If you want to talk contributing factors, the Public Enemy mess has three of them. Those who would participate in the debate about the group ignore them at their peril, so it’s probably worth spelling them out at the beginning:
The first explains how the controversy got started in the first place; the second explains why it has not yet died down. But the third explains why you should care nonetheless. The band’s latest album, Fear of a Black Planet, is a sprawling and unrelenting work, as ambitious and powerful a record as has ever been made: It’s Born to Run and London Calling and There’s a Riot Goin’ On and Highway 61 Revisited all rolled up into one. And the band’s recent appearance in Chicago, at the UIC Pavilion, was a jaw-dropping concussive assault of sound and propaganda. You can’t overstate the band’s importance: suddenly, the best rock ‘n’ roll band in the world doesn’t even have a drummer (and lacks a guitarist as such as well). Where, in the mid-80s, synth-pop bands like Depeche Mode, whose instrumentation consisted entirely of keyboards, made serious challenges to our understanding of what a rock band could be, P.E. takes it a step further: the band’s work is entirely pastiche, constructed in the studio out of drum programming, extravagant sampling, record scratching, and snippets of speech, slogans, stage announcements, and ominous stuff like sirens. People have been saying that rock ‘n’ roll is unmusical for decades; rap, of course, has a bad, um, rap for the same reasons, and P.E. has become the epitome of almost literal unmusicality.
Griff’s propensity for making chancy remarks was known to the group–after a series of minor incidents with British music papers involving (Spin said) remarks about Jews and gays, Chuck took him out of the press loop. But a dumb chain of circumstances put him alone in the same room with a Washington Times reporter and produced–the reporter says he gave no prompting–Griff’s depressing sociopolitical views about Jews, including the now famous comment that Jews are responsible for “the majority of wickedness that goes on across the globe.” The predictable uproar ensued, but Chuck, with a tendency toward macho stonewalling, (perhaps) an inaccurate feeling that it wasn’t a big deal, and (not least) residual loyalty to a friend, or at least the group, stonewalled. All that did was turn an embarrassment into a rout, and this at the hands of the devils (P.E.’s word) in the white media. Chuck eventually threw Griff out of the group, and then disbanded it, for a day or two. Then he let Griff back in, thoroughly muzzled. Griff later left to form his own band, the Last Asiatic Disciples, and now records for Luke Skyywalker, the man behind 2 Live Crew.
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People, people we are the same
My beloved, let’s get down to business.
On It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, the band’s second album, Chuck displays an astonishing newfound political voice on record. (The band had always been outspoken in interviews.) The album’s first two songs, the bluntest, most trenchant tracks rap had theretofore produced, were “Bring the Noise” and “Don’t Believe the Hype.” They’re pretty shocking even today. “Radio stations, I question their blackness,” blasts Chuck. “They call themselves black, but we’ll see if they play this.” (Sure, Elvis Costello pulled a similar move, but who else?) Farrakhan is a central figure: “Now they got me in a cell ’cause my records they sell / Cause a brother like me said, “Well . . . / Farrakhan’s a prophet and I think you ought to listen to / What he can say to you, what you ought to do”‘ and “The follower of Farrakhan / Don’t tell me that you understand / Until you hear the man.”
