The New Yorker Radio Hour - Chuck D on How Hip-Hop Changed the World

Episode Date: February 10, 2023

Forty years ago, Chuck D showed listeners how exciting, radical, and unpredictable hip-hop could be. His song “Fight the Power” became a protest anthem for a generation, and a Greek chorus in Spike Lee’s film “Do the Right Thing.” The Public Enemy front man talks with the staff writer Kelefa Sanneh about his life in music. “I wanted to curate, present, navigate, teach, and lead the hip-hop art, making it something that people would revere,” he says. Now, at sixty-two, Chuck D is an elder statesman of his genre, and also a critic of it and some of its more commercial impulses. His latest project is a four-part documentary, “Fight the Power: How Hip-Hop Changed the World,” which is airing now on PBS. “I’ve been to one hundred sixteen countries over thirty-eight years, so I’ve seen the changes,” he says. “People have made their way to me to say, ‘Chuck, this is what this art form has meant to me,’ in all continents except for Antarctica.”  Plus, Alex Barasch, who wrote about “The Last of Us,” joins David Remnick to talk about why adapting video games to film and television has been so challenging: for every “Tomb Raider,” there are dozens of forgotten shows and flops. “The Last of Us” has been years in the making, but it’s paid off for HBO, winning both critical and commercial success. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Staff writer Kelif Asanae covers a lot of subjects for us. He writes about politics and sports and music, a lot of music. Recently, he met up with a legendary figure in hip-hop, the front man and emcee of Public Enemy, Chuck D. So I met Chuck D for the first time at this bar called the Ivy Lounge. in Manhattan. It was empty. It was during the day. They'd cleared it out for us. And, you know, I think I was expecting a slightly more stern person than the guy who walked in.

Hi, how you doing? I'm Kay. Hey, Kay. How you doing? Good to see you again. I've seen you someone. You see me? Maybe, yeah. I'm so excited to sit down with you. Like a lot of people, I saw the Fight the Power video from 1989 directed by Spike Lee. You know, Chuck D and Flav and the other members of Public Enemy leading a march through Brooklyn. So Chuck D. was 26 when the first Public Enemy album comes out. And almost from the beginning, he seemed like an elder statesman. He seemed like a big brother.

And he has this new documentary called Fight the Power, How Hip Hop Changed the World. You know, it's all about the connections between hip-hop and the world around it, the culture around it, the politics around it. The ingenuity of DJ Cool Hurk was the spark that ignited this beautiful art form called hip-hop. When I listen to Public Enemy Now,

I hear it as protest music in a double sense. I hear it as protest music against, you know, the state of the world, but also that there's an internal protest, a sense that Public Enemy is protesting what's going on with hip-hop. But one thing that I noticed when I watch the documentary and even more when I talk to him, he seemed to be more focused on potential. What he mainly sees,

is the hope of all the things that hip-hop might yet still become. Do you remember when you first got a sense in New York City that something's happening? Something new is happening. These kids are doing some sort of new music. This thing called hip-hop is bubbling. Yeah, of course, the technical aspect. I thought, like, why they need two turn tables, the case one breaks down.

But when I heard it's like, okay, you got mixers. What the hell's a mixer? I know what a cake mixer is. You know what I'm saying? So I like anybody else was naive. And this person on the microphones is doing a little bit like the presenters to do on AM radios playing black music. WBL on the FM dial before that WWRL played all the black music in the city and the surrounding metropolitan area. And it was a small 1600 bandwift station at the end of the dial.

And they'd be like, Gary Bird, 1600 on the WWRL dial. come on, this is L-T-D. And you'd be like, wow, man, you know what I'm saying? Like in the city from WWRL, New York, Progressive AM in the Apple. And I'm Gary Bird from the G-B experience. Gary Bird was a person that I grew up with twice growing up with him playing music on WWRL.

Later on, Gary Bird hooks up with Stevie Wonder. They end up being friends. Stevie Wonder produces a song for Gary Bird called The Crown with Gary Bird. Bird is actually like a 16-minute dropping bars about our brilliance as human beings and as black folk. Well, Stevie Wonder does that, and it's a Motown rap record in 1982. Never gets talked about. So we'll talk about it right here.

At that particular time, you know, hip up to Cosmic University, where life is the journey and love is the trip and the study of your fumble make you here. I'm professor of the rap, and when I speak, a guarantee that my lines will not be. At that particular time, you know, hip-hop was emulating all this with the great voices, playing great music, going from the ones and twos, being able to, you know, bring that noise to the people. So I came up in all that. It's a four-part hip-hop documentary on PBS, Fight the Power, How Hip Hop Changed the World. Why is that important for you for that to be your focus? How hip-hop changed the world.

Most important word in that is world. I've been 116 countries. over 38 years. So I see the changes and have people come to me with different languages, although I can't interpret not one other than

the King's English, unfortunately, which is my biggest regret. But people have made their way to say, Chuck, this is what this art form is meant to me in all continents except for Antarctica

and parts of the Arctic. There's a quote from you in the documentary. You say, the pioneers in the beginning, They could have easily wrapped about the real things that's right in front of them. Guns, drugs, infiltrating New York City in 78, 79. And they said, you know what?

It's no way that's going to be popular. We want to keep the party going. Yeah. Not that they want to commodify it into something that's going to just quickly, just like, it's got to be popular so I could get money. Yeah, they wanted to make money to get up out of there. Right. But I think it was one of those things.

It's like, okay, everybody knows them damn stories. What's our escape route? We want to have escapism. We want to take this spaceship up out of here. Be me up, Scotty, fast. Did you feel like you wanted to join this hip-hop movement that was happening? Or did you feel like you wanted to redirect this hip-hop movement? I wanted to curate, present, navigate, teach, and lead the hip-hop art as making it

something that people will revere just like Grant would. You know what I'm saying? So I was educated in the arts ever since I was a little kid. My mother started the Roosevelt Community Theater in 1973 in Roosevelt. I was under Frank Frazier's tutelage as an art teacher in 1972 in Roosevelt. I go to Adelphi University to become a commercial artist. But as what? I had no idea.

I definitely wasn't going to go into architecture. And I wanted to become a renderer. And the music led me to the point, even if I got kicked out my first year at the freshman year, Adelphi, I actually got back in because all of a sudden hip hop records came out. And I said, wow, I could be in the music business as a hip hop illustrator, art department, album jackets, advertising. Wow, okay. And that got me through the rest of Adelphi where I graduated Dean's List in 1984. So hip hop as an idea got me through college. I think a lot of people nowadays might not realize just how radical public enemy was when you came out.

Why would I count them if they don't realize it? But I don't just mean radical compared to America. I mean radical compared to what else was happening in hip hop at that moment. You have to take a long survey of what was happening in hip hop to make a comparison. Right. It's not an art form that could be really easily thrown to you in four parts. series and you get it all. So if we were able to repeat the context of public enemy, how could you talk about being in the middle of a decade where communities are destroyed by R&B? It's Reagan and Bush,

co-intel pro, crack and guns, you know what I'm saying, drugs and guns. At that time, when we started out, Nelson Mandela was in prison in South Africa. Margaret Thatcher was running the UK And Gorbachev's Soviet Union was teetering on the brink of disaster politically, worldwide. And this was trickling down to like, damn, can we actually be humans too? Public Enemy was kind of like, okay, you're making records. I am the voice of in the middle of this. But at the same time, I'm bringing a community with me. And that was my role to actually lead a whole community, even a community that's juxtapose.

and not getting along with each other. Right. You know, being able to be that voice of maybe some reason. See, number one, rap was able to use more words. Yeah. In the shorter distance of time. Yeah. Singing, I mean, I'm bad on lyrics.

I still don't know what the hell a lot of songs are saying. Right. I can't make out the lyrics. And nobody seemed to ever say that, yeah, well, you know, everything else in popular music is unintelligible because they happen to sing their words instead of speak their words. Well, hip hop and rap happens to damn they speak their words. And there's like a justification thing that happens in hip hop where there's this sense of

who were you, who were you to be talking to me? And so rappers would say, this is who I am. Let me tell you who I am. It's the first rejection of the slave name. Hmm. You know, it's like, you know, I can't call myself Malcolm X, but you know what? I'm Chuck D. That type of thing.

You know what I'm KRS one? You know, I'm not Chris Parker. Right. And the rejection of the slave name was really the sociopolitical thing. That white folks in America, when you tell them that, they're like, I didn't even know that. I didn't even think of it that way. Well, number one, you didn't have to. But if you want to understand the page of where we're coming from, being called somebody else is number one on our brains or something that we're trying to change.

And when I call myself something else, you find difficulty in it. In 1997 in your book, you wrote, right now, rap is being used in a way that's negative to the existence of black people. Yeah. Why did you feel that way? Because the curators were failing and it was dropping the ball, explaining what it could do and actually put things in the right context in place. I'm 37 at the time. And I saw people say, well, we could grab the lowest hanging fruit and just to get the eyeballs in order for me to make a living with it. I'm like, damn, all right?

So me, I have a firm belief is like, spectacle gets you interested and get you in the building. It don't keep you there. Spectacular keeps you there. Matter of fact, spectacular keeps you coming back for more. The rock guys understand that. I was with Prophet who raised four years. Every night we got to stand in Ovation and rock hard as hell.

I'm not saying it never happened in the rap world. It's just that it's been groomed differently. You know, I mean, and the rocked. Rock world, man. People come back and back and back and back. The promoters take it seriously. The black thing, the promoters

always felt, yeah, if we could get a lot of money for it, we don't know how long it's going to last. And we'll take this heading money, and if it burns out, burns out. It's disposable, cool. We'll get the next one to replace it. I think that's been a disservice to the art form. And I said that at 37 years old, of 1997 and clearly we've seen.

But it's also, if you go back and when I think about the mid to late 90s, I think of that as another golden age for hip hop. I think of that as the Jay's... Golden corporate age. But I think of that as the Jay-Z era, the Missy Elliott era, the Outcast era. You're giving me, you give them, well, with the exception of outcast, you give me a whole bunch of individuals. Around the turn of the 90s, the record companies and corporations felt they could reduce the

culture's elements down to one, which is the... the emceeing on a record. So you removed the other elements, DJ and that was removed. The dance element was removed, art element was removed. You got emceeing, okay, they make a records. The biggest change is when they seen that the downsizing from collectors into solo acts is what probably was the biggest change. And because that wasn't handled or managed correctly,

hip hop became a whole bunch of soloists in the 90s because it was easier to renegotiate with one person and a group. Therefore, if you name your best groups out of 2000, you name it individuals, you name your best groups out of the 80s, you name it groups. Destroy a collective. But part of that, I think, is because rapping is so powerful.

I mean, when I think about public enemy, there's so much going on, but I think about you and your voice, and Flavreflav's voice and these incredible tracks of the stuff that you see. Yes, you're sitting home and thinking, but if you saw us performing,

which is performance is always the extension of art anyway, you ain't just seeing me stand on the mic and fucking spitting bars. So I think this documentary raises the bar over the bars. Hip hop is all the panoramic elements and motion. You know, you got sight,

style, sound, and story. Those things, when they circulate, that's what you have something that people say, I'll come back for years and years. One MC's spinning bars over beats, man. It's like, that's when it comes down to a point where anybody could do it. You got it right in the studio.

You practice that. You know, the studio's going to make it right before it leaves and they go out to perform it. And I'm like, well, they've got to go through a rites of passage just because they're a star without proving it. And the first thing I look for is like, I'm going to run out of breath. they're not going to be able to do what they record it.

Number three, all right, they're on a tour. They're going to lose their voice after the first three days because they're trying too hard. And then you'd be like, in the rock world, you rehearse and your first night you better get it right and you better not have any mishaps on the whole thing. To go back to the question that's kind of implied in the documentary about how hip hop changed the world,

how did hip hop change the world? And did it change the world for the better? Well, for the last 30 years, hip hop's been in Africa and they've surpassed the natural skill set that we're accustomed to in the United States of America, but that's always the case. If you pay attention to Africa, you know, the whole key is to make yourself feel better or superior. It's like, all you got to do is pay Africa no money. Like, it don't exist. Like, you know what? It might have started over there, but we're not acknowledging it to it starts in the United States. United States and that's just, that's derogatory to the black diaspora. You cannot separate the

black diaspora from black creativity in the future. So I've seen hip hop change the world many times over in places that's not just reduced to people under the construct of dark skin. I mean, in Yugoslavia and ourselves in ICE, saw a war stopped as we're doing a concert there in an ice arena and they stopped the war for one day in a Yugoslavian conflict between Croatia and Serbia and Montenegro and Slovenia. Next day they tell public enemy I see all right it's time for y'all to raise up out of here because we go on the war tomorrow sure enough we left over the borderline boom bombing over here wow so hip hop has changed the world because they would look at fight the power and six in the morning as far as anti-authoritative you know

conversation and applied it to their life, their language, their whole situation. Again, we got another guide map based on black people in the United States music and vibe to actually apply to ourselves and our movement. But isn't interesting how things have flipped, how hip hop used to be so divisive and polarizing. Some people loved it. Some people hated it. Radio stations would say, we play all the hits and no rap. And now here we are, and you're talking about the divisions in America and sometimes it seems like hip hop is one of the only things that just about everyone seems to like.

It's evolution. How can you not study evolution? I mean, it's like revolution that starts out. Evolution of what evolves into, you know? I mean, Curtis Blow is revolutionary. Jay-Z is evolution. He's an evolution, the culmination of all these things that led up to him doing the great things that he does.

Will it be evolution after Jay-Z? sure it will be. Is this thing going to be called hip hop or does it get termed in or something else? Probably. You know, we had jazz before everything was jazz. Right. And that's what we expect is that things are going to change and the era's not going to last forever.

So how is the hip-hop era managed to last for half a century? 50 years is not long in real life. 50 years long in cultural life. Yeah, very long. But in real life, it's like, yeah. But do you think 50 years from now, Two people might be sitting in a rooftop bar in a hotel talking about how did hip hop manage to last a hundred years?

She, you better be a whole 50 years when now people will be sitting. I mean, really, let's go 10 years out of time. Okay. I like to take 10 more years of people understanding that they got to take care of the next generations, teach them, take care of the planet. And I think hip hop is going to be there. It's going to ride regardless. I don't think hip hop's the thing that you ask could be around. We want to ask for human beings to be around.

We want to ask for the way of life, peace, love sharing to be around. Chuck D. of Public Enemy. He's a creator along with his producing partner, Lori Bulla, of Fight the Power. How Hip Hop Changed the World. It's a documentary series now on PBS. And you can find Kelifasane's writing on hip hop and a watch. range of other musical subjects and more at new yorker.com. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. Stick around.

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. The list of movies and TV shows adapted from video games is really long and it's kind of checkered. For every Tomb Raider, we have dozens of forgettable shows and would-be blockbusters that just weren't. But now there's The Last of Us. The HBO show based on a series of games set in a post-apocalyptic world. The Last of Us has been years in the making, and it's turned out to be a huge success, both critically and commercially.

I know what's out there we were going with an entire squadron for that very reason, but now I don't have a truck, I don't have a squadron, Fedris's five minutes away, what I do have is you. And I know what you're both capable of, for better or worse. I talked to Alex Beres, who's an editor at The New Yorker,

to understand why adapting video video games has been so difficult over the years. And what makes it work when it does work? Alex wrote about the Last of Us in December. Alex, I think you know me well enough to know, after all, all this time spent working together that what I know about video games, you could fit in a thimble. My kids will never forgive me. They're grown now, but I outlawed them at home.

They remind me of this all the time, and maybe I meant a mistake. But you love them. And more to the point, you're telling us that video games are now kind of, it's a long process, but have been influencing all other kinds of arts, particularly obviously television and movies. So what I'd love for you to do for us today is give us three instances where video games have been adapted to great effect and real effect on popular culture. So let's go to it. I think we do have to begin with Super Mario Brothers, which I would not call a great adaptation, but it is an instructive one in its impact and its reception. Nobody in Hollywood had tried the live-action feature-length video game adaptation as a form.

And frankly, the game did not give them a lot to work with in the way of plot. They're brothers, their plumbers, they're on the trail of a kidnapped princess, and a mystical meteorite that gives anyone who possesses it, the power. So when they came to adapt it, there was a degree of self-consciousness, a kind of desire to say, this is something more than the game. The tagline, in fact, was, this ain't no game. and they were aiming for a kind of ghostbustersy, subversive comedy mode,

slightly darker, slightly zanier, and they missed. But unless I'm wrong, Super Mario Brothers was a console game. It comes out in 1993 as a film, and lo and behold, in 2023, somebody's taking another crack at it. Oh, yes.

We are trying again with Chris Pratt in the title role. It's me, Mario. And I think this speaks to Hollywood's quest, No, they've not given up. It was a box office bomb at the time, but nobody has given up on cracking this formula. Now, we come next to something that dominated my household when my kids were really young.

Pokemon. This is the one that is nearest and dearest to my hut, I will say, in terms of the adaptations past. And it had this really interesting, sort of unusual, mutual, mutualistic relationship between the games and the series. The series, I should say, had 1,200 episodes 25 seasons, it's still going strong. And every time a new game came out,

they would take the protagonist of the show, who is this sort of perennial 10-year-old called Ash Ketchum, and plop him into the new region. So he meets all the same monsters as you meet in the game. He's meeting the same characters. He's fighting the fights that you as a player would undertake. And that sort of feedback loop has continued for decades now. It was actually recently announced

that Ash would be stepping down as the protagonist after some 25 years. So there was a real outpouring of nostalgia and excitement about that. Is Ash retiring to Boca Raton? We can only hope after the service that he's put in. You did, Bob! Now, not long ago, you came into an editorial meeting,

I don't know, a few months ago, and said that HBO is going to make a huge hit show out of a game called The Last of Us. Am I right? Yes. And I greeted this idea with a raised eyebrow, but said, Alex, you go ahead and do it. The video game turned small screen sensation had HBO's second biggest debut of the last 13 years behind only House of the Dragon. Yeah, it's pretty amazing. The premise of the show and of the game is quite simple.

A fungus-based pandemic has decimated society. And there's a smuggler called Joel, who is played in the show by Pedro Pascal. who lost his daughter at the beginning of the outbreak some 20 years prior. And he is thrown together with this young girl called Ellie, who it's understood may be immune to the pathogen and thus could sort of save what remains of society. So they have this kind of road trip across America. He is taking her to a lab where they hope that they will be able to engineer a cure.

Joel, I can handle myself. It's called luck. And it is going to run out. You hear that? That sounds like every post-apocalyptic story under the sun. But it's really about sort of the ways of living that people have caved out for themselves in this landscape. You know, there are some people who are building these kind of idealistic socialist communes.

There are people who've barricaded themselves into their own towns and won't let anyone else in. There are people who've turned to incredible violence. There are, you know, all of these different modes of existence. And you were sort of seeing all of this unfold through the deepening relationship, this kind of further daughter dynamic between the two of them. So, Alex, Super Mario Brothers, Pokemon and The Last of Us, is this all about Hollywood's search for intellectual property

that will become the next Marvel or something like a franchise that will just float the boat financially? I mean, I think that's certainly a factor. You know, Amazon, Paramount, Netflix, basically every studio and streamer under the sun is trying to do some version of this. And there have been a lot of false stuts, you know, Assassin's Creed with Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard

was sort of believed to be the next great hope of video game adaptations back in 2016, I think it was. And that just crashed and burned, and plans for sequels were promptly scrapped. So, you know, there has been some attempt over the decades to get something like this off the ground. But I think that The Last of Us has the advantage of this inherently cinematic quality and of a team that genuinely believes in what they're doing,

so it's not this kind of cynical cash grab alone, you know. Is it possible to predict what other games will become the television and movies of the near future? I mean, there are a million that are currently in development, you know, Amazon just announced a God of War series, Netflix are trying about a dozen different things right now and seeing what sticks. I mean, I think the thing to look for, and I hope that they know this now, is, you know, strongly defined characters and a strong narrative backbone,

something that a lot of these adaptations have historically lacked because when you're playing a game, you want to be able to project onto the character. You kind of get to fill in the gaps or even customize the way that they look and the way they act. And when that comes to television and they're just an empty cipher, it's not very interesting to watch

because you have no reason to care about them. So I think if people are careful in their selection of source material, then they will have much more success in that arena. Alex, thanks so much. Great to talk to you, as always. Thank you. Alex Barish is an editor at The New Yorker, and you can find his reporting piece

about The Last of Us at New Yorker.com. I'm David Remnick. Thanks for listening. We'll be back with the New Yorker Radio Hour next week, and we hope you'll join us. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed

by Merrill Garbis of Tune Yards. This episode was produced by Max Walton, Breda Green, Adam Howard, Calilea, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, and Ingofen in Putabwele, with guidance from Emily Boutin and assistance from Harrison Keithline, Mike Cutchman, and Meher Batia. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.