Chuck D On Collaboration, Staying Relevant, And Building Your Own Systems

By Dan Solomon
 After 30 years of bum-rushing the show, the voice of Public Enemy has some ideas for those who want to keep fighting the power.

 It’s not that early, but Chuck D is tired. He has a reason to be: The night before we talk, he broke one of the rules of his regimen, which is to not be out past 11 o’clock unless he’s working, and not to be out past one in the morning under any circumstances. "Late nights don’t mix with early days," he says, but the night before, he’d been at a show at a club with a long lineup of young rappers playing. "I had a late night in an environment that was just, like, three hours of weed. I don’t do none of that stuff, so I can't handle it," he says. "But I had to be diplomatically cool for the acts I was checking out. It would have been rude to leave earlier, so I had to be around until the end and see everybody. You can’t do that all the time."
Chuck D has a lot of thoughts about how to keep yourself together as you get older. He’d have to—he’s one of the godfathers of hip-hop, the booming baritone voice of a generation that left the underground parties in the Bronx of the '70s for the radio in the mid-'80s. But at a time when so many major acts were teenagers—whether they were Ice Cube or DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince—Chuck D was a mature voice even when he started, releasing Public Enemy’s debut album Yo! Bum Rush the Show in 1987, when he was already in his late twenties. And the decades of rhyming have been good to him. It may have been a long time since Public Enemy was getting radio play with new singles, but he’s still selling out arenas and touring as often as he wants to—which is another thing he’s got a rule about.
"We have strict rules to never be away more than 21 days, and we actually set standards to be a 16-day limit," he says. "Maybe it leaks over to 18 or 20 days, but after 12, the wheels start popping up differently. You can probably break it up, and we’ve broken up tours so people could get back to their regular lives."
Figuring out how to age in hip-hop is an important question. For years, there wasn’t much room for rappers to stay on the radio as they got older. That’s something that Chuck D learned firsthand, when the chart-topping success of Def Jam-released Public Enemy albums like It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, Fear of a Black Planet, and Apocalypse 91 . . . The Enemy Strikes Black gave way to the largely ignored independent releases like 1999’s There’s a Poison Goin’ On and 2005’s New Whirl Odor. But a world in which Public Enemy’s songs stopped getting played on the radio gave way to one in which Jay-Z’s and Dr. Dre’s new releases are awaited with eager anticipation, while Public Enemy booked tours that young, hot acts looked at in awe. Through it all, Chuck D kept doing what he did without compromise, maintaining an outsized influence on the culture even as he continued to find new ways to remain relevant.

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