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Public Enemy (band)

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Public Enemy, also known as PE, is a hip hop group from Long Island, New York, known for their politically charged lyrics, criticism of the media, and active interest in the concerns of the African American community.

In 2004, Rolling Stone Magazine ranked Public Enemy number forty-four on their list of The Immortals: 100 Greatest Artists of All Time.. Acclaimedmusic.net ranks them the 29th best musical act of all time and the highest hip-hop/rap group. . They were inducted into the Long Island Music Hall of Fame in 2007.

History

Signing to Def Jam records

Developing his talents as an MC with Flav while delivering furniture for his father's business, Chuck and "Spectrum City", as they were called, released the record "Check Out The Radio", backed by "Lies", a social commentary - both of which would influence RUSH Productions' Run D.M.C. and Beastie Boys. They were signed to the still developing Def Jam record label after co-founder Rick Rubin heard Chuck D freestyling on a demo.

Around 1986, Bill Stephney, the former Program Director at WBAU, was approached by Rubin and offered a position with the label. Stephney accepted, and his first assignment was to help Rubin sign Chuck D, whose song "Public Enemy Number One" he had heard from Andre "Doctor Dre" Brown. According to the book The History of Rap Music by Cookie Lommel: "Stephney thought it was time to mesh the hard-hitting style of Run DMC with politics that addressed black youth. Chuck recruited Spectrum City, which included Hank Shocklee, his brother Keith Shocklee and Eric "Vietnam" Sadler, collectively known as 'The Bomb Squad,' to be his production team and added another Spectrum City partner, Professor Griff, to become the group's Minister of Information. With the addition of Flavor Flav and another local mobile DJ named Terminator X, the group Public Enemy was born."

Stardom

It then took roughly one year before their debut, Yo! Bum Rush The Show, was released in 1987 to critical acclaim. They went on to release the revolutionary It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back in 1988, which performed better in the charts than their previous release, and included the hit single "Don't Believe the Hype" in addition to "Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos" chronicling a daring prison break.

Nation of Millions... was voted Album of the Year by the The Village Voice Pazz and Jop Poll, the first rap album to be ranked number one by predominantly rock critics in a major periodical. It is also ranked the 18th best album of all time by Acclaimedmusic.net.

They also went on to release Fear of a Black Planet, which was considered to be just as militant and controversial as their first two releases. It was also the most successful of any of their albums to date and in 2005 was selected for preservation in the Library of Congress. It included the singles "911 (is a Joke)", which criticized emergency response units for taking longer to arrive at emergencies in the black community than those in the white community, and "Fight the Power", which is considered by many to be the group's anthem. The song is regarded as among the most popular and influential in Hip Hop history and was the theme song for Spike Lee's Do The Right Thing. It is ranked the 84th best song of all time by Acclaimedmusic.net "Fight the Power" contains the classic lines: "Elvis was a hero to most but he never meant shit to me/Straight-up racist that sucker was simple and plain/MuthaF*ck him and John Wayne"

Their next release, Apocalypse '91...The Enemy Strikes Black, continued this trend, with songs like "Can't Truss It" and "# I Don't Wanna Be Called Yo Nigga". The album's influence could be seen and heard in the controversial song and video "By the Time I Get To Arizona" which chronicled the black community's frustration that some states did not recognize the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday. The video featured members of Public Enemy taking out their frustrations on politicians in the states not recognizing the holiday.

Legacy

Public Enemy were pioneers in many ways. Some of Terminator X's most innovative scratching tricks can be heard on the song "Rebel Without a Pause". The Bomb Squad offered up a web of innovative samples and beats; Critic Stephen Thomas Erlewine declares that PE "brought in elements of free jazz, hard funk, even musique concrète, via their producing team, the Bomb Squad, creating a dense, ferocious sound unlike anything that came before."

PE revolutionized the rap world with their political, social and cultural consciousness, which infused itself into skilled and poetic rhymes with raucous sound collages as a foundation. Prior to PE, political rap was confined to a few tracks by Ice-T and KRS-One, as well as prototypical artists such as Gil Scott-Heron and The Last Poets; PE were the first hip hop act to base their entire image around a political stance. With the success of Public Enemy, hip-hop was suddenly flooded with new artists that celebrated Afrocentric themes, such as Kool Moe Dee, Gang Starr, X Clan, Eric B. & Rakim, Queen Latifah, the Jungle Brothers and A Tribe Called Quest. In the 1991 movie Terminator 2: Judgment Day, John Connor (Edward Furlong) wears a Public Enemy T-shirt throughout the whole movie, exhibiting their influence even early on their career.

They were the first rap-group to make extended world tours, which led to huge popularity and influence in Hip-Hop communities in Europe and Asia. They also changed the Internet's music distribution capability by being one of the first groups to release MP3 albums, a format virtually unknown at the time.

Public Enemy helped to create and define "Rap Rock" by collaborating with New York Thrash Metal outfit Anthrax in 1991. The single "Bring Tha Noize" was a mix of semi-militant "black power" lyrics, grinding guitars and sporadic humor. The two bands, cemented by a mutual respect and the personal friendship between Chuck D and his Anthrax counterpart Scott Ian, introduced a hitherto alien genre to rock fans, and the two seemingly disparate groups even toured together. Flavor Flav's pronouncement on stage that "They said this tour would never happen" (as heard on Anthrax's Live: The Island Years CD) has become something of a legend in both rock and rap circles. Metal guitarists Vernon Reid (of Living Color) contributed to Public Enemy's recordings, and PE sampled Slayer's "Angel of Death" middle riff on "She Watch Channel Zero."

In the 1999 movie Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, Sonny Valerio (Cliff Gorman) expresses his musical taste mentioning few rap groups, and the MC that he prefers: Flavor Flav. Afterwards, he appears in his bathroom dancing and singing Cold Lampin' With Flavor, from the PE's second album It Takes a Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back

Members of the Bomb Squad produced or remixed works for other acts such as Bell Biv DeVoe, Ice Cube, Vanessa Williams, Sinéad O'Connor, Blue Magic, Peter Gabriel, LL Cool J, Paula Abdul, Jasmine Guy, Jody Watley, Eric B & Rakim, Third Bass, Big Daddy Kane, EPMD and Chaka Khan. According to Chuck, "We had tight dealings with MCA and were talking about taking three guys that were left over from New Edition and coming up with an album for them. The three happened to be Ricky Bell, Michael Bivins and Ronnie DeVoe, later to become 'Bell Biv DeVoe'. Ralph Tresvant had been slated to do a solo album for years. Bobby Brown had left New Edition and 'blew up' in 1988 and Johnny Gill had just been recruited to come in, but Johnny Gill had come off a solo career and could always go back to that. At MCA, Hiram Hicks, who was their manager, and Louil Silas, who was running the show, were like, 'Yo, these kids were left out in the cold, can y'all come up with something for them.' It was a task that Hank, Keith, Eric and I took on to try to put some kind of Hip-Hop flavored R&B shit down for them. Subsequently, what happened in the four weeks of December (1989) was that the bomb Squad knocked out a large piece of the production and arrangement on Bell Biv DeVoe's three-million selling album, Poison. In January (1990), they knocked out Fear of A Black Planet in four weeks, and PE knocked out Ice Cube's album AmeriKKKa's Most Wanted in four to five weeks in February. They have also produced local talent such as Son of Bazerk, Young Black Teenagers, Kings of Pressure and True Mathematics and gave producer Kip Collins his start in the business.

Origin of name

Chuck D had put out a tape to promote WBAU (the radio station where he was working at the time) and to fend off a local rapper who wanted to battle him. He called the tape Public Enemy #1 because he felt like he was being persecuted by people in the local scene. This was the first reference to the notion of a "Public Enemy" in any of Chuck D's songs. The single was created by Chuck D with a contribution by Flavor Flav, though this was before the group Public Enemy was officially assembled.

Public Enemy is also the name of one of the first film noir gangster movies, a 1931 classic starring James Cagney.

According to Chuck, The S1W, which stands for "Security of the First World", "represents that the Black man can be just as intelligent as he is strong. It stands for the fact that we're not Third World people, we're First World people; we're the original people (of the earth).

On the track "Louder Than a Bomb", from It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, Chuck D reveals that the D in his nickname stands for "dangerous".

Controversy

  • Several members of P.E. were also notorious for their alignment with the Nation of Islam and its leader, Minister Louis Farrakhan, whose remarks and speeches they have sampled along with Malcolm X's on several of their recordings. Professor Griff (after reading the book The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, which was published by the Historical Research Department of the Nation of Islam and consisted almost entirely of citations concerning Jewish involvement in the slave trade) asserted in an interview with David Mills of The Washington Times that most Jews are responsible for "the majority of the wickedness that goes on across the globe.According to Chuck D's book Fight The Power, after Griff cited several Jewish sources in a follow-up interview, Mills regretted writing the story and apologized to Griff. The story later surfaced in a Village Voice article. It resulted in Griff leaving Public Enemy and founding his own group, Last Asiatic Disciples, whose lyrics were even more politically and racially charged than Public Enemy's.

  • Chuck has stated in the songs "Bring the Noise" and "Don't Believe the Hype" that listeners should not judge people who they hear on the news and in sound-bites like Farrakhan's "until you hear the man".

  • In "Welcome to the Terrordome" the group was again accused of anti-Semitism when Chuck stated "Crucifixion ain't no fiction/So called chosen frozen/Apology made to who ever pleases/Still they got me like Jesus." Later in the song he refers to Rabbi Abe Cooper, who has debated Chuck D on television, with the line "told the Rab get off the rag."

  • One of their singles was named "Swindler's Lust", twisting the title of Schindler's List. Upon release of the single, the group was condemned by the Anti-Defamation League, though the group stated that they were not trying to diminish the events of the Holocaust, but were drawing a comparison between the events of the Holocaust and slavery.

  • Sister Souljah, a then little-known rapper and writer who had made guest appearances on several Public Enemy tracks, surprisingly became an issue in the 1992 Presidential campaign when Bill Clinton denounced the racial views she expressed in an interview with David Mills, then at The Washington Post.

Discography

Members

  • Chuck D (Carlton Douglas Ridenhour) — leader, producer, lyricist, main vocalist, and artwork
  • Flavor Flav (William Jonathan Drayton, Jr.) — lyricist, vocalist, producer, instrumentalist, hype man, comic relief
  • Professor Griff (Richard Griffin) head of S1W, liaison between PE and S1W, road manager. Occasional vocalist and producer, plays drums at live shows
  • Brain Hardgrove - (Guitarist, Band Director and producer)
  • DJ Lord (Lord Aswod) — DJ, producer
  • Terminator X (Norman Rogers) — DJ, producer (former member)
  • DJ Johnny Juice (John Rosado) Studio DJ, Producer

The following are a part of The Bomb Squad, the revolutionary production group which is closely associated with (sometimes considered a part of) Public Enemy:

  • Hank Shocklee (Hank Boxley)
  • Keith Shocklee (Keith Boxley)
  • Eric "Vietnam" Sadler
  • Gary G-Wiz

Chuck D is often listed as a member of the Bomb Squad under the pseudonym "Carl Ryder", a shortened form of his real name.

The S1W, which stands for "Security of the First World", are sometimes considered a part of Public Enemy, as well. The members constantly rotate and have included (among others):

  • James Norman
  • James Allen
  • Roger Chillous
  • John (Butch) "Pop" Oliver
  • Shawn Kevin Carter aka "The Interrogator"
  • Mike Williams
  • Andrew Williams
  • Dwayne Cousar
  • Ronald Lincoln
  • Keith "Krunch" Godfrey
  • Jacob "Jake" Shankle
  • Many of the future members of Professor Griff's Last Asiatic Disciples
  • Butch Cassidy (Aaron Allen) & his group "5ive-O" a/k/a "the Interrogators."
  • Harry Allen is also a part of the group as writer, journalist and 'media assassin'

Further Reading

  • Chuck D with Yusuf Jah, Chuck D: Lyrics of a Rap Revolutionary, Off Da Books, 2007 ISBN 0-974-94841-1
  • Chuck D with Yusuf Jah, Fight the Power, Delacorte Press, 1997 ISBN 0-385-31868-5

  • Fuck You Heroes, Glen E. Friedman Photographs 1976-1991, Burning Flags Press, 1994, ISBN 0-9641916-0-1

    • References

    External links



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