I’d like to inaugurate this column by giving a big shout-out to E-Boarders and P.E. fans worldwide. I’d like to also to give greetings of PEace to Slam Jamz and Peeps artists, Bomb Squad alumni and of course The Strong Island Crew itself.
Firstly, I consider it a privilege and an honour for myself and my multi-media partner Ron to be a part of www.publicenemy.com, an online musical, social, political and cultural revolution.
The technology that fuels this intellectual machine is actually what is responsible for our involvement with PE in the first place.
Public Enemy was already at least 2 years ahead of most high profile artists when they began utilizing the internet as a way to bring their intellectual property to the masses without the interference of big corporations that dictated to the labels they owned, as to what the public should hear and consume.
Ron actually contacted Chuck D. about a technical question after attending 98’s “Smokin’ Grooves “ tour when it hit Montreal(our hometown) via this web-site and received his answer from Chuck himself in the form of a hand-written letter, Malcolm X. stamp and all.
It’s grown way beyond a cliché when people say that this technology is making the world a smaller place. As a kid I would have never imagined personally being able to contact James Brown, Prince or Chuck Berry, much beyond a letter sent to a fan club president who would have sent me a generic typed letter and an 8 by 10 glossy, thanking me for my support. Even as a child, I was educated about that hustle. The close relationship The Machine had with its fans worldwide had its bonds strengthened even more with the aide of the Whirl Wide Web!
So what began over a decade ago as a series of P.E. radio documentaries on several Montreal stations as well as now on our own web-based podcasts on www.clickcaster.com/thisisnotatest , we join the Fam with our humble attempt to document the journey; past, present and beyond of a musical explosion that was unleashed to the world in 1987 and shows no sign of slowing down soon!
As all the world of rap and hip-hop has wound down and recovered from all the celebrations and commemorations of the various concerts , parties and events marking the 20th anniversary of the ground-breaking “It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back” , many might not be aware of another milestone that 2009 marks.
Yes the 2008 “Nation” tours brought the Machine to several continents , various music festivals and culminated with a New Year’s Eve gig Down Under performing the album back to front(or front to back , depending on if you know your P.E. history) in an unprecedented stream of props , homage and acknowledgment ever accorded to a pioneering hip-hop crew.
But in 1999, a musical and political revolution was hatched that in some ways had an even bigger impact than Nation, Fear and Bum Rush combined.
Although many may believe that P.E.’s decision to go independent was sparked by their relationship with their label Def Jam, which had been slowly going sour for years, it was actually other factors that ignited that spark.
Yes Chuck and company grew increasingly frustrated with decisions that label-head Russell Simmons had made over the years concerning the group , even if they were influenced by the major corporations that now controlled all record labels including Def Jam.
Vetoed was The Machine’s cover of The Impressions’ “We’re A Winner” for a Curtis Mayfield tribute album. Also vetoed was, “You’re Gonna Get Yours” off of their debut album “Yo! Bum Rush The Show”, was originally titled “You’re Gonna Goetz Yours”, a reference to the white
Endless red tape barricaded projects like Flavor Flav’s solo debut. A move that proved to be as much as a loss to Def Jam as it was to The Clocked One himself as we saw Ol’ Dirty Bastard ride a wave with a flavor(no pun intended) created by the man born William Drayton ,the new king of reality TV.
But the real catalyst behind P.E. going indie and embracing the internet was the freedom of removing the middle-man (record companies and distributors) from their artistic equation and now controlling the modulation of how their art was brought to the public.
Chuck D. grew tired of being told when to record, how often albums could be released and what singles would help sell those albums. Chuck refused to be a slave to the recording system. He would no longer pick “digital cotton” to quote form the song “Crash” off of “Poison”.
Al Teller who was an ex-executive from MCA Records as well as a well respected music mogul had now known P.E. in their first days at Def Jam when they recorded their debut album 1987’s “Yo Bum Rush The Show!”
Teller who had too grown tired of the redundant and restrictive nature of the music industry according to the major labels now was embarking on a new musical venture as well. Teller formed the online label Atomic Pop, which would market, distribute and sell albums online as well as hard copy versions at later dates in standard retail outlets.
Teller first major singing was Public Enemy.
“The millennium for many is the wall……” was the sub-title as all P.E. albums have had one) for “There’s A Poison Goin’ On”.
The title was influenced by Sly and the Family Stone’s 1971 classic; “There’s A Riot Goin’ On”.
There are parallels to these two major works of art. First of all Sly Stone by 1970 had too grown tired of the mechanics of the recording industry. His last single previous to “Riot” had been 19,69’s Thank You(Falletinme Be Mice Elf Agin) causing then CBS Epic Records head Clive Davis to constantly panic over no Family Stone product for the market.
Sly, who was always pretty much politically astute, had grown even more aware politically as The Black Panther Party had now replaced the flower headed hippies of Haight/Ashbury as his posse of choice.
Sly no longer even felt restricted to simply using regular band members on his recordings. Bobby Womack, Billy Preston and Ike Turner all played on “Riot”. Although no guests were featured on “Poison” , Chuck D. was collaborating at this time more than ever with diverse musical peers such as Isaac Hayes , Rage Against The Machine , Dapper Dan and believe or not Bob Marley and Jimi Hendrix.(no joke) His most important collaboration though would be with Prince , but more on that later.
The original art-work for Riot was the American Flag with black and white stripes and suns replacing the stars. Sly said that “I wanted suns instead of stars because stars to me imply searching, like you search for your star and there are already too many stars in this world. But the sun, that’s something that is always there, looking right at you. Betsy Ross did the best that she could with what she had. I thought I could do better”.
Sly was now questioning justice, human rights and the American way more than ever before.
P.E. offered no less than that on “Poison” joints like “LSD”(one of the funkiest P.E. joints ever) tackling subjects like domestic terrorism(“Got a truck full of fertilizer blowin’ up the spot” a reference to Timothy McVeigh’s terrorist attack on a Government building in the mid 90’s. “LSD” also broached the subject of Black fear of white supremacy (The Godamned white got you afraid”)
“41:19” saw Flav at his finest recounting the shooting of African street
On “Riot” Sly redid Thank You” in a more slowed down sparse and darker version, rechristening it “Thank You For Talking To Me Africa”, where he again reiterated the line “Looking at the devil, grinning at his gun”.
Other songs like “Africa Talks To You” (The Asphalt Jungle), “Brave And Strong”, “Runnin’ Away” and a silent title track which Sly said represented his quest to stop rioting, definitely proved that Sly was now headed into a new direction.
P.E. who from the onslaught of their career were always political, were also moving into a new direction but in the form of how their music would get to the masses.
The biggest quality that both “Poison” And “Riot” had in common was the stripped down dark underground raw sound that actually brought both P.E. and The Family Stone back to the nucleus of their musical essence.
As for the case in “Poison” if “Apocalypse ’91 was the hardest underground hardcore hip-hop album ever, then “Poison” was “Apocalypse” on steroids. Track no.7 “Crayola” is a true testament to this.
Public Enemy and Prince joined creative and political forces causing such uproar in the world of entertainment that even Trudeau’s Doonesbury cartoon had to feature a strip about it.
P.E. and His Royal Badness sort of began their musical relationship when in 19,89 P.E. laid down vocals at Greene Street Studios in New York City for a track on George Clinton’s album “The Cinderella Theory” , called “Tweakin’”. The “Theory” album was released on Prince’s
I remember hearing this track for the first time in ’89, getting shivers at the thought of an eventual collaboration with P.E. and Prince himself. It was like the
But the public would have to wait until the stars were aligned properly for this to happen. In this case the unfairness and corruption of the music industry aided the stars themselves.
After Prince’s relationship with Warner Bros. Records (his label since ’78) soured in 19.96 he looked to another major to revive the commercial aspect of his career. EMI paid him handsomely to release the 3 disc set “Emancipation”, but failed to show any interest in promoting the album or work radio with it.
Prince to decide to go totally independent and release a 3 disc set called “Crystal Ball” online through his N.P.G. label. Prince set up a web site called www.love4oneanother.com , threw in a 4th disc called “The Truth” as a bonus gift as a show of gratitude for his fans support and sold the whole package for $50. He reportedly made more from that project by cutting out the middle-man than he ever did with albums like “Purple Rain” and “1999”.
Prince’s political awareness also grew during this time. Heavily influenced by Chuck D.’s line on “He Got Game” about “The lies buried in the library”, Prince changed his entire approach to the business side of the music industry. He in turn influenced Chuck with the line “If u don’t own the master than the master owns you”, in reference to Black artists historically never owning their master recordings. Peep Poison’s closing track, the haunting “Swindler’s Lust”, for that manifesto authored by
“Swindler’s Lust” as keeping with P.E.’s penchant for uninvited controversy was the subject of attacks by Jewish groups ,claiming that it was a reference to the Steven Spielberg holocaust epic “Shindler’s List”. The fact that Jewish people have been part of P.E.’s fam from the beginning like Def jam founder Rick Rubin went totally unnoticed.
So Chuck D. inducted Prince into the Soul Train Hall Of Fame. Prince presented an award to P.E. at The Webbies, honoring their work in the online community and the stage was set for the 2 funkiest forces to hit the planet earth since James brown met a 16 year old William “Bootsy” Collins.
Prince in 1999 inked a one off record deal with Clive Davis and Arista Records for an album called “Rave Un2 The Joy Fantastic”. Prince and Chuck D. collaborated on a monster track called “Undisputed”. Musically influenced by James Brown, Zapp and The Neptunes, Prince constructed a track that as well had his own purple musical stamp on it and even sampled P.E.’s “Bring The Noise”. Hell P.E. sampled Prince on tracks like “Brother’s Gonna Work It Out” and “Sticka” a posse track from Terminator’s X.’s sophomore set “Super Badd”, featuring Chuck, M.C. Lyte, Ice-T and Ice Cube.
“Come one come all to the download Ball”, rapped Chuck on “Undisputed”, referring to Prince’s first online experiment.
Prince gave props to Chuck on his 2004 smash hit “Musicology” as well as referring to him as part of a holy musical trinity along with Jimi Hendrix and Miles Davis on “2045” – Radical Man , a track off the soundtrack to Spike Lee’s 2000 film “Bamboozled”
“The Millennium For Many Is The Wall”, was the sub-title to “There’s A Poison Goin’ On” released in 1999. You could order the whole album online at www.publicenemy.com or at Atomic Pop’s now defunct site.
You could buy the whole album online for ten bucks. The zip-disc version for it at $5.99 or pay 99 cents a song and choose whatever songs or how many songs you wanted. The fact that the major labels didn’t have P.E. themselves assassinated for this type of venture is a miracle in itself.
The covers of P.E. albums like “It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back” , “Fear Of A Black Planet|” and “Muse Sick N Hour Mess Age” were almost as exciting and dramatic and the music itself. But the cover of “Poison|” may have been the group’s most powerful one ever.
A group of white children are pictured playing with toys with gas masks obviously protecting them from toxic elements. These elements might be the air, pollution, music, film, television, or corruption in general. A lone Black child is prominently centered playing as well with no mask on protecting him from anything.
P.E. was now taking the Black community to task for the way we allow our children to indulge and ingest popular culture without protecting them form the realities of this American illusion of inclusion as Paul Mooney once called it.
No “Spray on hits” here on “Poison” as Chuck declared on “Crayola”. “You got the art official”, lamented The Hard Rhymer on the same track. “I’m the reverse of Jiggy”, he announced on “Here I Go”. (My personal fave on the album)
“First The Sheep Next The Shepherd”, “Kevorkian” and “Last Mass Of The Caballeros” could all be used as school texts in the way they encapsulate the time that this album came out. The lyrics to these songs should be included in high school history books as a reference in understanding the beginning of the Y2K era. Much in the way that Beatlemaniacs(of which I am one) look to Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band as a historical document to 19,67.;The Summer Of Love.
As far as instrumentals go, they’ve always been important bookends as well as a conjunction on P.E. albums. “Final Countdown Of The Collision Between Us And The Damned”, “Contract On The World Love Jam” and “Show Em What You Got” are lyricless symphonies of soul and funk with snippets of speeches from Malcolm X., Marcus Garvey and Minister Louis Farrakhan as well as many others.
These short jams actually set the tone for P.E. albums as well as the meter, cadence and musical direction. Apocalypse ’91 would not be the same without the musical coda at the end of the “Bring Tha Noize” remake with Anthrax.
But the album instrumental intro “Dark Side Of The Wall 2000” is easily the greatest P.E. instrumental ever. With a “Mother Popcorn”/”I Know You Got Soul” guitar and bass type groove , the voice snippets on this one are the most haunting and prophetic of any P.E. instrumental piece yet. With opening words from an anonymous snippet saying “Kill”, P.E. was not reciting a call for violence but rather a killing of the old ways that stifled art and controlled the way it was retailed to the public.
“Do You Wanna Go Our Way???”, the album’s second single and opening vocal track is asked in the same manner that Jimi Hendrix asked the world 30 years earlier if they were “Experienced”
Their way would now also include a new way for artists and people as a society could do business and deliver their intellectual property to the masses.
Chuck would later debate Metallica’s Lars Ulrich about this on The Charlie Rose Show. Ulrich was against downloading. Chuck’s stance was that being against it was like trying to stop the rain. Where as Ulrich came off arrogant and insulting(Ulrich at one point called Chuck “ignorant” during the program) Chuck came off as a visionary with a fresh and promising new direction for artists as a whole. Chuck also pointed out that unlike Metallica; most artists did not own their own masters and that this new technology had provided a new way for artists to participate in the music industry.
Flav sounded better than ever before on joints like “41:19” and “What” , blending his own style of buffoonery and social commentary that that Wu-Tang , dubbed ‘The Drunken Style , unorthodox but deadly. Flav’s brilliant mind and musical genius shined brightly on “Poison”
Professor Griff who had already begun his return to the P.E. fold in ’96 on “Horizontal Heroin” off of Chuck’s solo debut “The Autobiography Of Mistachuck” closes “Poison” with a spoken word piece, a genre of which he is truly the master.
The original Public Enemy was back in full effect!!!
In an interview Chuck said the album was recorded in the Mountains and refused to elaborate any further than that. And although you can stay tuned to this column in the future for a literal explanation , from a creative point of view, the album has the feel of being laid down in a secluded and aloof environment away form the artistic webs of deceit that corporate America had created to leave artists spiritually impotent.
There may not be the fanfare there was during the “Nation” anniversary shows like there was in 2008.(Montreal Jazz Festival fans and media are still talking about their concert stop there) Rolling Stone , The Source and Billboard may not fill their pages about anecdotes concerning “Poison” or its impact. But when you study the nature of the artistic and business revolution that it’s responsible for, all that hoopla is kind of the opposite of what that album and its movement set out to do.
Anyway if you want to really want put a picture or a face to its impact and influence , just go check out your iTunes , Amazon or Yahoo account and the need to look further for “Poison’s contribution to the modern music industry will cease !
