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The Great AL Bell , Mistachuck. and Sir ISSAC
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| Issac Black Moses Hayes R.I.P. from Chuck D and Public Enemy |
Issac Hayes is my musical godfather ,simple as that. I've learned the great sense of humility from him as well. In growing up and seeing his records bought by the dozens in my household from aunts, uncles, and parents alike, it was like he was always there in the crib anyway. As a deejay eventually those same records found a way into my crates. The image of his bald pate and chains was ingrained inside my other siblings and I as we pretended to all play the music of the Theme to Shaft. Black Moses said the headlines, centerfolds, and Stax ads in the back of Jet magazine black folks portal to our own american culture. Well little did I know That i would befriend this 'hero on a first name basis, starting witnessing his estewment as a Chief in Ghana, Africa in 1993. I came readily prepared upon meeting him there, asking him to reminisce those STAX years both as songwriter and the artist.
Well the artist in him spawned the art in me. These songs typically make his Greatest Hit compilations, but then again they're the beginnings of my hip hop DJ roots as well as those childhood musical rompings with my brother and sister as well. The long versions have the ultimate breaks for the forming of the genre, Ikes Mood, Walk On By, The Look Of Love. His records have inadvertently spawned hip hop classics themselves like Hung Up On My Baby done up by the Geto Boys with 1991s 'Mind Playing Tricks On Me' and the break that led my Public Enemy production team to do 'Black Steel In The Hour Of Chaos' from Hyperbolisyllabicsesquedalymystic. Over the years I've participated and worked with Issac on a few occasions like appearing on each others latter day albums, and participating in STAX museum activities when called such as when he and David Porter pulled me to the side during the STAX Reunion concert and officially named me a 'soul man'. It gets no better than that, Im telling you. So now I want yall to get a taste of what I get everyday loaded in my Ipod, and lets take this trip to Soulsville with Black Moses.
The above is from the liner notes I wrote for ISSAC HAYES 2 CD set ....R.I.P.ISSAC HAYES
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Chuck On Tour Bus trying to be the Rolling Stones
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| UK Financial Times Tour Article With Public Enemy |
By Angus Batey
Published: August 9 2008 03:00 | Last updated: August 9 2008 03:00
Chuck D has a request: a champagne bucket full of ice. For most musicians preparing to go onstage at the Brixton Academy in south London, that might not raise eyebrows. But Public Enemy's front man is a politicised rebel, and his success predated rap's obsession with bling - diamond-encrusted Rolexes, ostentatious rims on the wheels of luxury cars, and Moet on ice.
Actually, the ice will serve a different purpose - to numb his left foot before some DIY surgery. For three years the rapper, businessman, lecturer, author and political activist has been battling onychocryptosis. That's an ingrown toenail to you and me. Last night, when Chuck was performing at the University of East Anglia, in Norwich, it kept him from moving around quite as much as he would have liked, but he managed. This afternoon, however, as he surveyed the vast expanse of the stage at the Brixton Academy, he realised that was not a performance he could repeat. "I was labourin' in Norwich," he says. "But this a gigantic stage! You can't not move around on a stage that big."
Scissors, a knife and bandages are procured from the venue's first-aid kit. The ice is delivered, and the door of the dressing room swings shut. The man about to perform a 20-year-old album called It Takes a Nation of Millions To Hold Us Back is not the sort to let a painful big toe constrain him.
This is Public Enemy's 61st tour, in the band's 21st year together, and they've sold out the Brixton Academy, which holds 4,900 people. In some respects, this demonstrates their staying power - and yet just three years ago, they failed to sell every ticket at the 2,100 person-capacity Forum in Kentish Town, north London. Their highest placing in the British singles chart came 10 years ago; their best-performing album peaked at number four in 1990. Chuck admits that the current tour's concept - they will perform their acknowledged classic album, Nation, in its entirety each night - has helped bring in both lapsed fans and curious newcomers. But it takes more to maintain longevity in the music business than any one piece of canny marketing.
As we all know - music listeners, producers, investors alike - these are hard times for the record industry. Global sales of recorded music in 2007 were at a 22-year low. CDs - which saved the industry back in 1985 - can now be copied with no loss of quality, free music downloading from the internet shows no signs of decreasing despite recent attempts by internet service providers and record companies to stem the flow, and CD give-aways by magazines and newspapers have helped undermine recorded music's perceived value.
But as the lines outside the Brixton Academy suggest, fans haven't stopped paying for music; they're just spending in different ways - and the principal beneficiary seems to be the live music business. The vast number and variety of rock festivals and outdoor gigs taking place in the UK, and a rise in average ticket prices, suggest a business in rude health. Record companies are jumping in on the action, signing new artists to "360-degree" deals, where the labels take a cut of live income, merchandising and other areas traditionally the preserve of the musician. Live music promoters are also changing the way they operate, with the company Live Nation adding the South American superstar Shakira and Canadian rock band Nickelback to the previously announced captures of Madonna and the Glastonbury-headlining rapper Jay-Z. These multi-million-dollar long-term deals give the company the rights to distribute the musicians' recorded music as well as to book their tours.
And yet Public Enemy are unlikely to interest the likes of Live Nation: the band's margins are too small. Nor are they going to sign on to a 360-deal: they would simply be giving away money that they can presently keep for themselves. How, then, to make it in this new terrain? Chuck D thinks he has a business plan: minimise expenditure, maximise income and synchronise everything around the core brand. Unfortunately, it's not quite as easy as it sounds.
The day before Brixton, in a room backstage in Norwich, the 15-strong Public Enemy team are preparing for their show. Chuck D - born Carlton Ridenhour, in 1960 - is one of nine performers. The others include William "Flavor Flav" Drayton, 17 months Chuck's senior; a DJ; three members of their security guard-cum-dance troupe, the S1Ws (or Security of the First World); and backing musicians known as The Banned. The other half-dozen people occupy supporting roles: management, personal security, operation of the merchandise stall. It is about as lean a unit as can be, but it's still expensive to run.
Getting the group from the US to the UK is probably the single largest expense, but in-country costs - transportation, food and board - add up quickly, too, and help shape the itinerary. A show at a venue such as the Academy will bring in a healthy fee, but the gigs Public Enemy play before and after that - Norwich, then at the Junction in Cambridge - have capacities closer to 1,000, and aren't nearly as lucrative. "Typically, two or three shows are really paying for the whole tour, and the other shows are really just fill-ins to keep the band working each night," says Greg Johnson, who manages the touring side of Public Enemy's business, as well as Flavor Flav's career outside the group.
It would perhaps make sense, then, for the band to undertake extensive tours and to return frequently to key markets - but there are limits to how sustainable such an approach may be. Chuck recalls that a few years ago they made the mistake of playing Bristol twice in a six-month span: "The most that you're gonna get out of that is, play to anybody who didn't come to the first show."
No such mistakes this time round, says Johnson: they won't be returning to Britain for two years or so, "just to make sure we don't oversaturate the market and we keep demand high".
Public Enemy are one of the most-travelled bands working today; Johnson estimates they will be on the road for three or four relatively short bursts during a typical year. The group do not pay retainers or year-round salaries, so financial stability depends on individuals developing their own projects outside the group.
Since 1991, Chuck has been a regular on the US college lecture circuit, and his activities outside Public Enemy today include running a slew of websites, broadcasting a regular radio show, and running a pioneering online record label, Slamjamz.com. Flavor has developed a bizarre parallel career as a reality TV star with a successful series on the MTV-owned channel VH1. The group's DJ, DJ Lord, plays club and radio dates, and one of the S1Ws, James Bomb, has instigated a Public Enemy comic book which is on the verge of securing a potentially money-spinning link-up with DC's Batman. The members of The Banned are all session musicians while, as Johnson explains, "Some individuals in the group are doing well in real estate, construction and home renovation, and the S1Ws have a security consulting business." Only such a complex confluence of diverse revenue streams can keep the band afloat.
Perhaps the group's track record in the music industry is instructive. Public Enemy's initial contract with Sony-owned Def Jam records ended in 1998. Outside the Junction in Cambridge, over a microwaved plate of fish and rice in the tour bus, Chuck reveals that the band turned down a million-dollar advance when they decided not to re-sign with Def Jam. "In order for me to build something, I had to leave," he says. "They wanted to keep us around, but we would have been a token. And the advance would have been paid for with accountability, with them telling us how to spend it."
Chuck had the prescience to appreciate how the interactivity of the web could help his band and his businesses. He had already fought with Def Jam over making music available in the digital MP3 format. After the label stepped in to block free online distribution of a remix project, PE recorded a song about the spat called "Swindler's Lust", and Chuck took to referring in his blogs to the then Def Jam executives Russell Simmons and Lyor Cohen as "Hustler Scrimmons" and "Liar Conman".
His first independent move was to sell the band's 1999 album There's a Poison Goin' On through PE's website. "Another thing publicenemy.com did for us was allow us to cement relationships worldwide with promoters," Chuck explains. "Before, they weren't necessarily able to get in touch with us."
Of course, the band could not have begun life in the online environment at a financially sustainable level had it not been for what Chuck terms their "name equity". The band's political views and Chuck's quotability and outspokenness have helped the cause, too. Today, they do not need the marketing muscle of a major label: instead, when they tour or release CDs in the UK, they hire an independent British publicist who has been working with them for nine years, who secures editorial coverage that would cost huge sums if they had to buy it as advertising space.
Chuck still stands for the values and attitudes espoused at the group's height - "Do I still believe in reparations [for slavery]?" he asks, slightly incredulously. "Hell yeah! Can we say that in the Financial Times?" - and still holds out against having tours sponsored by alcohol or tobacco companies, as it implies his endorsement of products he does not use. These positions help maintain the unusual level of media interest in a band a long way past their commercial prime: on the days of the shows I attend, almost 30 interviews are scheduled - mainly with Chuck - with outlets ranging from a Cambridge student newspaper to the website of The Daily Telegraph; from three BBC digital radio shows to a four-minute segment on Channel Four News.
Public Enemy seem to have found a way to make the current realities of life in the music business work for them: but as a long-term model, it has its limits.
"There's definitely a concern," says Johnson. "When the economy is not doing so well, your market for live performance is limited to those individuals who are not necessarily so sensitive to economic change."
The other big question is less an economic and more a human one. Sales of an artist's back catalogue have traditionally served in lieu of a pension for rock musicians of advancing years; with that particular well running dry, touring may take up some of the slack, but not everyone is going to be happy about gigging into their seventies. And while the superstar likes of The Police, The Eagles or Led Zeppelin could play a string of shows that would generate enough money to set them up for a comfortable dotage, the majority of artists may have to keep gigging until they drop.
"When Chuck introduces Flavor on stage, he says he's 'the world's oldest teenager'," says Johnson. Indeed, as if emphasising the point, Flavor, Johnson and a few others leave Chuck on the bus doing interviews in Cambridge and head to a nearby bowling alley for an hour. "These guys are in great shape," Johnson continues. "Flav can do this for quite some time, I'm sure. But Chuck, on the other hand, is probably gonna say, 'Hey, enough is enough.'"
Retirement from live work is not on Chuck's agenda, and it is conceivable that by the time it is, the lecture circuit, radio work and writing will bring in enough to see him through old age. He has an indomitable public persona, but it is not just his bad toe that causes him to harbour a few doubts about his continued aptitude for performance. "I'm always a person who wants to beat expectations, though I wouldn't mind just living up to them," he grins, getting to the heart of what touring is all about. "You never fully understand the circuitry in your head that makes you do what you do anyway - so at any given moment you could lose it. The whole key to live performance is exactly that - it's a performance. You have to do the songs, or they do you.
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Takes A Nation
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| PE-BombSquad Rules Pitchfork Fest in Chicago |
It took a field of hipsters to hold back reality t.v.’s favorite half of Public Enemy last night in Chicago’s Union Park, as Chuck D shot the gun on Pitchfork’s third effort in the festival realm with the opening diatribes of hip-hop’s seminal album, It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back, sans his counterpart.
Chuck D upon Flavor’s belated entrance: “Where the fuck were you on “Bring The Noise?”
Flavor Fav: “I don’t know Chuck, I was with the family.”
Apparently he was talking about his actual family, of which he helped set up shop back stage. His godson would later grace the platform and stare blankly as the duo fought the power. But at the moment, the sentiment quickly lost value as track by track of their twenty-year-old album deployed via their production team, The Bomb Squad. And politically-empowered ass shaking ensued.
If you aren’t hip to the London-based promoters All Tomorrow’s Parties series “Don’t Look Back,” in which fans are to precisely do just that in honor of full LPs that master the art of time and organization, Pfork Day One would baffle the mp3 mind.
Public Enemy were given closing honors, albeit marred by Flavor Fav’s self-promotion for his new season of Flavor Of Love, in which a sea of horn-rimmed-glassed music purists attacked with boos. Though it spurred the best comeback I’ve heard since grade school (“For all you mother fuckers boo-ing: What are you, ghosts or something?”) followed by an equally volatile performance of “Don’t Believe The Hype,” Flavor introducing it with a tale of a New York DJ trashing the PE name with an on air one-liner, “No more music by these suckers.”
Of course Chuck and Flavor would spit many more diatribe catchphrases, capped by a “Fuck George Bush,” a peace sign emblazoned “Fight The Power That Be,” and finally, “Only You Have The Power To Give Peace.”
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PEs Press Conference Better Than Many Rap Shows
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| Public Enemy Press Conference Montreal Jazz Festival |
Well, whaddya know? These guys have something to say. It's always been clear that Chuck D is articulate and opinionated but Flava Flav usually just provides a bit of flava. Instead he held court, directing the press conference, making smart remarks and even talking American politics.
"McCain's the name of a potato company. McCain can't do nothing for me but make french fries."
Chuck D predicted that the U.S. presidential race is going to be "the world's biggest reality TV show in the next six months. You gonna see some sh*t you ain't never seen before." And the two proved themselves to know a fair bit about Canada and Montreal, dropping names like Molson, McGill, Much Music.
When called to task on Public Enemy going commerical, Chuck D asked, "Commercial?! What you talking 'bout commercial? Commercial how? I drove my 1997 Acura up here to Canada -I ain't driving no fancy, brand new car. Nobody gives me sh*t. No, we ain't commercial one bit."
One journalist asked what their music had to do with jazz. Flav answered, "Jazz is the root of all modern music -hip-hop, rock, rap," then added, "and ain't no one looks so much like Miles Davis as me."
Chuck D said, "You could be Miles Davis' son for real."
The fellas of Public Enemy are "looking forward to banging Montreal, as we always do." Word is they're going to bang out the entirety of their landmark 1988 album, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, to mark its 20th Anniversary.
Chuck D put it best: "Public Enemy interviews are better than most rappers' shows." As much as I enjoyed the press conference, my money is still on the show.
-Natasha Aimée Hall
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Flav, Chuck and Stripped Down Enemy Bring....
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| PE Rips Montreal JazzFest In Its 21st Year. |
Earlier in the day, the group gave a press conference about their upcoming performance. It has been said—most often by the group—that Public Enemy's press conferences are better than most other rappers' shows. A truer statement has never been made: Chuck D was insightful and belligerent, Flavor Flav was ever the hypeman and subjects as disparate as jazz history, oil, American politics and family vacations were touched upon. Much of what Chuck D said during the press conference was repeated to the capacity Metropolis crowd, befitting an MC who has always spoken about far more than himself. But Public Enemy has not survived for over 20 years purely on political awareness; to quote their lyrics, they “rock bells.”
In 1988 the group released It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, an album whose importance to the hiphop genre can be compared to that of Miles Smiles and jazz, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and rock and Reign in Blood and metal. To celebrate the china anniversary of the record, the group presented it live in its entirety, an ambitious and marvelous undertaking. The group's guitarist and bassist were unavailable as was spokesperson Professor Griff so Chuck D, Flavor Flav, DJ Lord (who replaced original member Terminator X a decade ago) and a drummer played sparser versions of the songs that highlighted their dystopic nature. Appropriate to a performance at jazz festival, there were breaks between the numbers during which Chuck D or Flavor Flav gave some historical background and the tunes were actually played out of order; as Chuck D said, “We're improvising.”
It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back is one of those rare records to be of a time while also being timeless. The world situation in 1988 was hardly ideal and 20 years later, Public Enemy's music is still apt, particularly with an historic American presidential election on the horizon. Public Enemy were sincerely angry back then but age has not dulled their edge, nor their charismatic stage demeanor: Chuck D ran around the stage with child-like exuberance, Flavor Flav was a show unto himself, the S1W's (Public Enemy's security/dancers) were ominously serious and DJ Lord was a one-man case for the turntablist as a legitimate musician.
It may not have been traditional jazz as would be expected by some at the festival. The volume and length—almost 3 hours—was draining and highlights like a Flavor Flav drum solo and non-Nation rhymes like “Fight the Power” and “Welcome to the Terrordome” all melded into one numbing experience. But as Flavor Flav stated, “Jazz is the soul-root of hiphop.” For all the adventurous and open-minded bookings during the festival's 29-year history, the invitation extended to Public Enemy demonstrates why it is unrivaled.
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yes - the rhythm the rebel
