Bringing That Beat Back
Public Enemy's 20 Years in the Game

By Jessica Koslow
From L.A Weekly

“I always consider Run-DMC as the Beatles of rap,” proclaims Chuck D, front man of one of rap’s most revered groups, Public Enemy. “We’re the Rolling Stones,” he declares, “meaning that if they heap praises on those guys as being the kings of rock & roll as far as their longevity is concerned, we like to think the same about us in the game of hip-hop.”

Public Enemy, consisting these days of founding members Chuck D, Flavor Flav and Professor Griff (as well as their ubiquitous security squad, the S-1Ws), pioneered hardcore political rap. Around the same time that Compton’s N.W.A (Niggaz With Attitude) blasted onto the scene with their debut, Straight Outta Compton, on the other side of the country this Long Island crew were dropping socially aware — and controversial — messages backed by the revolutionary machine-gun rhythms of their production team, the Bomb Squad.

This year marks 20 years since Public Enemy released its debut, Yo! Bum Rush the Show. To celebrate, the group that was hailed by Rolling Stone as one of the 50 greatest artists of all time released How You Sell Soul to a Soulless People Who Sold Their Soul on August 7.

The group has earned accolades from some of America’s most authoritative sources: The New York Times in 1999 declared It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back to be one of its “25 Most Significant Albums of the Last Century,” and the Library of Congress (the preservation wing of the American government that Chuck D so often decries), has filed Public Enemy’s Fear of a Black Planet in the National Recording Registry.

Explain the meaning of your new album’s title.

Chuck D: How You Sell Soul to a Soulless People Who Sold Their Soul is answered with a simple phrase: You don’t sell soul to a soulless people who sold their soul. You have to give it to them. And that’s how it boils down with me. I think the last 15, 20 years the music and the record business experienced a great deal of one-sided individualism and greed. In order to return it to some of its roots, artists and entertainers and songwriters have to reach down into themselves in order to reach down into the souls of folk.

You and Flavor Flav have very different personalities. How have you made it work for so long?

There’s a group of us, and the total jelling unit is the thing that’s able to signify that we’re the Rolling Stones of the rap game. The thing that makes it last is we figure as black families go, everyone is accepted as family. Flav has created a position that’s been imitated but never duplicated: He’s the greatest hype man in the history of the art form.

Do you feel like Flavor Flav’s antics dilute the impact of Public Enemy’s message?

The answer is yes and no. Yes, if the media always wants to pay less attention to the other figures in the group besides myself. Flav has never changed and has always been the exception to the P.E. rule. The group is not a duo. But then again, media tends to endorse whippings of mass distraction. P.E. is like any group/family coming from the black community. We tend as a people to include and love the extremes in the same house with the same love regardless. Every black family seems to have one, and even some white ones such as . . . remember Billy Carter?

Many hip-hop artists have struggled to produce energy in live performance. What’s your philosophy on translating your music for a crowd?

My thing is trying to organize something that’ll get people’s attention for an hour or so. It’s my job. What I’m going through now is, I’m learning the new song, “Harder Than You Think,” and maybe another song called “Black Is Back.” I should know these songs by the time I get to California and put it in our set. And the reason that you have to get to know them well is they have to be able to match the intensity of some of the classics. “Black Is Back” and “Harder Than You Think,” they have a classic resonance to them.

KRS-One is on this album. You’ve called him the most feared and greatest MC of all time.

Calling him the greatest MC doesn’t do him justice. I call Jay-Z the greatest MC because he’s the embodiment for MCs all the way up to this point. But that’s not a title that’s even good enough for KRS-One. He is the only rapper I’ve ever seen that changes the atmosphere of the room he steps in. He’s as imposing as Howlin’ Wolf was to blues.

You have an online label, Slamjamz. What have you been working on?

To make a long story short, when people say that hip-hop is gigantic and big and it has all this growth, I say one thing we’re missing is the involvement of women like it was 20 years ago. We have a group on our label called Crew Grrl Order. Crew Grrl Order, along with Northern State, another all-female group from Long Island, did a collaboration. They’re the only two female rap groups in the world — damn near — and that’s a problem. How big can hip-hop be if you can’t name an all-female rap squad? They’re trying to be the epitome of a lot of things that are empowering for women inside of hip-hop and rap. The biggest thing the label is working on is a tribute to James Brown to be released in November. We chose 12 classic tracks from Mr. J.B., and our artists are knocking them out.

Do you think Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton can win the presidency?

No. That doesn’t mean we don’t try. I just think the American democratic system is full of hypocrisy. And it’s primitive. It’s a two-party system that if it doesn’t change, you’re going to have the same mathematics work against people. And the mathematics say not only has a white male always been president, but a white male has always lost to the president. That dynamic has to be changed with some type of different strategy and planning — preferably by another party other than Republican. I always thought Barack Obama or whoever is the next president of the United States has to clean up at least three years of bullshit. Then, their first thing in office they’re going to be on the defensive, and I think that might be too much for Barack Obama. There’s a chance for Barack Obama in 2016. The mathematics that’s being played is going to eventually have Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton cancel each other out. How come Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton can’t come under a guy like Edwards? Have Edwards clean up and then Obama work with that campaign and try to figure out how to clean up America without being a focal point and bearing the brunt? Same thing with Hillary Clinton. You look down into the crux of the problem. Even the Democratic Party is run on ego and the same old-boy network. Handshakes by the zipper.

How You Sell Soul to a Soulless People Who Sold Their Soul is in stores now. Public Enemy will perform at the Rock the Bells Festival 2007 at the Hyundai Pavilion in San Bernardino on Sat., Aug. 11, and at House of Blues, Sunset Strip, in West Hollywood on Thurs., Aug. 16. For more information, visit www.­publicenemy.com and www.slamjamz.com.



Laboratory for a Fortressed World

By Naomi Klein
From The Nation
2007

Gaza in the hands of Hamas, with masked militants sitting in the president's chair; the West Bank on the edge; Israeli army camps hastily assembled in the Golan Heights; a spy satellite over Iran and Syria; war with Hezbollah a hair trigger away; a scandal-plagued political class facing a total loss of public faith.

At a glance, things aren't going well for Israel. But here's a puzzle: Why, in the midst of such chaos and carnage, is the Israeli economy booming like it's 1999, with a roaring stock market and growth rates nearing China's?

Thomas Friedman recently offered his theory in the New York Times. Israel "nurtures and rewards individual imagination," and so its people are constantly spawning ingenious high-tech start-ups--no matter what messes their politicians are making. After perusing class projects by students in engineering and computer science at Ben Gurion University, Friedman made one of his famous fake-sense pronouncements: Israel "had discovered oil." This oil, apparently, is located in the minds of Israel's "young innovators and venture capitalists," who are too busy making megadeals with Google to be held back by politics.

Here's another theory: Israel's economy isn't booming despite the political chaos that devours the headlines but because of it. This phase of development dates back to the mid-'90s, when Israel was in the vanguard of the information revolution--the most tech-dependent economy in the world. After the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, Israel's economy was devastated, facing its worst year since 1953. Then came 9/11, and suddenly new profit vistas opened up for any company that claimed it could spot terrorists in crowds, seal borders from attack and extract confessions from closed-mouthed prisoners.

Within three years, large parts of Israel's tech economy had been radically repurposed. Put in Friedmanesque terms: Israel went from inventing the networking tools of the "flat world" to selling fences to an apartheid planet. Many of the country's most successful entrepreneurs are using Israel's status as a fortressed state, surrounded by furious enemies, as a kind of twenty-four-hour-a-day showroom--a living example of how to enjoy relative safety amid constant war. And the reason Israel is now enjoying supergrowth is that those companies are busily exporting that model to the world.

Discussions of Israel's military trade usually focus on the flow of weapons into the country--US-made Caterpillar bulldozers used to destroy homes in the West Bank and British companies supplying parts for F-16s. Overlooked is Israel's huge and expanding export business. Israel now sends $1.2 billion in "defense" products to the United States--up dramatically from $270 million in 1999. In 2006 Israel exported $3.4 billion in defense products--well over a billion more than it received in US military aid. That makes Israel the fourth-largest arms dealer in the world, overtaking Britain.

Much of this growth has been in the so-called "homeland security" sector. Before 9/11 homeland security barely existed as an industry. By the end of this year, Israeli exports in the sector will reach $1.2 billion--an increase of 20 percent. The key products and services are high-tech fences, unmanned drones, biometric IDs, video and audio surveillance gear, air passenger profiling and prisoner interrogation systems--precisely the tools and technologies Israel has used to lock in the occupied territories.

And that is why the chaos in Gaza and the rest of the region doesn't threaten the bottom line in Tel Aviv, and may actually boost it. Israel has learned to turn endless war into a brand asset, pitching its uprooting, occupation and containment of the Palestinian people as a half-century head start in the "global war on terror."

It's no coincidence that the class projects at Ben Gurion that so impressed Friedman have names like "Innovative Covariance Matrix for Point Target Detection in Hyperspectral Images" and "Algorithms for Obstacle Detection and Avoidance." Thirty homeland security companies were launched in Israel in the past six months alone, thanks in large part to lavish government subsidies that have transformed the Israeli army and the country's universities into incubators for security and weapons start-ups (something to keep in mind in the debates about the academic boycott).

Next week, the most established of these companies will travel to Europe for the Paris Air Show, the arms industry's equivalent of Fashion Week. One of the Israeli companies exhibiting is Suspect Detection Systems (SDS), which will be showcasing its Cogito1002, a white, sci-fi-looking security kiosk that asks air travelers to answer a series of computer-generated questions, tailored to their country of origin, while they hold their hand on a "biofeedback" sensor. The device reads the body's reactions to the questions, and certain responses flag the passenger as "suspect."

Like hundreds of other Israeli security start-ups, SDS boasts that it was founded by veterans of Israel's secret police and that its products were road-tested on Palestinians. Not only has the company tried out the biofeedback terminals at a West Bank checkpoint; it claims the "concept is supported and enhanced by knowledge acquired and assimilated from the analysis of thousands of case studies related to suicide bombers in Israel."

Another star of the Paris Air Show will be Israeli defense giant Elbit, which plans to showcase its Hermes 450 and 900 unmanned air vehicles. As recently as May, according to press reports, Israel used the drones on bombing missions in Gaza. Once tested in the territories, they are exported abroad: The Hermes has already been used at the Arizona-Mexico border; Cogito1002 terminals are being auditioned at an unnamed US airport; and Elbit, one of the companies behind Israel's "security barrier," has partnered with Boeing to construct the Department of Homeland Security's $2.5 billion "virtual" border fence around the United States.

Since Israel began its policy of sealing off the occupied territories with checkpoints and walls, human rights activists have often compared Gaza and the West Bank to open-air prisons. But in researching the explosion of Israel's homeland security sector, a topic I explore in greater detail in a forthcoming book (The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism), it strikes me that they are something else too: laboratories where the terrifying tools of our security states are being field-tested. Palestinians--whether living in the West Bank or what the Israeli politicians are already calling "Hamasistan"--are no longer just targets. They are guinea pigs.

So in a way Friedman is right: Israel has struck oil. But the oil isn't the imagination of its techie entrepreneurs. The oil is the war on terror, the state of constant fear that creates a bottomless global demand for devices that watch, listen, contain and target "suspects." And fear, it turns out, is the ultimate renewable resource.



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