In the late ’80s and early ’90s, two super groups ushered in what’s commonly known as the golden age of rap: the Compton, Calif.-based N.W.A, and Public Enemy of Long Island, N.Y. That era is being revisited with the debut of the N.W.A biopic “Straight Outta Compton,” which grossed $56 million in its opening weekend.
The “Straight Outta Compton,” “Fear of a Black Planet” and “It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back” albums provided potent soundtracks to festering problems stemming from racial inequality, many of which could be traced back to segregation and housing discrimination of earlier decades that persisted still.
N.W.A’s “F_ Tha Police” was an anthem that awakened America to the notion that within black communities like Compton, the police were an occupying force — ever-present harassers and violators of civil rights. The flip side of the song was Public Enemy’s “911 is a Joke,” which illustrated the feeble consideration for black lives when emergency responders were called to those same communities and they took ages to arrive.
While N.W.A eventually disbanded as Ice Cube and Dr. Dre went on to enjoy enormous commercial success as solo acts, Public Enemy, while wildly popular and respected throughout the world, eschewed the mainstream limelight. Chuck D is best known as Public Enemy’s front man, but he and the Public Enemy producing team, the Bomb Squad, also mentored Ice Cube when he left N.W.A and recorded his first solo album, “Amerikkka’s Most Wanted.”
In July, Public Enemy released its 13th studio album, “Man Plans God Laughs.” The group continues to tour the world and Chuck D, now 55, works heavily with Harry Belafonte’s Sankofa Justice and Equity Fund. The Post spoke with the self-described raptivist by phone Saturday night. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Q: What was the idea behind “Man Plans God Laughs?”
A: The term came from when I did the voiceover for Dr. J’s documentary [“The Doctor”] and he said in the documentary when he had plans this brother tragically passed. That was the first time I ever heard the statement, and it resonated, and I decided to write, something that from my vantage point would pertain to that statement that fits the world of now. So, man plans, God laughs, right? No matter what you think . . . life goes on and the world still turns and the universe has its own story. The most we can do is plan anyway, but understand, be humbled by things greater than ourselves.
Q: You name check Black Lives Matter on [the track] “Earthizen.”
A: I went one step one step beyond. No lives matter. We don’t matter. A lot of times, when people hear “black lives matter,” you know, people are so outside of their selves. The United States citizenry always is outside of itself. They think they don’t pertain to having any involvement in the social conditions or in the systematic makeup of reducing us. People don’t feel like. . . they’re connected to the system, the kind of stuff that keeps people of color and minorities down. That’s like saying to the masses of the United States, if you want to say white America, y’all gotta step up and keep this machine from running so smooth to run over people. I mean look, we can talk about black lives matter. What about the brown people who are getting caught up in the shrapnel of the border between the United States and Mexico? Does that mean that we don’t give a f_? Or that’s not even an issue? So it’s beyond police brutality that might happen in Baltimore or Ferguson. It’s like, what’s out of wack that’s holding the system up when it does wrong? So that’s what that is, in a nutshell. No lives matter if we don’t.
Q: Do you feel like the focus of the movement is too narrow?
A: Well, the focus of the movement is self-defensive. You gotta get yourself together, and get yourself together with your own community before you can actually embrace the situations around. I just think there’s people that have a wider scope that can say “Yeah, that movement is a part of something that needs to be added all the way across the board.” Black folks are in more desperation in our quote unquote communities, which are plantations, more than ever. But we can’t look to the media to tell us who we are and how we are, when you’re looking at conditions every day. But you know, how many people are stuck in their gadgets? Take mass transit and see how many people have their heads stuck in their gadgets. What do they search on their gadgets for? Are they searching for connection or are they searching for definition? These are the questions that are not so easy to answer in August of 2015.
Once upon a time, a recording could actually set you free a little bit. But we’re in a multimedia participation age. It’s visual audio as opposed to audio-visual. It kind of takes the gamut. Can a record actually sway many people organically? “Man Plans God Laughs” was going to be an organic attempt. It’s an audio file. It actually resonates beyond the charts into an existence to sway people in 2015. That’s debatable. We had the release of “Straight Outta Compton” last night. It’s motion picture. It’s a film. It’s a movie. People are more apt to lean toward the film as a reality or a TV show as a reality even before the record. N.W.A is an actual group of recording artists, but that was in the ’90s and the late ’80s. Now, N.W.A’s story had to convey itself in a film in order to get that impact of who they are and what they did. Ice Cube understands that. Myself, we’re not in the area of films. We might be in area of the traditional. We’re artists and we’re a group coming out of a genre in its 28th year that traveled a hundred countries and has pretty much been our Johnny Appleseed.
If you look around at what we are as musicians doing concerts, conveying our message across audio files and some visual aspects, for the United States of America, who has built robots over the last 20 years, it might not be the top-rated format. More people responded to the TV show “Empire” [laughs] than anything out of the music business. And people sit down and sit they a_ in front of a TV show and take what’s delivered. And if they feel it’s relevant to what they already feel and know, then they’re going to stay stuck to the tube. We addressed that years ago.
Q: So we’re not going to see a Public Enemy movie at some point?
A: I don’t make movies. I can’t make that call.
Q: If someone approached you, would you be open to it?
A: I ain’t acting in it, and I ain’t writing the script. Where do I figure into Hollywood? . . . Where it might be involved with something I do, maybe a score, a new soundtrack.
Q: Have you seen “Straight Outta Compton?” What did you think?
A: Yeah, yeah, it was dope. I thought Ice Cube and F. Gary Gray conveyed a story that actually had to go through tragedy, drama, beef and just how these guys persevered when these guys were young to get to where they’re at now. I think that was clear. I thought that was a great job. At the core of it, it was a moral and a lesson.
. . . If you’re together and you don’t figure out how to stick together and do the right thing you’re going to drift and be part of the wrong thing. You’re bound to have a very quick demise, and your demise has nothing to do with how much money you’re making. Your demise could be losing grips on what you think is reality, so I think that was conveyed in the movie very well. Public Enemy and “Man Plans God Laughs” touches upon these things. Our plan was to make an album that’s left in 20 minutes, but we couldn’t do that. We wanted to make a Ramones-type punk album and songs actually being less than two minutes. We made an album with songs hovering less than three minutes because we feel less is more. I feel as an emcee who’s 55, it’s like that uncle sitting on the porch. I ain’t got a lot of words for you. Let a young person give you a lot of words and figure out themselves. I know myself. I think I set the standard as an elder emcee. Let the music ride underneath it. Say less, but very powerful. Be to the point and get the hell on out of there. That was the goal.
Q: What would you say the lesson was?
A: When young black people get together, beware of who you lay in bed with. Pretty much that was it. Understand N.W.A came together because people didn’t give anybody from outside New York a chance, but they had to come together. They came together because the music industry was in one particular city into itself. The only way N.W.A could come up was to become a group and a collective. We fast-forward to hip-hop and rap music today, and how many collectives do you have? Very few. The power of black music and the power of hip-hop, especially in the beginning, was groups and collective efforts, but it’s been reduced to one person. You wonder if this is a lawyer’s doing or corporate doing because they didn’t want all these n_-s in the same room screaming at ’em? It’s easier to neutralize one person than a group of them coming from all angles.
That’s been the coup d’etat of the corporate record industry over rap music and hip-hop. We name a whole bunch of individuals today — whether it’s Kanye West or Jay Z. We individualized an art form that came in as a collective. That’s been the biggest tragedy. So when it comes down to a group like Public Enemy, they just don’t know how to process it. When we look at processing ourselves, we’re looking at the Rolling Stones. We’re looking at the Beatles, or even black collectives — they don’t understand, like the O’Jays and the Isley Brothers. They’ve individualized black music. That’s been the biggest tragedy of black music. If you was in charge of your headline, Soraya, I would say make it “The biggest tragedy is that they got rid of black groups.”
Q: Do you think this is part of a larger trend in society to focus on the individual that’s being reflected in music?
A: Well, they did neutralize the black community down to individuals. You can always take out an individual, and if kill the head, the body will go. That’s the philosophy, ever since Marcus Garvey and beyond. Kill the head and the body shrivels, you know? It’s been a reflective game plan. People feel that the assassination of Malcolm X derailed the Nation of Islam for a long time and they feel like the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King derailed the movement of black folks and civil rights for awhile. COINTELPRO has been working heavy, especially in [Washington, D.C.,] the city you in.
I remember when Dr. King was shot, so I’m not going to backread it, you know what I’m saying? And I’m not going to ask somebody else for the fact when I was alive at that time. So if I can go back to remembering when the Rolling Stones came out with “Satisfaction,” and still make a record today that somebody like Kendrick Lamar can comment to, that’s a long stretch of time for an emcee. I take pride in being able to relate to 1964 and 2016 at the same time.
Q: Can you tell me about your involvement, and the Bomb Squad’s involvement, with “Amerikkka’s Most Wanted?”
A: Yeah, Ice Cube was leaving N.W.A. Me, as a person who had been touring with Ice Cube and had befriended N.W.A, was approached by Cube to say “Look, I can’t live. I can’t grow here. Not only am I being stagnant, creative-wise, but I haven’t even been accounted to for the things I’ve contributed to N.W.A getting to the level that it’s at and I don’t know my way up and out of here.” I tried to encourage him to stay with the group because I thought groups were powerful, but he couldn’t. It was impossible. So he came east, first got involved with us doing “Burn Hollywood Burn” on “Fear of a Black Planet” and then Hank Shocklee, myself, Eric V. and Keith Shocklee decided to take on Ice Cube and do “Amerikkka’s Most Wanted” with he and also Sir Jinx. It was a combination. It was more like mentoring. It wasn’t like producing him. He already had a sensibility of what to do. He learned under Dre and now he was doing his own thing. We was a rock for him to swim to, and we was also encouraging him like, “Dude, you have it inside you. You can do it.” And he did and never looked back. Ice Cube is one of those geniuses where he’s always perpetually creating and writing in his head. It was my job, initially to say “That’s cool. Just don’t repeat yourself twice and make sure you can back up what you say and you’ll be good.”
Q: You took some heat recently for some things you tweeted about Bill Cosby.
A: Yeah! I trended. I trended for the first time ever and it happened to be on the f_ing heels of Bill Cosby and I was outside the damn country. So, I’m tweeting on the toilet bowl, and people think I’m sitting in front of a desk. I’m finished doing a concert and going to the bathroom and sitting there tweeting. People think seriously that I was caught up into this whole emotional swirl. I think one thing about social media, you can’t detect a person’s state of mind and time and emotions off of it. It’s just Twitter with 140 characters.
I was basically just saying, in the short spaces that I had, that not only is it character assassination on Bill Cosby’s legacy, I just thought it was character association. They accused me of character association. So, I was just saying you’re going to wipe away everything he did in the past, and if it’s up in the present, you’re just going to take it away with one big swoop? Well, welcome to what they do to black history anyway. And it turned into this whole thing of thinking I’m defending the people that he so-called raped. Like, nah, either you can’t read exactly what I wrote or either I’m not good at writing exactly what you want to read on Twitter.
Yeah, the Bill Cosby thing is tragic. It’s tragic to know these things he’s been accused of. I think the thing that made it uncalled for is the drugging. It’s like, dude, that’s crazy, you know? If somebody wanted to say, well you know, everything that Bill Cosby had and was doing back then, every one of the women, they had orgies and no one’s going to admit to the orgy that they was in. All right. So then’s everything up with a tossed ball, right? No one said anything back then, saying, “Oh no, he’s so powerful.” F_ that. If you was raped, take him to f_ing jail, but it’s a whole bunch of things that went on in the ’70s that a lot of people don’t want to bring into the open. I think the thing that made it totally, totally uncalled for is the fact that he was drugging them and women realizing later on, “Yeah, I think I was drugged.” That’s the thing, as opposed to saying “Me and Bill got it on, he’s a f_ing idiot, we had sex and he f_ing didn’t even call a cab for me. F_ him.” You hear a lot of those stories. I think the drugging thing is what made the average person say “that’s dumb.” I didn’t support any of that. So people actually thought I was supporting that through Twitter, I’m like, well, you’re reading Twitter wrong.
I couldn’t get away with a conversation backing whatever Bill Cosby was doing. I wasn’t. I couldn’t even get away with that in my crib. My wife, a university professor, [would have been] handing my head back to me and s_ on a platter if I came wrong. I got daughters, grown daughters. Man, I couldn’t win with that even if I wanted to be sexist. But people don’t know you. The thing that got me is that I’m trending with this bulls_ like I care about Bill Cosby. I’m pretty sure I never, ever, ever would have got in a room with Bill Cosby. I wouldn’t have been the type — “Oh, let’s invite Chuck D and his people in” — nah. He wouldn’t have invited me in, so I’m not like that whole — Will Smith is more like Bill Cosby’s people, not me. They would have been like, “nah, he’s too rebellious.” I wasn’t part of the Hollywood club. I wasn’t part of the TV club. I’m a musician and I’m a rap artist that tries to further the genre instead of being defined as a bastard of music.
Q: Is there anything a person can do that’s so terrible that it warrants scrubbing them from society?
A: The best thing you can do is be on your best behavior and don’t get got by doing the wrong s_ at the wrong time at the wrong place, because the biggest news about yourself, especially if you’re in the realm where I’m coming from, is going to be the worst. I’ve had a principle of saying the best news for me is no f_ing news. No news is the best news. Which means what? You suffer economically because you don’t get the publicity that people have used in the music business or cultural business. That’s why I said even in the song, “Man Plans, God Laughs,” “bad news is bad news and the hood news is no good news,” meaning what? Anything you see coming out of the hood or people of color, it’s usually when you hear the most about us, it’s usually the worst s_ imaginable. It’s transferred over into TV shows, where they’ll advertise a show with people screaming at each other. And they’ll tell you, “Well, it’s not racial. It’s not racist because we have plenty of dysfunctional shows with white people screaming at each other.” And they start comparing you with Honey Boo Boo. The good black story can’t get green-lit.
Don’t believe the hype doesn’t mean don’t believe anything. It means you gotta weigh information. And you gotta challenge information. You’ve got to look at information with a well-rounded scope.
Q: The reason I keep coming back to this issue of legacy is because you know N.W.A. You worked with them, and one of the criticisms of “Straight Outta Compton” is that it erases Dr. Dre’s assault on Dee Barnes. It’s like it never happened.
A: Dee Barnes should have been covered in the movie?
Q: I don’t know. I don’t know if we can expect that when they [Dr. Dre and Ice Cube] made the movie.
A: Hell naw they ain’t gonna write that about themselves. Nobody is going to do that. And Dee Barnes is the best friend of mine, you know? You gotta ask Dee Barnes. Dee Barnes usually goes around and says “You know what? Beats by Dre? No, I was beat by Dre.” You know? And that was happening back in the day. You see when this movie came out Dre had to admit, “yeah, I did some stupid s_ in my past.” Yeah, you damn right you did. But, I think people should talk to Dee Barnes and not for her. Dee Barnes was left hanging because she can’t have a voice and what she thinks now. Give Dee Barnes an interview.
