Can't Stop Won't Stop (39 page)

After Sinclair left Ann Arbor, so did Adler, moving first to Boston. Fired from his DJ job at WBCN for playing Joe Tex, bored with his pop music critic job at the
Boston Herald
, Adler left for New York City in 1980 with a box of brand new rap records under his arm. He met Russell Simmons while doing a story on rap for
People
magazine and they became fast friends. When Adler approached Simmons to try to sell him an anti-Reagan rap intended for Kurtis Blow, Simmons demurred but hired Adler to do publicity for his acts. Adler immediately understood what set Simmons apart from the Black-owned indie pioneers like Enjoy and Sugar Hill. “He was never gonna just be a guy who operated within the confines of Black cultural institutions,” Adler says. “He was gonna take this Black culture and promote it everywhere.”

Simmons was twenty-six, an extroverted, infectious son of civil rights activists, less concerned with political parties than with being the center of the party. Even during his brief stint as warlord of a Queens chapter of the Seven Immortals, his thing had been bumrushing school dances and concerts. No social crowd ever gathered that Simmons could not work his way into the middle of. He had a sixth sense for the popular.

When Simmons met Rick Rubin, a twenty-one-year-old, gnomic Jewish long-hair with Bambaataa-sized tastes in music and a Sinclairian talent for fomenting white teen cultural rebellion, he found the perfect partner. Rubin had grown up on Long Island playing metal and punk, and became a rap devotee through the WBAU shows and Mr. Magic. When he moved to Manhattan to attend New York University, regular trips to Blue's “Wheels of Steel” night at Negril and The Roxy sealed his love for hip-hop.

Rubin had a hardcore aesthetic. “I think Rick helped radicalize Russell's rhetoric,” says Adler. “He used to say, ‘We're gonna pull the mainstream in our direction simply on the basis of the integrity of the records themselves. We are going to win with no compromise.' ”

Radio had long calcified into racialized formats—Album-Oriented Rock for whites, Urban Contemporary for Blacks. Rap was the most exciting new music to come along in years, but there was no room for it in either. MTV had burst onto the scene by championing rock and new wave, and all but excluding Black
artists. Only after Columbia reportedly threatened to boycott the young network in 1983 did MTV begin airing Michael Jackson videos. Winning meant desegregating radio and music video.

Not long after the ink dried on Def Jam's contract with Columbia in 1985, Rubin hired Bill Stephney as the label's first full-time staffer. Rubin was a Spectrum City fan. But perhaps more important was the fact that Stephney played guitar, was from Long Island, and dug AC/DC the way Rubin did Schoolly D. After graduating from Adelphi, Bill Stephney had done a short, influential stint at the College Music Journal, launching its “Beat Box” urban chart and mapping what would become a powerful network of rap radio shows. Stephney had also maintained his old white rock radio contacts, which later proved crucial to Def Jam's success.

Russell was a Black executive able to bridge Black and white tastes like no one since Berry Gordy. He hired Adler. Rick was a Jewish music producer who understood how profoundly Herc, Bam, and Flash's insights could reshape all of pop music. He hired Stephney. The staff for Rush and Def Jam was uniquely suited and highly motivated to pull off a racial crossover of historic proportions.

Bill Stephney convinced his friends at rock radio to stay on Run DMC's cover of Aerosmith's “Walk This Way,” even when the call-out research showed racist, “get the niggers off the air” feedback. He then succeeded in propelling the Beastie Boys onto rap radio, a feat no less difficult. By the end of 1986, their strategy had been perfectly executed. The Black group crossed over to white audiences with
Raising Hell
, then the white group crossed over to Black audiences with
Licensed to III
.

Forget busing, Adler thought. Hip-hop was offering a much more radical, much more successful voluntary desegregation plan. It was bleeding-edge music with vast social implications. “Rap reintegrated American culture,” Adler declared. Not only was hip-hop
not
a passing novelty, the ex-Sinclairite told journalists, it was culturally monumental, and Run DMC and the Beastie Boys were the new revolutionaries. “Young, smart, fast, hard,” he called them. “Lean and winning.”

Def Jam's epochal feat of pop integration unleashed a rap signing blitz. Majors realized that rap music was not a fad, and they were far behind the curve. Their Black music departments had become calcified, geared toward promoting
expensive R&B acts that appealed to an upwardly mobile audience quickly losing its trend-setting power. By the end of 1986, and continuing for the better part of a decade, majors moved in the other direction, trying to sign every rap act they could. It was one of those rare moments in pop music history where major-label disorientation left the door open for any visionary to walk through and do something radical.

At the same time, the teens weaned on Herc and Bam and Flash were growing up, and they felt they had something to say. They simply needed to figure out what that something was.

When Stephney left CMJ, he had written in his last column that he hoped to develop a group that was equal parts Run DMC and The Clash. He wanted to be a part of making the rap
Sandinista!
Back in Hempstead, at 510 South Franklin, he, Hank, and Chuck were at a crossroads. If they were going to do something, Hank says, “We had to create our own myth for ourselves.”

But while their homies from Hollis were taking over the world, Spectrum City had run out of steam. Chuck was about to turn twenty-six and had little intention of remaining a rapper. Rick Rubin was still pestering Chuck's mother with phone calls. Chuck was thinking, “Yo I need to make some radical moves. And that's not radical enough.” He wanted to get a job as a commercial radio personality.

Rubin joked that if Stephney couldn't get his best friend signed to Def Jam, he would have to be fired. So Bill offered Chuck and Hank a meeting with Rubin. The two brought in a four-song demo which included “Public Enemy #1,” “The Return of Public Enemy” (which would become “Miuzi Weighs a Ton”), “Sophisticated Bitch,” and “You're Gonna Get Yours.” Rubin immediately offered Chuck an album deal. “I was like, well I'm not going to go in there by myself,” Chuck says. After he negotiated to include Flavor Flav and Hank, the deal was done, and he set about finding a place for the entire crew.

As he had done with “Tales of the Skind,” he created alter-egos for each of them. Richard Griffin took the name “Professor Griff” and the title that Eldridge Cleaver had held in the Black Panthers, “Minister of Information.” Unity Force, the Spectrum City's security team run by Griffin, were renamed the Security of the First World (S1Ws). Hank assembled the musical team, starting with his
brother Keith, also known as “Wizard K-Jee.” Army fatigue-wearing Eric “Vietnam” Sadler—like Stephney and Flavor Flav—was a veteran of the Long Island funk cover-band scene and was learning to program drums and synthesizers. Spectrum City DJ Norman Rogers became “Terminator X.” Paul Shabazz and the DJ for the Kings of Pressure, Johnny “Juice” Rosado, also made key contributions. Hank's team became known as the Bomb Squad.

Most important, Chuck, Hank and Bill had to come up with a concept for the crew. Spectrum City was done. But they had yet to come up with a new name and concept.

Bill's dream was for the group to make the cover of the
Rolling Stone
. “Let's make every track political,” he said. “Statements, manifestoes, the whole nine.” Hank worried that kind of approach might lose them credibility with their core audience. He says, “Everyone making Hip-Hop wasn't a thug, everybody wasn't about being stupid.” But, he adds, “we found that people were really against the political aspects of the music. That wasn't a slam dunk.”

Characteristically, Chuck was somewhere in between. He wanted to write rhymes that were more explicit, but he says, “It was impossible to put that type of shit in your rhymes. It was like, you better rock the fucking crowd. You could throw in one line or two, like ‘Reagan is bullshit.' Motherfuckers be like, ‘Yeah, okay.' ”

Then there was the crazy DJ MC Flavor, whom Hank had renamed Flavor Flav. Both Hank and Chuck wanted Flav to round out the crew, be the MC yin to Chuck's yang. Bill objected. “I wanted the group to be so serious, I didn't want Flavor in the group. Flavor was like a comic cut-up, so my thing was, ‘Here we are trying to do some serious shit, how are we gonna fit this guy in?' ” he says. “They were completely right. With Chuck being serious, with the stentorian tones, you needed a break, you needed someone to balance that or else it would have been too much.”

One night while they were recording
Yo! Bum Rush the Show,
Bill returned from the Def Jam offices to 510 South Franklin. On a bulletin board, Hank had written the crew's new name: “Public Enemy.” Stephney smiled. The name perfectly fit their underdog love and their developing politics. He recalls thinking, “Okay, I can spin this. We're all public enemies. Howard Beach. Bernhard Goetz. Michael Stewart. The Black man is definitely the public enemy.”

A generation after COINTELPRO, Black radicalism had gone underground. Chuck's striking logo for Public Enemy—a silhouette of a young black man in a gunsight—suggested exactly why. But Public Enemy and the other crew that most represented the bumrush aesthetic, Boogie Down Productions, used their album covers to depict the return of the black radical.

P.E.'s cover for
Yo! Bum Rush the Show
and B.D.P.'s cover for
Criminal Minded
depicted the crews in dim-palled basements, readying themselves to bring black militancy back into the high noon of the Reagan day. Scott La Rock and KRS-1 were bunkered down in the Bronx with handguns, ammo belt, grenade, and brick cell phone. Whether or not they intended to, they recalled southern revolutionary Robert F. Williams's bracing 1962 Black power manifesto,
Negroes with Guns
.

In 1959, Williams, an integrationist who supported armed self-defense, was thrown out of the NAACP. But his ideas helped theorize the shift from Civil Rights nonviolence to Black Power confrontation. In 1967, Huey Newton set Williams's concept in motion, using a California law that allowed individuals to carry loaded firearms in public. His Black Panther Party began brandishing rifles at rallies in the parks and streets of Oakland. When a white legislator tried to overturn the law, the Panthers stormed into the California State Capitol and national consciousness.

Those days had been long since eclipsed by counterrevolution and crack. But Public Enemy tapped back into that urgent theatricality when they called themselves “the Black Panthers of rap.” On the shadowy basement shot for the cover of
Yo! Bum rush The Show
, Chuck D was the rightstarter/”riot starter,” the only one bathed in Muslim white. Professor Griff looked in from the right in a red beret. Flavor Flav leaned his hand forward as if out of DONDI's
Children of the Grave
burner to consecrate the wax. Another black hand reached down from the corner to press the turntable's Start button to begin the revolution. Across the bottom ran the punchline, perfectly pitched and in repetition:
THE GOVERNMENT'S RESPONSIBLE . . . THE GOVERNMENT'S RESPONSIBLE . . . THE GOVERNMENT'S RESPONSIBLE
. . .

Old school rappers—and most of the new schoolers, for that matter—invited comparison with entertainers like Cab Calloway, Pigmeat Markham, Rufus
Thomas, Slim Gaillard. But Public Enemy and Boogie Down Productions pointed back to the voices of Black radicalism, heard on the albums of the Watts Prophets, the Last Poets, H. Rap Brown, and Gil Scott-Heron. While the new political radicals were out in the streets and on the campuses fighting apartheid and racism, Public Enemy and Boogie Down Productions repped the new cultural radical vanguard. Preparing to emerge from the darkness, they demanded to be heard as the expression of a new generation's definition of blackness.

The key issue of the ‘80s was representation. The political radicals saw overwhelming whiteness in institutions of power and fought for multiculturalism and diversity. The cultural radicals saw an ocean of negative images and tried to reverse the tide with their own visions.

From Fort Greene, a filmmaker named Spike Lee crashed through the gates of the movie industry with independently produced box-office hits,
She's Gotta Have It
and
School Daze
, unapologetic slices of Black life that refused to cater to
Superfly
blaxploitation cliches or Eddie Murphy crossover expectations. During the ‘70s, after the success of Melvin Van Peebles's breakthrough,
Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song
, Hollywood had co-opted and finally crushed Black indie filmmaking sensibilities. In the ‘80s, communities of color boycotted Hollywood for the “cultural insensitivity” of films like
Fort Apache: The Bronx
and
Year of the Dragon
. But with Lee's success, Black filmmakers—including Robert Townsend, Keenen Ivory Wayans, Charles Burnett, John Singleton, Warrington and Reginald Hudlin and Allen and Albert Hughes—again received cautious studio backing.

Like Spike Lee, Chuck and his crew were ready to storm the citadel. He says, “We were all gonna bumrush the business from a bunch of different angles, be it radio, journalism, records.” Chuck and Harry Allen, who had begun writing for the
Brooklyn City Sun
and
The Village Voice
, regarded mass media as inherently hostile to Black people. Allen, the “media assassin,” coined the term “hiphop activism” to describe how they could turn their culture into a weapon of resistance.