New Chuck D Interview

[bigted]

http://www.rollingout.com/cover/index.php?...7&more=1&page=2

The day before Chuck D is scheduled to take his place behind a lectern and drop knowledge on eager listeners, he finds himself at his mother’s home tripping down memory lane.

As he sifts through 20-year-old photographs from his college graduation, Carlton D. Ridenhour reminisces on the time in his life when he was a mere student of the game, rather than the teacher he has since become.

“If I’ve got something to be stuck up about, I ain’t gonna brag to people about my rappin’,” he will say the next day, in retrospect. “I brag to people about my degree, ‘cause it took every day of those 6 years. Six years, boy — [and] 2 years to understand what the hell I was doing.”

It’s a strange admittance from a man often credited with lyrically educating a generation. But Chuck doesn’t necessarily see it that way, preferring to call himself the spark plug. “That’s how people learn, they gotta get sparked,” he says. “People always say, ‘Chuck, I remember back in the day you taught me something real.’ Uh-uh, I didn’t teach you. It Takes a Nation of Millions To Hold Us Back is only an hour. All it did is name references. You were smart because you found out about Coltrane and Chesimard and you processed that.”

In many ways, Chuck D still looks and sounds the same — a relic from a bygone era when incendiary rap was the rule, when young black men compared themselves to African kings, and female counterparts, like one named Latifah, prefaced her name with the title, Queen.

But the times and rhymes have certainly changed. Now the only color leftover from hip-hop’s red, black and green era is the color of money. And loud, lyrical, rebellious African Americans like Chuck D have long since gone out of style — even amongst their own constituents. Rap fans today prefer their politically conscious rappers with heaping helpings of the kind of self-conscious lyricism that made overhyped rapper #1 a household name. We are so caught up with looking at ourselves in the mirror that checking the rear-view rarely occurs to us. As a result, history remains just that — a thing of the past destined to repeat itself.

Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that the platinum-selling artist is busier now than he was at the peak of his recording career. Yes, the leader of Public Enemy is still fighting the power. But he finds himself preaching far less often to the choir than he does reminding those wayward soldiers that the battle is not over.

That’s what brings him here today, to the Georgia World Congress Center, where the 2006 National Urban League Conference is taking place. The ballroom luncheon he is scheduled to address is filled with the incoming generation of buppies, or young urban professionals, as they prefer to call themselves. Most of them are full-time entrepreneurs or already-successful careerists. Though they remain actively involved in the community-at-large through their NUL affiliation, most populate suburbs far removed from the concerns and conflict of inner cities. And most of them have long since shelved those classic, platinum-selling Public Enemy albums like It Takes a Nation of Millions To Hold Us Back, Fear of a Black Planet and Apocalypse Now — The Enemy Strikes Black, which likely sparked more cultural pride during their adolescence than any text studied before or since. As the hundred or so attendees began to lunch on their entrée of grilled salmon, Chuck approaches the podium preparing to take them back to school.

“On my birth certificate, it says Carlton Douglas Ridenhour. Race: Negro,” says the 46-year-old. “By 1968, we were black. And black was beautiful. James Brown said, ‘I’m Black and I’m Proud.’ Black Panther Party, you know. Kwame Ture, formerly known as Stokely Carmichael [introduced] Black Power — BLACK — anytime before that, black was a bad word.”

The lesson he teaches consists of equal parts history and our story, as Chuck touches everything from globalization to the “dumbassification” — as he so eloquently puts it — of America in general and, specifically, urban culture.

“Fast-forward to 2007, black is a curse word,” he continues. “Ni**a is the word to use. And it’s being [paid] rent, like water, endorsed, financed to a point that niggativity is big business in America.”

But don’t get it twisted. This isn’t the tale of another one of those throwback rappers who hates all things contemporary simply because he’s no longer in the mix. To the contrary, Chuck is more sought after now than ever. He pens his own column for Elemental Magazine and publicenemy.com once a month, hosts his syndicated “On The Real” radio show once a week (AirAmericaRadio.com) and continues to grant requests via the 100 or more e-mails he receives per day to give lectures, grant interviews and make appearances 365 days a year. Plus, while presiding over his own SlamJamz record label, which features 30 artists internationally, Chuck and Public Enemy continue to record and release new material, like their recent full-length album, Rebirth Of a Nation.

By no means has Chuck toned down his pro-black, anti-establishment rhetoric. But what he has learned to do is disseminate the message in ways that not only incite listeners but provide insight as well.

“[There] was a particular time in my life where I said, ‘You know what man, I can hype people up too [easily] and I can make them angry too [easily].’ So I had to scale that back because you want to lead people [so] that if they’re going to fight something, at least they’re going to know what they’re fighting about,” he says. “You wanna have people define themselves and discover themselves and then also be a benefit to mankind, man. But bottom line, we have to get to the point where we understand that knowledge, wisdom and understanding are the keys to life and you can’t get them in a microwave. Knowledge, wisdom and understanding come like the sands of time, itself.”

Back in the day, before gangsta rap overtook rap’s golden era, Chuck D was like an elder statesman of sorts, presiding over hip-hop’s then-new school of philosophical emcee’s and politically charged groups like living legend KRS-One, the African medallion clad members of X-Clan, and Five Percenter spitters Poor Righteous Teachers and Brand Nubian.

“Chuck D is like an idol and I don’t even have idols,” says Allhiphop.com founder, Chuck “Jigsaw” Creekmur. “[That’s] where we got our political state [of] mind and consciousness [from].”

As head of the pioneering Public Enemy — featuring colorful hype man Flavor Flav, DJ Terminator X and head of the S1W’s (Security of the First World) Professor Griff, Chuck helped package black power and resistance for black teenagers as well as a multitude of white, radicalized youth. Whereas the average rapper today is billed as a high school dropout and ex-dope dealer, Chuck was just 2 years shy of receiving his design and communications degree from Long Island’s Adelphi University when Def Jam signed Public Enemy after producer and part-owner Rick Rubin heard a tape of Chuck freestyling. It would take yet another 5 years before the release of their first album, Yo! Bumrush the Show in 1987.

“We all got our degrees around ’84 and went right into the music business,” says Chuck, referring to himself and other PE affiliates, Bill Stephney and Harry Allen the Media Assassin, as well as Hank Shocklee, a member of the production team, The Bomb Squad, that gave the group its alarming, revolutionary sound. “And our mission was to destroy it and use it as a transmitter to endorse or reinforce intellectualism — not anti-lectualism, not dumbass-ification.”

America wasn’t quite prepared to swallow this image of smart, strong, enraged and engaged black men. Public Enemy could not escape the onslaught of media criticism and eventually the group was forced to kick Professor Griff out of PE after claims he’d made anti-Semitic comments during an interview.

By the time PE released their hugely successful sophomore album, Chuck was nearly 30. Add that maturity and education together and you begin to understand why Chuck’s subject matter as PE’s lead rapper was so far removed from the party and braggadocio raps of that era, or the puerile drugs, guns and decadence-laced lyrics that pervade today’s airwaves.

Rather than blame the fruit for being spoiled, Chuck points to the fruit-pickers who harvest such a crop and make millions mass marketing it. “In the music business, do you think wack rapper #1 and G-Unit, or Jimmy Iovine is the person that’s propagating thug and criminal mentality to the masses?! And he lives in Malibu, and is just stacking and collecting it all. He’s been the guy behind Death Row. Death Row just went bankrupt, but Jimmy Iovine has cashed his way all the way to the bank,” Chuck declares. “I’m telling you right now, he’s in direct juxtaposition to what I’m about. If I run into him, straight up and down, I’ma gaffle his ass, for real. It’s going to be straight up and down; I’ma just knock you out when I see you.”

What pisses Chuck off more than anything is when black folk wield their money-making sword with that same sense of unaccountability and irresponsibility. In other words, black people who are willing to do damn near anything to make a dollar only do so at the expense of their own people — which is exactly how African Americans became enslaved in the first place.

“There’s got to be a soul to our business,” he tells the crowd of young, professional hustlers more than once, putting emphasis on quality versus quantity. “Why are you giving a million Lil Wayne records more credence than 400,000 quality records that the Roots have made? Don’t get caught up with the quantitative method. More doesn’t always mean better.”

While Chuck is obviously well-versed when it comes to telling people what-it-is, he doesn’t claim to know all the answers. “To err is human. Nobody’s got life down. Life can only be managed. It can’t be mastered. So we’re all students.”

But like any good student, Chuck D knows that asking the right question at the appointed time can trigger a revolution

[willsmithandjazz4life]

Thanks for that.

[fresh_from_sofia]

thanks , i am gonna read it later