3/28/2023 0 Comments Evil inside platinumHe became the trade’s easiest mark: ask him a question and he would deliver great copy, some of it-not all-doctrine from Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam. Last summer, in interviews with the English press, he had repeatedly hurled vicious slurs at Jews, whites and gays. Griff’s remarks capped a year of internal unrest. It is the hour of chaos extended indefinitely. In aesthetic terms, as a work of art, the current condition of sustained instability is the apotheosis of all Public Enemy has strived for. As Bill Stephney, former vice president of Def Jam and a close adviser of the group says, in what might as well be Public Enemy’s motto, “The revolution will be marketed.” And then come back out and then win, and just leave the audience devastated and leave the venue.” The group has spoken in a dozen prisons and hundreds of schools across the country, combining activism and self-promotion in a blueprint for the next wave of black radicalism. And I don’t mean talk and lose, I mean talk and win. “Even if the kids don’t know they want to hear it, ’cause a lot of times they don’t know they want to hear it. “Chuck might talk 50 percent of his show-and win,” says Daddy-O of the rap band Stetsasonic. College graduates and proud adults in a genre dominated by teenagers, Public Enemy have changed the way hip hop sounds, the way it is made, what it does. In practice, this may mean the end of the most innovative and influential group of the late Eighties. (Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images) made the only decision he could: no decision. Criticized from all sides, and wanting-according to one of his associates and close friends-to be liked by everyone, Chuck D. said that Griff was his close friend of 20 years, and that they had never been friends, just professional associates, with Griff his subordinate. has refused to stand by his colleague, and refused to disown him. For a number of reasons, lead rapper and writer Chuck D. This followed public statements that Griff would remain in the group, but be stripped of his title (June 19) that he had been fired (June 21) and that Public Enemy had disbanded (June 22). The status of the crew and its members has been changing day to day, but at press time, here’s how things stood: following a barrage of anti-Semitic remarks by Minister of Information Professor Griff in the Washington Times-and subsequently reprinted in the Village Voice-Public Enemy is taking an indefinite hiatus. In a month of intense turmoil and confusion surrounding Public Enemy, this taped message remained one of the few constants. Those were the first words you heard if you called the Jewish Defense Organization’s New York office in June. “Did you know that the black rap group Public Enemy are anti-Semitic?” A few commonplace mistakes, made by young men under great duress, had started it all. There was a troubling symmetry: Public Enemy’s logo of a black man in a rifle sight on one side, and the JDO’s logo of a machine gun in a Star of David on the other and the chic allure of Uzi submachine guns on both.Īt the root of the frenzy there was not evil, just mundane human error: four friends from suburban Long Island, whose routine internecine squabbling, once it got away from them, had gotten way, way out of hand. There were death threats and lies, a militant 27-year-old accountant whose past battle cry still hung in the air: “Louis Farrakhan no right to talk, no right to walk, no right to live.” At the Slave Theater in Brooklyn, Al Sharpton rallied blacks against Jewish pressure on Public Enemy. Public Enemy: Our 1988 Interview With Chuck D and Flavor Flav.5 Albums I Can’t Live Without: Masta Ace.Outside the posh Ziegfeld Theater on 54th Street in Manhattan, dozens of Jewish militants chanted, “We hate Public Enemy! We hate Public Enemy!” while inside, on the soundtrack to a movie some white critics called an incitement to a race riot, Public Enemy rapped, Elvis was a hero to most/But he never meant shit to me/He’s straight out racist/That sucker was simple and plain/Motherfuck him and John Wayne. A black man with ties to Minister Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam clamored, “The Jews are wicked, and we can prove this” and a young black reporter, a liberal in the employ of Reverend Sung Myung Moon’s right-wing newspaper chain, bolstered his career by circulating and multiplying the hatred he found so repugnant. As the Supreme Court dismantled affirmative action, quietly inflaming the center of American racial tensions, there was madness on the periphery. It was a horror movie, evil descending on a New York summer that had begun with a brutal gang-rape in Central Park and a tabloid sideshow of black suspects rapping Tone Loc’s “Wild Thing” in their cell. This article originally appeared in the September 1989 issue of SPIN. Public Enemy: Our 1988 Interview With Chuck D and Flavor Flav
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