Yo! Rap Gets on the Map

By JANICE C. SIMPSON

Spike Lee knew just the right thing. While shooting his racially charged movie Do the Right Thing last year, the director realized how crucial it was to find appropriate music for the song that ignites the film's climactic riot scene. "I wanted it to be defiant, I wanted it to be angry, I wanted it to be very rhythmic," says Lee. "I thought right away of Public Enemy."

Word, Spike. Few groups pulsate with more in-your-face aggression than the four young black men known as Public Enemy, rap music's self-proclaimed "prophets of rage." For the sound track, they concocted Fight the Power, a swaggering mixture of combustive rhythms and rebellious rhymes ("Got to give us what we want/ Got to give us what we need/ Our freedom of speech is freedom or death/ We got to fight the powers that be"). The song not only whipped the movie to a fiery pitch but sold nearly 500,000 singles and became an anthem for millions of youths, many of them black and living in inner-city ghettoes. For these listeners, rap in general, and Public Enemy in particular, is more than entertainment -- more, even, than an expression of their alienation and resentments. It is a major social force.

"Rap is the rock 'n' roll of the day," says pop-music publicist Bill Adler. "Rock 'n' roll was about attitude, rebellion, a big beat, sex and, sometimes, social comment. If that's what you're looking for now, you're going to find it here." The basic sound, propelled by a slamming polyrhythmic beat, is loud and raw. The lyrics, a raucous stew of street-corner bravado and racial boosterism, are often salted with profanity, and sometimes with demeaning remarks about whites, women and gays. The fact that they are delivered by young, self-consciously arrogant black men in a society where black youths make many whites uneasy doesn't help either.

Nevertheless, rap -- hip-hop to its true fans -- has grown into the most exciting development in American pop music in more than a decade. Nearly a third of the records currently on Billboard's chart of the top 100 black albums are by rap artists. The biggest pop single of 1989 was a rap song by Tone-Loc, Wild Thing, which sold more than 2 million copies.

Not bad for a genre that got its start as renegade street music back in the mid-1970s. Turned off by the blandness of disco and the slickness of rhythm and blues, disk jockeys in black dance clubs began manipulating their turntables to blend instrumental riffs from different songs, dragging the needle across a record to create an even harsher sound. While these brash mixes played, M.C.s, or rappers, would exhort the crowd with chants: "When I die, bury me deep;/ Put two speakers at my feet,/ A mixer at my head,/ So that when you close the casket/ I can rock the dead."

From bootleg cassettes, rap moved onto commercial recordings and into the acts of savvy performers. Yet even those from middle-class homes -- like the group Run-D.M.C., or some members of Public Enemy -- accentuated the funkiness of the music by dressing in sweatsuits, baseball caps and other street wear. They evolved a hip lingo that turns ordinary meanings upside down ("stupid" is a compliment in rap argot) and adopted flashy aliases like LL Cool J that could pass for graffiti signatures. Youngsters rallied to these homeboys who, unlike smoother sequined and glittery entertainers, seemed so much like themselves. "Rap is the sound of urban youth," says Bronx native Fred Brathwaite, who as Fab 5 Freddy hosts the cable show Yo! MTV Raps. "People identify with rap. You feel that you can look like that, that you can be a part of it immediately."

A whole generation of young performers reared on rap is taking the music in new directions. Their music is more complex, their lyrics are more subtle, and their style is more adventurous. Female rappers like Salt-N-Pepa and Queen Latifah wage a feminist assault on the macho world of hip-hop. Mellow fellows D.J. Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince bring a Cosby-like calm to the music. The laid-back rappers De La Soul put out a hippie-style hip-hop. Los Angeles' N.W.A. (Niggers with Attitude) get down to a gritty realism and sometimes hair-raising hostility. And groups like 3rd Bass add a white soul flavor to the rap mix.

But no group has had a more radical effect on rap music than Public Enemy. "Once Public Enemy got in the door, that really turned the rap world upside down," says Cynthia Horner, executive editor of Right On, a magazine for black teens. "Many rappers come out with lyrics that are just boastful, but Public Enemy goes several layers beyond that. They try to set a kind of model for black youths to follow."

And what a model. Fans liken Public Enemy to the Black Panthers, and it is an image that the group cultivates. A precision-stepping, paramilitarily clad backup group known as S1W (the Security of the First World) stands at attention onstage during all their performances. Lead rapper Chuck D (Carlton Ridenhour) and his comic sidekick Flavor Flav (William Drayton) philosophize about the everyday problems of urban life and are unabashed in their declarations of black pride, peppering their songs with references to Nat Turner, Marcus Garvey, Huey Newton and Malcolm X.

Public Enemy isn't the only rap group to tackle political issues. Longtime rapper Kool Moe Dee pushes the importance of getting a good education. Kris Parker, also known as K.R.S.-One, is a committed activist whose Stop the Violence coalition has helped raise $150,000 for the National Urban League. Parker, who spent several years living on the streets of New York City, also devotes time to the homeless. Nearly all the groups preach against drugs. What sets Public Enemy apart is the militancy of its views and the insistently defiant manner in which it expresses them both in and out of its songs.

This militancy has resulted in charges of anti-Semitism against Public Enemy. Jewish groups were alarmed last spring when Richard Griffin, then the group's "Minister of Information" and head of the S1W squad, told the Washington Times that Jews were responsible for "the majority of wickedness going on across the globe." Ridenhour promptly condemned the statement and said that Griffin, known as Professor Griff, would leave the group. A few days later executives at Public Enemy's record label, Def Jam, announced that the group would disband. In the end, however, the group stayed together and Griffin stayed on, albeit in a demoted position. Griffin, a devoted follower of Black Muslim leader Louis Farrakhan, now says he went too far in blaming all Jews.

Less than six months later Public Enemy released a new single, Welcome to the Terrordome, on which Ridenhour, in an apparent reference to the earlier incident, says, "Crucifixion ain't no fiction;/ So-called chosen, frozen./ Apology made to whoever pleases./ Still they got me like Jesus." Upset by the references to deicide and the term so-called chosen, the Anti-Defamation League wrote a protest letter to CBS, the record's distributors. The company eventually issued an internal memo instructing its employees to ensure "that none of our recordings promote bigotry." But Public Enemy and its supporters remain unapologetic. "This is Chuck's point of view as an African man living on this planet," says Harry Allen, a self-described hip-hop activist. "The notion of saying things to Europeans to make them comfortable is not part of the game."

Despite the controversies swirling around Public Enemy, rap continues to move into the mainstream, gaining acceptance among audiences well outside its black constituency. Not too many years ago, radio stations, both black and white, refused to play rap records. And when the press wrote about rap, it was usually to chronicle a violent incident at a concert. Now hip young whites have hijacked rap to downtown clubs. Suburban teens, on the lookout for something new, have carried it out to the shopping malls. Fashion designers have picked up on the baggy pants and dark sunglasses of rap couture, while advertising executives have copied its semantic style ("Reeboks let U.B.U.," declares one ad in fluent hip-hop).

Over the past few years major record companies like Columbia and RCA have < scrambled to hook up with rap labels. MTV, once criticized for ostracizing hip-hop videos, gives Yo! MTV Raps 30 minutes on its daily schedule. Master rappers D.J. Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince have appeared on the David Letterman show. The Grammy Awards got into the act last year when it created its first rap-music category. Meanwhile, mainstream musicians like pop producer and jazz trumpeter Quincy Jones are including rap tracks on their new albums.

The epicenter of rap still lies in black urban communities, and it is from such communities in Los Angeles, in Seattle, in Miami, that the new talent is rising. "Hip-hop is a black thing," says Fab 5 Freddy. "But if you want to get with it, come on over." Yo, home. Listen up.