May 24, 2009
farrakhan’s a prophet and i think you ought to listen (chapter one excerpt)
sugarhigh! will be posting excerpts from this book over the next several months
Numerous Five Percenter and Nation of Islam-influenced emcees circulated through hip-hop in the eighties and after. What bears most directly on our story is not so much that such figures existed, or played a role in hip-hop’s development, but rather their increasing salience over the second half of the decade — the fact that there was a desire, a market for such representations and polemics. This desire was by any measure encompassing. By the end of the eighties, hip-hop style meant Afrocentric commitments, fashions, and rhetoric — and, crucially, this style was neither apolitical nor vacantly “positive” but embraced a consciously confrontational politics. Public Enemy was both producer and product of this sea-change, more intimately bound up in its workings than any of its cohort. Their intensity approached the millenarian: “Countdown to Armageddon, ’88 you wait.” By 1989, Chuck could claim with considerable authority, “Public Enemy is the official voice of the rap world, Black youth, oppressed youth and yes, many white youth in the western world.” At the end of the year, leading pop music critic Robert Christgau saw them as almost pure cause, and was specific about the effects wrought: “they have actually instigated a species of leftish Afrocentrism among kids who three years ago thought gold chains were dope.”
Public Enemy achieved this reputation in part because of their insistence in articulating the new politics as a historical development — as a supercession of rap’s early ethos, that of partying and self-celebrating proclamations (self-empowerment as contentless desire, one might say). Their supercession preserved the earlier tradition within itself, even while turning it upside down. The most well-known example is the inversion of a Beastie Boys title from 1986, “"(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (to Party!)"; it returns as Nation of Millions’ closing track “Party For Your Right To Fight.” “Bring The Noise” at once celebrates Run-DMC’s formative role in the genre (“Run-DMC first said a deejay could be a band”) and announces why their spirit is no longer adequate to the situation. This is again achieved through inversion of source lyrics: “Never badder than bad 'cause the brother is madder than mad.”
Inversion is a suggestive effect, as if the restructuring of the tradition toward anger and conflict was a way of setting hip-hop on its feet so as to address actual conditions. This political mode of confrontation is not identical to Black Nationalist aspirations, but is consistently aligned with them. The same song from Nation of Millions hazards the cry of what should rightly follow rap’s formative “Old School” years: “Farrakhan’s a prophet and I think you ought to listen to — what he can say to you, what you ought to do.”
Such progressions, keeping faith with rap’s roots while growing toward the most radical social engagements, made Public Enemy both the figures and figureheads par excellence for hip-hop’s political turn, as did the group’s deftness at addressing overlapping but varied audiences. This was achieved in part by the interplay of Chuck’s role as a prophet of rage and the more wayward, everyman charms of sideman Flavor Flav; and in part by the insistent scale-jumping from street scene to allegorical narrative to historical lesson and systemic analysis, all of which allowed the group, in one of its most well-known passages, to “rock the hard jams, treat it like a seminar — reach the bourgeois, and rock the boulevard.”
The couplet marks the time. It offers two pairs, and insists on the necessity of both: aesthetic success must accompany political content as a pedagogical necessity, and communication must cross lines of class, race, and geography to exceed subcultural status. This double synthesis, then, is the program for a political art. This is the measure of Public Enemy’s achievement, rather than articulacy or militancy as such. That is, their significance lies in their realization of an explicitly social-political, confrontational problematic in relation to an aesthetic form that expressed the same problematic otherwise: a total work that solicits engagements and generates affects in multiple ways.
Neither “realization” nor “total” here is meant to indicate a perfectly coherent program, much less a triumphal artificing of an ideological position. If the group was one day making nationalist demands, on another they were taking aim at economic structures while distancing themselves from the Nation’s theological strain; e.g. 1989’s “I follow the Nation because Minister Farrakhan and the Nation show us economic self-sufficiency in America and that's my sole use for this information.”