The Empire Strikes Black

By JAY COCKS

You don't need an addressable cable box or a fancy monitor to beam in on the most exciting TV in the country. Even a screen is superfluous. All that's necessary is a tape deck or a CD player and a finely tuned ear. Let Public Enemy supply the images.

"Rap music is black America's TV station," says Chuck D, the group's lead voice, chief lyricist and moving force. It's a solid metaphor. Rap is cool music in a cool medium, carrying a blisteringly hot message of social outrage, as instantly accessible as the nightly news. It is also, frequently, as perishable: contemporary music that not only describes and comments on its time but passes with it. Rap is music for the emphatic now, rhythm without a past or future. In rap there is only the present, and the present is tense indeed.

Not even the recent welcome spate of films by black filmmakers can put the street situation right in your face with the force of rap, which is one reason why most of those films use rap on their sound tracks to muscle up the drama. Public Enemy itself was heard, memorably, in Do the Right Thing, but nothing in that deft and righteous movie can match the immediacy of a cut like Nighttrain on their new album, Apocalypse 91: The Enemy Strikes Black. Out only a month, Apocalypse has burned into the Top Ten and sold a million copies; it hit No. 4 on the Billboard chart, with Can't Truss It sitting high at No. 3 among the singles. The heat, in every sense, seems to be following the group on its current tour. Disembarking from the band bus for a recent date in Oakland, Chuck D looked at the flames in the near distance and observed, "This is it. It's Apocalypse '91."

And Apocalypse is different from standard-issue funked-out dance-club rap: in its thick sonic layering, which is playful, graceful and brutal by turns; in its roughhouse lyrics, which are part editorial and part rage, raw but keenly focused; and in its politics. "I think people got a connotation that hard-core rap had to have cursing or gangster stories," Chuck D, 31, reflects. "We've got neither. I wanted to show we could make a hard album without those connotations -- a positive hard-core record." A first step was to cool out on the language, which had been overworked and overbaked by the Geto Boys and the recent N.W.A. album. Explains Chuck D: "Cursing and all that sis played out anyway."

In case that decision might sound like a bit of self-justifying commercialization, it should be kept in mind that another lively cut on Apocalypse is titled How to Kill a Radio Consultant. Radio has not bridled. Public Enemy can get away with saying what it wants, whether it's lambasting shock-effect journalism (A Letter to the New York Post) or coming down hard on black drug dealers who exploit their fellow blacks ("Got tha' nerve as hell, to yell brother man") and on liquor interests whose black-oriented sales pitches are "selling us pain." Rebirth, with its observation that "You can't see who's in cahoots/ Cause now the KKK/ Wears three-piece suits," ought to be faxed straight to David Duke's campaign headquarters.

Chuck and fellow band members Flavor Flav (the gentleman who perpetually wears a large clock around his neck) and Terminator X have succeeded in making a narrow strip of the 'hood into a wide swath of territory that serves nicely as an image of contemporary urban America, sundered by poverty and racism. It's a place the band knows intimately, if not exactly by birth. Chuck D, born Carlton Ridenhour, was the eldest of three children of a middle-class family in Roosevelt, N.Y. He started getting deep into music while dejaying at Adelphi University, where he also drew a comic strip for the campus paper and casually considered a career like his father's, as a graphic designer. He met producer Hank Shocklee and Flavor Flav (then William Drayton) at the campus radio station, and graphics soon got subsumed into graphic language and a grandiose beat.

Shocklee and Chuck D deejayed on the party circuit, appeared at local clubs and concocted a local video rap show. When they cut their first single, Public Enemy No. 1, in early 1987, their sound was already incendiary. Their first album, Yo! Bum Rush the Show, sold 400,000 copies later that same year without benefit of airplay. Each succeeding record displayed new fire and fresh momentum, culminating in Fight the Power, which soared up the singles charts in the summer of 1989 and became the signature song in Do the Right Thing.

That was also when Public Enemy got burned by its own flame. A nonperforming member of the band, Professor Griff, used a newspaper interview to vent some unsavory racial theories (among them: that Jews are responsible for "the majority of wickedness that goes on across the globe"), which caused enough criticism for Chuck D to fire Professor Griff and disband the group. The Professor, Chuck D remarked later, "almost burned down the house." When the group re-formed two months later, its leader was careful to say, "We are not anti-Jewish. We are not anti-anyone. We are pro-black, pro-black culture and pro-human race."

That stance is clear from even a cursory listen to Apocalypse, a record with enough power of persuasion and electronic concussion to set the bluesiest soul rapping. "If there's an overall message," Chuck D says, "it's the destruction of the evil forces within the black community. The time to face them is now." Face up and dance.

With reporting by David E. Thigpen/Oakland