Issue Icons
Chuck D
By Caleb NeelonIllustration By Shepard Fairey and Ernesto Yerena
Public Enemy scared the living shit out of America in the late 1980s, thanks in large part to its leader, Chuck D. The asides of court jester Flavor Flav only made Chuck’s barked orders and admonitions more fearsome. Though he conceived the group’s name partly as a representation of the persecution and criminalization of the Black community, Chuck also embodied the outlaw vigilante who battled his government while protecting his people. Onstage, he made it clear that he would be the one cracking the whip.
Chuck D was born Carlton Ridenhour in 1960. He started rapping in the early ‘80s while studying graphic design and DJing on campus radio at Adelphi University on Long Island. One of his rhymes, “Public Enemy No. 1”, appeared on a compilation and caught the ear of Rick Rubin, who signed the fearsome wordsmith to his fledgling Def Jam label in 1986. Chuck assembled a band that included Flavor Flav, Terminator X, and the Bomb Squad production crew, along with the Uzi-wielding martial artists known as S1W, part security team and part backup dance troupe. With a unique visual identity and live show, Public Enemy brought theater to hip-hop. As Chuck explains, “Our thought process was that the live element was an organic part of earning your niche, and sonically we were different, so our performance needed to be different.”
When Public Enemy dropped their revolutionary It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, they were all in their late 20s, a contrast to their peers who were barely out of their teens. Flavor Flav may have acted the clown, but nobody in the group was a kid. They set the revolutionary agenda for a generation, living up to Chuck D’s claim that hip-hop was “the Black CNN” when Spike Lee featured their single “Fight The Power” (later included on 1990’s Fear of a Black Planet) in Do The Right Thing, his 1989 portrayal of Brooklyn race conflicts.
It’s hard not to conflate Public Enemy’s artistic and commercial success with the fulfillment of the social platform they set out, and Chuck continues to be assigned a set of rather unfair expectations. He responds by looking inward. “You have to set your own goals and standards,” he asserts. “My parents always told me to pay attention to what I was doing and not care about what everyone else was doing or thinking about what I did. You make your own standards, and you gotta stick with that, even when it gets to be very unpopular.”
One of those standards is to grow and mature beyond what Chuck calls the “extended teenagers” of much of hip-hop. “You have to be able to navigate the generations,” he explains. “If you still do the same things at 35 that you did when you were 19, that’s not forward movement.” His standard is different when it comes to making music, however. “As far as being in a band goes, with music, that’s different: at 40, 50, or 60 years old, music isn’t connected to any one age.” Always looking to stay ahead of the times, Public Enemy embraced the digital music format early on, releasing 1999’s There’s a Poison Goin’ On via the Internet before it was available in stores.
Today, Chuck moves in a hundred different directions. He creates content for Public Enemy, works with new artists, and fine-tunes his record label. He believes the challenge of staying creative lies in keeping a clear schedule. “There are things I can’t be bothered with and can’t take care of, and in a way the woodshedding process is about getting rid of those things.”
So where does Chuck find that creative peace? “Long drives in a rental car in the middle of the country, long stretches of road – it’s therapeutic. I give talks at dozens of colleges and universities each year, and usually it’s on the drive there to whatever small town the college may be in where I can be alone and with my thoughts.”