Chuck D - Fight the Power: Rap, Race, and Reality

Monday, February 24, 199712:00 noon
Soul Cafe, New York City

Ten years since the release of Public Enemy Number One, my first single for Def Jam, and here I was sitting among reporters, TV and radio people, between Flavor Flav and Professor Griff. This was just the beginning of a hectic day and a crazy week, the prelude to the History of Hip-Hop concert being sponsored by Radio WQHT aka Hot 97 in New York. Being a part of this event had me wondering how the control of Hip-Hop and Rap music had changed hands and got swallowed up by the corporate pimps of soul. Aside from celebrating the history of this great music, one purpose of the performance was to balance out the growing stigma that Hip-Hop concerts are unsafe.

Flavor, Griff, and I took turns talking, setting the stage for whats in store for the coming months. Flavor, whos been back and forth in the media for a host of personal reasons, was abrasively upbeat about turning the page on our tenth year. Griff, on the other hand, was cordial and cool and let the room guess about the future plan and his ideas. Obviously, there was an appetite for what Public Enemy could bring to the public.

Personally, I felt rejuvenated after a four-year challenge-filled hiatus. My challenges were trying to sustain my art within a crumbling art form and trying to resuscitate that art form. Its damn near like scaling a slick mountain with roller skates, especially after the murder of Notorious B.I.G. three weeks later. I felt the career toll of controversial scars on my mind, body, and soul had healed a bit for future wars in store. The Rap game had changed to a point where my competitive nature could no longer operate. Rap tours had all but vanished, an area that allowed Public Enemy to prove all our doubters wrong. Radio stations had to be paid heavy money to play Rap records. Record companies flooded the gap with payola, expensive video marketing, and over saturated replicated marketing campaigns. And Gangsta sound became the lead topic on R&B formatted music, something that wouldnt offend a white corporation and still rotate easily on white-owned Black radio stations without losing a female audience.

Here I was performing for a corporation claiming to be the Hip-Hop Voice of New York, only agreeing to do it providing I retained the rights to the World Wide Webcast of the event. That broadcast never happened, so I was committed to the task of performing merely for romantic reasons that night. KRS One and Run-DMC opened and closed the show respectively, lighting up the stage in the process, and there we were, in between, for the first time in a year and a half. We thundered through the set: Flavor, Terminator, The S1Ws, Brother James Norman, Roger, Mike and the Crew and, once again, Griff. We showed all, that if we had to do it, we could.

I must admit, I was surprised at the amount of media people who clustered inside the Black-owned Soul Cafe that Monday. All media were banned from the event, so Ill bet most of them were pissed off about not being able to see the show. I opened the floor talking about my multimedia ventures leading up to the twenty-first century; a new Public Enemy record, a PE Archive label, Slam Jamz, the Internet, and a host of ideas including this book, Fightthe Power: Rap, Race, and Reality.

The purpose of this book is to expose to the reader the beauty and depth of Rap and Hip-Hop. For too long Ive felt that this art form is tossed aside as a ghetto game for Black youth and that limited opinion is ignorant. Through the many controversies that my peers and I have weathered, the facts have been passed over for distortions and hysterical stigmas, not only by the mainstream, but by my own community as well.

This book damn sure aint a passive introduction to this world, nor is it an autobiography. Ive never stressed the importance of me. I am a man first and a Black one to the core. If those facts offend some, fuck it. Fight the Power will ruffle.

Im offended that few know that my peers are worldly, engaging, entrepreneurial, have traveled, have families, have college degrees, and pay taxes like everybody else. Im here to set the record straight.

But this book is not solely my own opinion. It has been shaped by the hundreds of conversations Ive had across the planet over the past twelve years with everyone, including presidents, political leaders, athletes, leftists, conservatives, religious leaders, pimps, racists, international people, drug dealers, average men and women, homeless people, military prisoners, as well as my fellow Rap and Hip-Hop peers.