that he and Public Enemy would, like Malcolm or Martin, be taken down. My paranoia was not unfounded - the FBI was constantly monitoring them. The FBI spying on a rap band! Sitting at home in my little bedroom in west London, I wasn't sure if that was somehow meant to scare us off Public Enemy by somehow tapping into the perennial fear of a subjugated community that the master will destroy those who articulate resistance to the status quo (those who listened would also surely pay dearly). But it was too late. For me and millions of others the cat was already out of the bag. Chuck and PE had shown us that music was not just meant to anaesthetise our minds to the pains of structural inequalities - but to be used, like the best art can be, as a magnificent catalyst for inspiration, debate and change.
