HILife Cover Story: Public Enemy
October 29, 2009 by John Berger
Filed under Inside HILife This Week
Leaders of hip-hop
Courtesy photo
LEGENDS OF HIP-HOP HALLOWEEN MASQUERADEwith Public Enemy, MC Lyte and DJ Ready Red Where: Pipeline Cafe, 805 Pokukaina St. |
No crowd gets treated like a small crowd by Public Enemy. Theyre far too professional for that.
PE rocked a full house at the old Aloha Tower concert hall and delivered one of 1988s best shows. They worked just as hard, and were just as impressive, in front of an embarrassingly sparse turnout nearly 20 years later during the Hawaii Hip-Hop Festival at Kapiolani Community College. The group Chuck D, Flavor Flav, Professor Griff and the S1Ws performed as if the crowd numbered in the millions.
It was, to quote a colleague, The best hip-hop concert of 2005 that nobody saw.
We dont short anybody. We look at the quality of the audience, not the quantity, Chuck said when the subject came up last week. He was having a busy day he politely excused himself twice to take other calls but the quality of the conversation was as high as ever.
Chuck D always has something interesting to say.
Its been more than two decades since PE broke nationally with Yo! Bum Rush the Show and then followed it with three more landmark albums It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, Fear of a Black Planet and Apocalypse 91 The Enemy Strikes Black. The group made history as the first to release a full-length album of political hip-hop, as pioneers with Anthrax in the creation of rap metal, and as one of the first groups of any genre to release download-only digital albums.
Flavor Flav has enjoyed a high-profile career in recent years in reality television. Professor Griff, PEs minister of information and head of the S1Ws, recently published a book, Analytixz, that is available at www.publicenemy.com.
Chuck leads the group on two projects that position them again as music industry pioneers. Theyre embracing a new financing model with their next album via SellaBand, a program in which fans invest in the project for $25 and, in return, receive a numbered CD plus a cut of all net revenue. The deal is being offered to the first 1,000 people who sign up.
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