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Almost 20 years have shot by since Q's Mark Cooper traveled to America to report on the shock waves caused by Public Enemy and NWA. Seems an apt time to salute these avatars of hip hop, so here's an excerpt...--Barney Hoskyns, Editorial Director, Rock's Backpages

Rain is streaming down in sheets on the Long Island suburb of Hempstead but, inside Public Enemy's headquarters, the group's leader Chuck D is just getting warmed up. While Public Enemy's producers Hank Shocklee and Eric Sadler work on backing tracks in the studio, mixing keyboard lines with samples from one of the 8,000 albums which line the walls, Chuck D is holding court in the office and talking up a storm.

A slight, cautiously friendly man who talks compulsively and without pausing, Chuck D has taken a lot of heat this year. During the summer, the anti-semitic slurs of Professor Griff, Public Enemy's erstwhile "Minister Of Information," brought a hail of criticism down upon the group, both from the Jewish Defense League and many former friends and associates--"If the Palestinians took up arms, went into Israel and killed all the Jews, it'd be alright because they shouldn't be there," Professor Griff told the Melody Maker in 1988. Chuck D responded by throwing up a smokescreen, claiming first to have sacked Griff and then to have disbanded Public Enemy. In fact, he merely vacillated and then reactivated the group, reinstating Griff in a supposedly gagged role.

Public Enemy have always cast themselves as the shock troops in rap's confrontation with white racist America but now Griff's remarks and Chuck D's indecision have smeared their own activities with a racist taint. CBS Records has already asked the group to change several words on their forthcoming single, "Welcome To The Terrordome," on the grounds that terms like "rab" and "nig" may offend.

Despite the increasing paranoia and self-pity of his lyrics, Chuck D remains an articulate "prophet of rage" in the memorable phrase from Public Enemy's last LP, It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back. The subject matter of the forthcoming LP, Fear Of A Black Planet, does not suggest compromise, crossover or back-pedaling.

"This album is intended to show up the Eurocentric point of view for what it is," says Chuck D. "In a white civilization, the product of a mixed relationship is considered black. Especially in this country. There's a law about it. Any black blood in you, you're black. Now you might feel that because you're white, all you want to do is reproduce more white children--you probably won't even think about it because you're programmed to follow a pattern, to stick to your kind. Yet your thinking is racial rather than humanist. If the world was to truly come together in peace and love, then you would have a mixed population, you wouldn't be maintaining a white power base like an exclusive club to keep blacks down and out. White supremacists believe that any mixing with black blood produces non-white children who can only contribute to the dwindling of the white race. Fear Of A Black Planet is about the fear that anybody not white is black and contaminating..."

Public Enemy's stance may remain the most militant in rap but they are no longer the most confrontational artists on the block. Southern California's NWA [N****z With Attitude] stole much of their thunder this summer with the gangster stance of their debut LP, Straight Outta Compton, and its incendiary raps like 'F**k The Police.' While Public Enemy combine their furious backing tracks with what purports to be a political program, NWA insist that they merely tell it like it is amidst the violent world of LA's black and Latin gangs.

"Public Enemy is more political and we're more street," explains NWA's prime rapper, Ice Cube. "We feel that the boy across the street who's 15, he don't care about the President, the Governor or the Mayor. The only people he sees in authority are the police. We deal with what's in your face; Public Enemy is more of an overview. The ministers and teachers in the black community don't deny that gang and drug problems exist but they don't want us to talk about it, they'd rather sweep it under the rug. They're basically into chastising the kids and we're not into being role models and telling people what to do. Why should we have to be the preachers and teachers of the community just because we rap? Why should we have a message? Why can't we just tell it like it is and leave it like that?"

Both Public Enemy and NWA are as adept at media manipulation and image construction as an ABC or a George Michael. The apocalyptic noise of their backing tracks and their fierce rhetoric suggests an America on the brink of racial war, even while much of their material deals with black-on-black violence in a country where murder is the leading cause of death amongst black males between 18 and 34 and where 94 per cent of black murders are the work of other blacks.

While NWA rage against the police and come on like gangsters boasting about their firepower and their indifference to death, Public Enemy look outward beyond the black community to the racism that continues to keep American blacks "in their place." "Fight The Power," their contribution to the soundtrack of Spike Lee's account of racial tension in New York, Do The Right Thing, was a summer hit which dramatized Lee's portrait of inevitable racial bloodshed. Lee's film gained added focus from the two murders which dominated the New York summer. In April, a white female jogger was raped and left for dead by a gang of blacks and Latinos in Central Park. Then, in August, a 16-year-old black youth, Yusuf Hawkins, ventured into the Italian-American suburb of Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, in order to buy a car, only to be shot dead by locals "defending" their neighborhood. The approach of winter and the election of the bland but black Mayor, David Dinkins, has cooled New York down but racial bitterness still hangs over the city like a cloud.

Yet while rap continues to give voice to the anger and grievances of black America as well as providing up to the minute party music, it is rapidly entering the mainstream pop charts and gaining a central role in youth culture, black and white. Ten years ago, the Sugar Hill Gang scored the first rap hit with "Rapper's Delight," a record which remains something of a novelty take on the culture emerging from the sounds systems of Brooklyn and the Bronx. Nowadays, the Billboard pop charts are full of rap artists with around 10 rap albums in a recent Top 100 pop chart and another seven or so records featuring artists like Bobby Brown and Neneh Cherry who mix song with rap in a fusion that has been a pop commonplace this year. Most of these rap albums are released by major labels which have invested heavily in rap in the past few years, spurred on by the success of the Def Jam/CBS collaboration launched with the Beastie Boys and LL Cool J in 1986.

Until the mid '80s, rap remained an independent music but increasingly those indie labels have become hip hop A&R arms for major record companies who acknowledge their ignorance of a music that remains wedded to the street. Warners has Cold Chillin', Atlantic, First Priority, MCA, Uptown and RCA has its alliance with Jive. Prior to these signings, Kurtis Blow was the only rap artist affiliated to a major label. Nowadays, even Motown is signing rap artists. Indeed several of rap's original champions are currently worried that the majors' current signing spree may result in a glut of rap releases that could swamp its emerging mass market.

While the majors have moved heavily into rap, radio, traditionally music's most powerful marketing tool, has remained strangely deaf to its appeal. Black radio continues to virtually ignore rap in its pursuit of advertisers who prefer to court older female listeners rather than teenagers. All-rap stations like LA's KDAY are the exceptions that prove the rule. Meanwhile most black stations, if they feature rap at all, restrict it to evening or weekend shows. Many rap artists who have scored Top 40 hits in the past couple of years have done so without black radio but with the help of Top 40 pop stations which play records like Salt-N-Pepa's "Push It" or Young MC's "Bust A Move' without waiting for them to cross over from "urban" radio.

As Chuck D has pointed out, rap is essentially a noise music to be played loud on cassettes in cars, Walkmans and ghettoblasters. "Hard" rap artists such as NWA and their protégés the DOC continue to hit the charts straight from the street with little media exposure, gathering an audience by word of mouth. While early package tours led by such rappers as Run-DMC did much to establish rap on a national basis, the media attention resulting from incidents--like that at Long Beach Arena in 1986 where an outbreak of gang violence resulted in injury to 41 fans--appears to have somewhat slowed live business this summer, despite some powerful packages featuring LL Cool J, NWA and De La Soul.

If rap is now the bush telegraph of the young urban black experience, what Chuck D calls "black America's TV station," it is because rap remains black America's most direct and least censored form of expression. "Rap gives black people a language," argues the mouth of Public Enemy. "When I was growing up, I didn't know how a black person in Los Angeles was living: the news wouldn't tell you, a sitcom wouldn't tell you. It was like a blackout. With rap, you can just listen to someone like Too Short and picture where he's coming from."

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