'Racism when not addressed will trickle down the line and contaminate' The Public Enemy rabble-rouser talks about riling the white establishment and how he never intended to pick up a mic 🎙️ shaun_curran interviews MrChuckD
After his father died in 2015, Chuck D started to do something he’d hardly done for 30 years: draw, paint, illustrate. “I began to get into my art as a therapeutic thing,” he says. Whenever he took meditative excursions to help with grief – “I did ayahuasca to try to figure out if my dad’s soul was OK” – he found himself sketching whatever was on his mind. “I delve into art as being a saving grace and extension of my inner self. Out of one visit I came back with 30,000 pieces.
But before Carlton Douglas Ridenhour became Chuck D, he was an aspiring artist, captivated by the hip hop aesthetic. At high school he would regularly compete in art contests; he studied graphic design at Delphi University with the ambition of illustrating rap album covers and marketing material. He never envisioned a career as an MC.
Chuck was 26 when Public Enemy started in 1985, giving him a presence, and perspective, beyond his younger peers .What came first, his inherent loudness, or a need to make himself heard? “I think both came at the same time. Because I definitely was gonna say what I had to say. I come from a time in the 60s where the truth was outspoken.”
“Because it started out as a music genre that people were foreign to. That’s what [the documentary] comes to answering – here’s all the extensions that make us see the culture as a human-being connector.” Public Enemy’s incendiary UK tour in 1987 announced their arrival – and that of the nascent hip hop genre – to the world. “And I knew that we were going to brag about black life, coming to these shores talking from a black perspective and angle. We call it the British invasion.”
“Collectives in groups is when is at its best,” he says. “Because it was performance art, and it made performance art so panoramic. Usually, you had DJs, MCs, dancers breaking, graffiti and art culture. It was an experience. And it’s hard for one person to create an experience musically and culturally.”
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