Photo: Matt Baron/Shutterstock Earlier this year, by all outward appearances, the landmark Long Island hip-hop group Public Enemy seemed to cease to exist, as front man Chuck D fired longtime sidekick Flavor Flav in a public spat over a planned performance at a rally for Vermont senator Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign in March.
For people asking what happened, I can kick someone out for two days. Here’s another thing: Flavor can give you 10 percent, but you can’t unhear him. Flavor’s 10 percent is someone else’s 50 percent. On “State of the Union,” produced by DJ Premier, you cannot unhear Flavor. Without Flavor, you don’t have a Public Enemy record like that. He should be acknowledged if he wants to come and do his percentage of the work. That’s all that was.
You always gotta be optimistic. You gotta fight for people. You gotta fight for rights. You can be optimistic and know you still have to keep fighting. Sometimes your lungs have to fight for breath. Sperm fights to find the egg in order for conception to take place. Fighting for survival is not something that’s outside the ordinary. You can’t be asleep and expect things to wash up on your shore and all of it be positive. I don’t think life works like that.
Always. In the new song “Toxic,” you ask, “Can a song save the world?” I’m curious what your answer to the question is. You left Def Jam in 1998 and then released There’s a Poison Going On the next year with a paid download option; you were one of the first major acts to do that. It was you, Prince, David Bowie, and Tom Petty who were talking up the possibilities of the internet as a distribution tool for artists. Was it annoying watching the music industry fall behind the internet in those years?
That’s usually the case. Things that start out as a tool end up as a toy. I’m sure Henry Ford, when he made the car, couldn’t foresee drag racing or doing figure eights in a parking lot, drunk driving and all that. He made the Model T to get a person from A to B economically in a horseless carriage. That happens with all technologies. You have generations that grow up with technologies that look at them a different way than the pioneering thought.
MrChuckD Much Respect!
MrChuckD Chuck D is as establishment as it gets. Always has been. Poseur.
MrChuckD
MrChuckD I paid more income taxes than realDonaldTrump