Thin Line Between Law and Rape

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Public Enemy, "Thin Line Between Law and Rape" (download until 2/2/09), from "Muse Sick-N-Hour Mess Age."

There are few heroes that mean as much to me as Chuck D. I don't have many heroes, really heroes as such. But Chuck always sets my heart aflitter. I was of precisely that age when Public Enemy hit where I was ready for it. 1988, Sophomore year of liberal arts college, ex-prep school malcontent, PE releases “It Takes a Nation...” and I'm done for. To make the point more clearly with another example, one of my high school buddies, then at Yale, described to me his experience in the summer of '89, back from Connecticut, “Fight the Power” just out as a single, driving in his dad's convertible around Mt. Soledad in La Jolla, blasting PE, thinking to himself, “this has all got to come DOWN!” True story, and one of Chuck's major achievements. Chuck never aimed his message at white people, but there are a lot of white people in this country who made choices in their lives for the better because his music radicalized them to a greater or lesser extent.

I think I may have made this point before, or maybe I'm recalling a conversation I've had in the recent past, but while I appreciate the mp3 file, and recognize some real benefits of this new mode of distribution, I'm not sure the way we access music in this age of the internet produces the kind of social convergence I remember from 1988 and 1989. My relic friends from the 60's endlessly discuss, wistfully but with some real enthusiasm, what it was like waiting for the next Beatles or Dylan record. What would they spring on us next? Rubber Soul came out, everybody talked about it with each other. Highway 61, everybody asked what the hell he meant, etc.

By the time I came of age this type of social convergence was lessened partially because of the efforts of the industry to produce it. No longer seeking producers of good music, the industry sought blockbusters which everyone would buy. The records which would seem to appeal to the widest audience got the biggest push, which meant that the industry pushed the familiar rather than the new. The Beatles I imagine would have been a cult act in the 1980's rather than the top sellers, and Dylan would never have gotten a hearing. So Madonna was a big deal, and while she was trumped up to be something new there was nothing new about her music, which wasn't even hers. She stunk then and stinks now, we all know it.

Prince was the one who snuck through when I was in Jr. High and High School. I remember being completely cynical about Prince when he first hit, because my cousin from the midwest thought he was all that, and while I liked my cousin I didn't take her or anyone else's musical opinions too seriously unless they were into Coltrane. But when the pianist in my school's jazz combo told me that Prince was fantastic, I opened up my 14 year-old ears and heard it. I'd been into Kraftwerk for a few years, and here he had all the electronic innovation they did—I feel I can say that—while adding so much more to it. First thing I bought was the single for “When Doves Cry,” which came out before the “Purple Rain” soundtrack. I then checked out “1999.” So if you think about the stretch I went through up until I graduated, it was the entire Golden Age of Prince: “1999,” “Purple Rain,” “Around the World in a Day,” “Parade,” and then capping it off my senior year with “Sign o' the Times.”

My little music buff crew would constantly go over the relative merits of each record as they came to us, and if you look at the list you can see why—each successive year—we had this intense sense of curiousity about what he would do next. The man always seemed to pull some amazing, unexpected ace from up his sleeve to set us talking, anticipating, praising—communicating. Then with “Sign o' the Times” he did everything, literally everything, and we were done for.

PE was the last artist who seemed to galvanize people—this is in my little world, I hasten to say—like Prince did, or Dylan, or the Beatles. Prince it should be said was never just someone who simply had mastered other people's forms and reproduced them. “1999” more than anything was the kind of sui generis creation that gave Prince license to genre hop. Prince was a hedgehog for one record, and then he became the world's greatest fox. PE, however, was the world's most radical hedgehog. I had not to that point and have not since to this day heard a record that was at once such a fully-conceived, integrated, cut-from-whole-cloth, break from the aesthetic past as “It Takes a Nation...” Maybe “Free Jazz,” but “It Takes a Nation...” sold a lot more. Chuck would quickly give credit and say he stood on the shoulders of giants, and he'd give credit to his collaborators, and sure, he should.

Now I start to get wistful, like my 60's relic friends who talk about how everyone was together and things were moving, and the world was changing. But, I swear it, that's how I felt with PE. And when “Fear of a Black Planet” was delayed, and there was the thing with Griff, you know, it produced fear that the whole thing was going to end, and that the machine would take away PE and we wouldn't have someone to look to. I know, I know, look in the mirror asshole, but I was just a kid, really.

“Fear of a Black Planet” came out and I think I was the only one in my group who didn't actually like it better than “It Takes a Nation,” but I respected it, and knew that it was a big deal. “Apocalypse '91” came out, and the sound had changed, it was more modest, but I was all in favor of that. Chuck had earned the right to just make a PE record without all the hype, and who could disagree with any record with “By the Time I Get to Arizona?”

Fast forward three years of gangster rap. I don't use the “a,” thank you. What follows is not my own point, not original, but it does bear repeating. The truth is, as any fool will tell you, that you can make more money if you have a bigger market. And in the US, the big market is white people. You'll make more money selling whatever to white people than any other single group, racially categorized.

This is the dialectic of Public Enemy. It was radical for Public Enemy not only to discuss things as they did and continue to do, but to do so so excellently that white people had to pay attention, and buy it. I've read in more than one place that PE sold more records to white people than black or any other color for that matter, in a dismissive way—white writers burnishing their hipster cred by questioning the authenticity of a black artist who went over with white people. What these idiots (and other words pop into mind) forget is that there are more white people in this country than any other racial group, so it's not surprising that more white people bought PE than black. It was the platter du jour: anyone with any sense had to have had “It Takes a Nation...” committed to memory. I did and do: ask my students. I can still bust out “Bring the Noise.”

Once—and this is the antithesis—you bring white people into the market, you bring white expectations. People buy most often to their expectations. So when N.W.A. hit, it's true, my friend from South Central that I went to see PE with when I was in college was into it, because it was his neighborhood. But to me the guys just sounded like, well...gangsters. Not the kind of people I'd want to associate with. Not really that pleasant. Rakim may have been a stickup kid, but he was no gangster. Gangsters aren't well, and we sensible people avoid them, with all due respect and courtesy. But who fit the expectations of white America in the first Bush era, Chuck D or Eazy E? The record companies knew that peddling the worst racist stereotypes of black people to white America was a much safer economic bet than betting on a black man speaking the truth. And so Chuck produced, like capitalism, his own gravediggers: white people buying rap trying to be hard. Chuck was hard, but gangsters were harder: they were stone killers. Gotta buy it from the safety of my suburb.

How did Chuck respond? He made his best record. Yes, I'll say it: “Muse Sick n Hour Mess Age” is the most well-conceived thing PE ever did, the broadest critique, with a different bag of musical tricks than any of the other records. Chuck had more tricks up his sleeve than Paul McCartney in 1967. Cue the ominous music and recall the Rolling Stone review: published before the record had come out, Rolling Stone gave the record one star out of five. Chuck was out of step with the times, Wenner's rotten rag claimed before anyone had a chance to hear it and decide for themselves. Rap had moved on, gotten harder, gotten gangster. The white kids, save a few die-hards like me, didn't buy the record. Sales were relatively sparse, and PE found itself soon without a label.

“Thin Line Between Law and Rape” is the case in point when I make the claim that “Muse Sick...” is Chuck's meisterwerk. This is not just a rap—just a rap...tell that to Rakim—but a weltanschauung. Legally deprived of the right to make the kind of sample collages he'd raised to high art with the Bomb Squad, we have this beautiful, simple, straight organ on top of the beat. The broader diaspora is present in its Jamaican form. And while, yes, Chuck did use the “B” word previously, and while his first apologies were, like all apologies, of limited value, he does right here. An apology is so many words, but calling white patriarchy by its true name is all right indeed.