Chuck D on How Hip-Hop Changed the World

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 10 February 2023

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Forty years ago, Chuck D showed listeners how exciting, radical, and unpredictable hip-hop could be. His song “Fight the Power” became a protest anthem for a generation, and a Greek chorus in Spike Lee’s film “Do the Right Thing.” The Public Enemy front man talks with the staff writer Kelefa Sanneh about his life in music. “I wanted to curate, present, navigate, teach, and lead the hip-hop art, making it something that people would revere,” he says. Now, at sixty-two, Chuck D is an elder statesman of his genre, and also a critic of it and some of its more commercial impulses. His latest project is a four-part documentary, “Fight the Power: How Hip-Hop Changed the World,” which is airing now on PBS. “I’ve been to one hundred sixteen countries over thirty-eight years, so I’ve seen the changes,” he says. “People have made their way to me to say, ‘Chuck, this is what this art form has meant to me,’ in all continents except for Antarctica.” Plus, Alex Barasch, who wrote about “The Last of Us,” joins David Remnick to talk about why adapting video games to film and television has been so challenging: for every “Tomb Raider,” there are dozens of forgotten shows and flops. “The Last of Us” has been years in the making, but it’s paid off for HBO, winning both critical and commercial success.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:09.6	This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.
0:13.5	Staff writer Kelif Asane covers a lot of subjects for us.
0:17.2	He writes about politics and sports and music, a lot of music. Recently, he met up with a
0:23.5	legendary figure in hip-hop, the frontman, an MC of Public Enemy, Chuck D. So I met Chuck D for the
0:31.7	first time at this bar called the Ivy Lounge in Manhattan. It was empty. It was during the day. They
0:36.9	had cleared it out for us. And,
0:38.5	you know, I think I was expecting a slightly more stern person than the guy who walked in.
0:44.7	Hi, how you doing? I'm Kay. Hey, Kay. How you doing? Good to see you again. I've seen you someone.
0:49.4	You see me? Yeah, maybe, yeah. I'm so excited to sit down with you. I go for you.
0:57.0	Like a lot of people, I saw the Fight the Power video from 1989 directed by Spike Lee.
1:02.0	You know, Chuck D and Flav and the other members of Public Enemy leading a march through Brooklyn.
1:11.2	So Chuck D was 26 when the first Public Enemy album comes out.
1:15.6	And almost from the beginning, he seemed like an elder statesman.
1:19.2	He seemed like a big brother.
1:26.6	And he has this new documentary called Fight the Power,
1:30.3	How Hip Hop Changed the World.
1:32.4	You know, it's all about the connections between hip hop and the world around it,
1:36.6	the culture around it, the politics around it.
1:39.7	The ingenuity of DJ Cool Herk was the spark
1:43.3	that ignited this beautiful art form called hip hop.
1:48.1	When I listen to Public Enemy Now, I hear it as protest music in a double sense. I hear it as protest music against, you know, the state of the world, but also that there's an internal protest, a sense that public enemy is protesting what's going on with hip-hop.
	...

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