Music

Chuck D takes on the artistry of hip-hop

By Joe Gross
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Monday, April 24, 2006

When Chuck D picks up the phone at his New York home, the voice of a generation sounds a little bit fatigued.

This is slightly jarring, because the operative word in the above paragraph is "voice," and the hip-hop artist also known as Carlton Ridenhour, who speaks with Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts at the Paramount Theatre on Tuesday, is usually a booming, commanding presence. The pair will speak about social issues, presumably including hip-hop, which Pitts explored eloquently as a music critic.

"Worldwide, for people 30 and under, it's a cultural language," Chuck says. "It embodies sight and sound and style and it uses elements of the past. The problem is that most fans don't have history as an accompaniment."

With Public Enemy, which he designed and led, Chuck turned his authoritative bellow into a weapon of confrontation and enlightenment. Combining noisy, cutting-edge production values and the politics of black power, for a while there, Public Enemy was one of the world's most important bands.

Last year, the Library of Congress added P.E.'s 1990 classic "Fear of a Black Planet" to its National Recording Registry. Spin magazine chose two P.E. albums for their "100 Greatest Albums (1985-2005)" list, with the 1988 breakthrough "It Takes A Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back" at No. 2 and "Black Planet" at No. 21.

But that music was made a long time ago. These days, between occasional P.E. tours and albums, Chuck spends his time running the Internet record label Slamjamz and hitting the lecture circuit.

And when talking about the current state of hip-hop, it doesn't take much to get Chuck going.

"When I was coming up, the last thing hip-hop groups wanted to do was sound like one another," he says. "Now, that's not the case."

For example, nobody could ever confuse P.E. for peers Jungle Brothers, a Tribe Called Quest or N.W.A. Yet artists in regional scenes (Houston, the Bay Area's hyphy scene, Miami bass) tend to sound similar. And, with this rise of hip-hop superproducers, one sound is used for lots of artists. A track produced by, say, the Neptunes for, say, Snoop might sound similar to one they make for Jay-Z. And the Neptunes' sound is closely related to their Virginia neighbor, Timbaland.

The ability to build a career and a life in hip-hop is of paramount importance to Chuck, as is reminding people that hip-hop is a far wider field that most people, or even hip-hop fans, know.

"Journalists have a tendency to cover that which is brought to them," Chuck says. "Nobody really does any digging. The most beautiful thing about art involves you going to it instead of it coming. If all you do is let it come to you, you fall victim to promotion and big companies."

Big label hip-hop thrives on a flash-in-the-pan, one-hit-wonder business model. It's rare for artists to have long-term careers in hip-hop, let alone be long-term big sellers. (Only two hip-hop artists have platinum albums in the 1980s, '90s and '00s: producer Dr. Dre and the Beastie Boys).

Chuck thinks this is a shame.

"I just don't understand why A Tribe Called Quest can't be thought of as having a long-term career like Frank Sinatra or Johnny Cash," he says. "Artist development is just gone."

For his own part, Chuck says that Public Enemy hasn't been a full-time endeavor since 1995. "I spend 50 percent of my time running Slamjamz and have for 10 years," he says. "I've been on the lecture circuit for 16 years. I spent that time raising my family. My oldest child just graduated from high school. If P.E. had been full time, I would have had crazy psycho kids."

That said, Chuck is proud of P.E.'s international reputation.

"We've been on 56 tours all over the world," he says, "We were the first rap group to be a thoroughly international success. We planted seeds in the '80s and '90s in places like Eastern Europe and South America and Canada. Kanye West can play a stadium anywhere in the world because of the roads we paved. But at the same time, Grandmaster Flash paved roads for us. Funkadelic paved roads for them. Sam and Dave and Otis Redding and Motown and James Brown paved roads for them. And on and on."

Whether he's developing his artists on Slamjamz or discussing policy and culture on an Austin stage, Chuck D remains a singular figure in hip-hop, independent to the last.

As he puts it, "Why be an artist if you're going to be a slave?"

jgross@statesman.com; 912-5926