Public Enemy's Chuck D says: Start Snitchin'!
Chuck D is one of the best rappers of all time. As the frontman of Public Enemy, he turned heads in the 80's with brilliant and politically astute albums like "Fear of a Black Planet" and "It Takes a Nation of Millions To Hold Us Back." Chuck D did it with a message of community empowerment, self-awareness and political activism, but that stuff doesn't sell nowadays. Most of today's successful hip-hop artists make a living out of glamorizing gang banging, drug dealing, getting-rich-quick obsessions or just by singing plain inane lines like Akon's "I wanna fuck you/You already know."
Speaking of Akon, he's the latest to propagate the stop snitching message in a shameful video in which three guys kill their friend for cooperating with the police in a bank robbery case. We spoke to Chuck D a while back about such issues and we'll be presenting his views here. This is the first of two parts of our conversation about the state of rap music today, the state of the black community, and the state of American society. Your comments are welcome. Check back for part II of the interview, and catch Public Enemy on a worldwide tour right now.
Stereo Warning: What's your opinion on today's hip-hop and hip-hop press?
Chuck D: Today's hip hop is corporate-dictated. A lot of the artists are very
talented but in order to have one of those nice big contracts it behooves them
to be similar to what makes a hit record and a hit artist, as opposed to carving
their own niche from an art standpoint.
So for a shot at that a young rapper today would have to glorify violence
and spending time in jail?
It seems like that's the pattern that happens to work. A lot of artists
will say 'hey, I'll go to jail and get more publicity off of that move
rather than doing something beneficial to the community.' And that's a reflection
of the media, who cover somebody for shooting somebody or getting shot more
that someone who's feeding people with turkeys at Thanksgiving. That's
why a younger artist will follow that dollar.
What do you think of hip-hop magazines that glorify rappers convicted of
violent crimes, such as the magazine XXL, which publishes a "jail issue"?
Every issue of a lot of magazines might as well be called the jail issue because
they uphold the quantity of what's happening instead of the quality of
the art. Yes, there's gangsterism that takes place, but there are also people
that graduate from college, but they are not reflected into the mainstream,
while somebody who might want to play gangster or thug is being reflected every
minute as being the guideline for the culture. To me that's wrong. The
imbalance is wrong.
What about the stop snitching message and rap's glorification of this
code of silence that makes it tough for inner-city neighborhoods to get rid
of crime?
It's the jail mentality, which has been backed by some kind of corporate cosignature that says that the thug life is the way to go and to snitch on somebody is wrong. The bottom line is somebody is actually selling drugs in your community and decimating your community and that's not held under the magnifying glass as being fucked up or wrong. All of a sudden, what appears to be wrong seems to be right, without any kind of judgment coming to the front.
Some judges say that community support is crucial for people to be able
to come forward and talk to the police.
I support snitches. If the person is cancerous to the society, then a snitch
sometimes is the best solution, with an army behind him. Because the person
who's cancerous to the society, they have no army. That's why i encourage education
for people. But when we don't encourage people to be doctors or lawyers, who's
gonna fix your people? I don't understand the anti-intellectualism and
the dumbassification of it all, when hip-hop could aspire that we have to be
balanced on all ends in order to go forward as a community and as a nation.
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Tags: rap hip hop hip-hop akon public enemy chuck d snitch
