May. 19, 2010 - Issue #761: Public Enemy
Fear of a hack planet
Public Enemy experiments with a new model of music financing
/ Walter Leaphart
"We were exploring the area of being able to release without someone hovering over you," recalls PE frontman Chuck D. "We were finding a new avenue."
The move from the group's native home, Def Jam records (hip hop's premier powerhouse) to Atomic Pop (an independent label of many genres, but the least of which is hip hop) showed PE wanted to break from the chains and be, as El-P puts it, "independent as fuck."
"I like to romantically make the comparison to [the '80s]. There was no pressure on anything, it was free-spirited," says Chuck D. "Going into independence was more like getting out of the system than returning to one."
For PE, the Internet was that system, albeit an untested one. "Experimentation is a large part of everything we do," explains Chuck D. "Either you find new ways with experimentation or satisfy the old ways, which probably won't work. This came out of being discontent with the old ways of pushing records."
Now PE is trying for another watershed moment, trying a model that even some champions of the Internet are skeptical of. Using SellaBand, a social networking promoting fan-funded music, PE hopes to raise $75 000 from fans or investors (here called "Believers") for its next album. In the pitch, PE is going to collaborate with artists suggested to them by Believers. Already Z-Trip, Tom Morello and Rise Against have been secured for the untitled project.
To buy one "part," Believers pay $25 and buy a share in 33 percent of the revenue. The more you pay, the better the perks. For $5000, you get an executive producer credit. Double that and you get a trip to their studio during a recording session, too.
In October, PE projected a $250,000 budget. Only a handful of SellaBand artists have succeeded in meeting their goals, but to a maximum of $50 000, which indicated to Chuck D early on that PE's goal might be insurmountable. So last month, he admitted that it was unrealistic and would take them too long to actually do what they want—make music. "It's a little bit different in the digital age: no one waits for anything," he explains. "The model has to be time sensitive."
Although SellaBand filed for bankruptcy and had to be saved by German buyers last February, he is confident "this system is going to work for us or somebody else ... We got involved in the Internet in 1999 and we're gonna pave the road for artists in the future to do this. Once again we're paving the road and we're building the bridge."
The new budget requires the group slash from the marketing and promotion plans. As well, the album can't include as many high-profile collaborators as hoped, plus "the artists needed to take a lower fee. They're all down with it because they're creative peoples."
Despite the lower budget, PE still has about $20 000 more to raise, which has remained the same for over a month.
It could be a while before PE returns to one of its Long Island studios. In the meantime Chuck D is busying himself in various ways. Although his political radio show, On the Real, folded with the closure of liberal AM station Air America, he's taken on a new program, ...
ANDYOUDON'TSTOP! He describes it as a "hip-hop show that works like a news program, but it's definitely rap and hip hop-centric only."
He also continues with his labours of Internet love, hiphopgods.com, a webzine honouring pioneers of rap, and SlamJamz, the label he owns and operates with Internet distribution and promotion as its nucleus. Through his label, next month he is also releasing his second solo album, Don't Rhyme for the Sake of Riddlin' (a line from "Don't Believe the Hype").
On both Chuck D's solo record and the to-be-determined PE album, tackling racism is to be expected—obviously, but probably not in the way you expect. The wildly racist undertones of the Tea Party movement, he says, "sounds like it's just old-cracker racism in a new term." Instead, he says he wants to focus lots on anti-immigration and border policies affecting many minority groups. It's apparent even in the interviews he conducts and the raps he writes, where you'll find the colour "brown" in place of or alongside "black" people. He seems to think that we're now dealing with a Fear of a Brown Planet.
Last month, "Tear Down That Wall," a song off his upcoming solo album, was put on the SlamJamz website for free. By twisting President Reagan's iconic phrase to call out the country's expanding wall along the Mexican border, Chuck D returns in classic form to put his fist through hypocrisy.
And then, a few days after the interview with Vue Weekly, Arizona approved a law that requires immigrants to travel with their papers and allows police to detain any who don't.
So of course, he would respond. Twenty years ago PE slammed another one of Arizona's bad policies, refusing to recognize MLK Day. But while underground rapper Toki Wright beat everyone to the punch by updating PE's "By the Time I Get to Arizona" three weeks ago, Chuck D co-wrote a Huffington Post article with wife Gaye Theresa Johnson. It issued "a call to action, urging fellow musicians, artists, athletes, performers, academics and production companies to refuse to work in Arizona until officials not only overturn this bill, but recognize the human rights of immigrants."
Recently, the border along the 49th parallel has also caught his ire. Reminding him that "it's just a big fucking game, man. Passports, visas and legalization—it's meant to keep the distribution of poor people from finding fresher terrain. It's not different from South Africa."
What has US customs done to earn such heated words? Nothing. It's Canada's fault, "not letting half of my crew in" for the group's Canadian tour. "The Canadian borders are strict for reasons that I'm clueless about. They've been tripping here and there," he says, guessing only that the stricter controls are due to tighter constraints since 9/11.
"It's only 'X' amount of people [in Canada]" he exclaims, before learning the real number, 34 million. "The land was snatched from the Indians and they want to stop people of colour from coming here? What's the square acreage of Canada?"
Being reminded that Canada is the second largest country sends him flying: "How can there be one country with land like that in the modern day world? And they still tell people they can't come here? Where does this come from? It sounds like some old-school white man!"
Chuck D is exaggerating the extent of the borders' restrictions: only one member of the S1W dance crew and Professor Griff, a founding member and choreographer, have been denied permits. But for a black American artist who has paid every due, been down every road and helped foster the fastest growing culture in the world, being told that any of his 28-year-old, pioneering band isn't welcomed is perplexing. For Canadian rap fans, however, it's business as usual.
Local promoter Tim Baig, owner of Urban DNA Events and a promotional partner for the Edmonton PE show, says, "Hip-hop artists getting extra attention at our borders is nothing new. It's been happening for the last two decades. Artists have always expressed the difficulty and frustration of passing through Canada customs and immigration."
He says rappers "feel like they are stereotyped and targeted when it becomes known that they are American rap artists, sometimes spending hours at the border just to get cleared."
Though Baig won't disclose specific artists who have been turned away by customs, there is a noticeable pattern regarding who gets in and who doesn't. Although Chuck D thinks it's probably racially motivated, the answer to why, after decades of touring, the borders have become impenetrable to PE might simply be that the group isn't a mainstream act anymore. As an independent, PE gets the same treatment as Immortal Technique, not Lil' Wayne, whose Canadian tour dates are only cancelled on doctors' orders.
"There's way more challenges than there were before," he admits, citing the task of selling music online as one of the biggest obstacles. "On our digital store [Beyond.fm] you can hear music from beginning to end. It's like having a small record shop — but so what? You still got to get people to come in, and even if they come into your store, how do you get them to buy?"
Online distribution gave Public Enemy more control over its music, but it didn't expand the group's audience much, if at all. Now, more than a decade later, PE is still set on finding that algorithm, sharing creative control with fans to bring more people into the store, digital or otherwise. V
Sun, May 23 (8 pm)
Public Enemy
Edmonton Event Centre, $19.99 – $42.50
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