Alex Henderson

Arts and Entertainment 

Most of My Heroes STILL Don’t Appear on No Stamp: Public Enemy Fights the Power 2012 Style, Boyeeeeeee 



By Alex Henderson
RealmNoir, July 23, 2012

No less than 25 years have passed since the release of Public Enemy’s first album, Yo! Bum Rush the Show. So much has changed since that 1987 debut (politically, musically, economically, technologically), but as PE’s newly released Most of My Heroes STILL Don’t Appear on No Stamp demonstrates, one of the most important political hip-hop groups of all time hasn’t exactly mellowed over the years. There is a lot to be angry about in 2012, and Most of My Heroes STILL Don’t Appear on No Stamp (released by SPITdigital) addresses the political and economic problems of the early 2010s in an angry, biting yet clever and sometimes humorous fashion that is distinctively PE.

Public Enemy leader Carlton Ridenhour, a.k.a. Chuck D (now 51), and his comic sidekick William Drayton, a.k.a. Flavor Flav (now 53), didn’t invent political hip-hop. The golden age of political hip-hop started 30 years ago in 1982 with Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five’s seminal hit “The Message.” Kurtis Blow included a song called “Hard Times” on his first album in 1980, and some musicologists would argue that the first political rap came from the Last Poets and the late Gil Scott-Heron in the early 1970s. But it was “The Message” that inspired a long list of hip-hop MCs to start writing lyrics about crime, poverty, drugs and other social problems. “The Message” opened the door for sociopolitical classics like Run-D.M.C.’s “It’s Like That” and Captain Rapp’s “Bad Times (I Can’t Stand It)” in 1983, Dr. Jeckyll & Mr. Hyde’s “Fast Life” in 1984, Ice-T’s “Killers” in 1985 and Boogie Down Productions’ “Say No, Brother” in 1986. But Public Enemy took political hip-hop to a new level with Yo! Bum Rush the Show and the classics that followed, including 1988’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (widely regarded as their most essential release) and 1990’s Fear of a Black Planet.

Public Enemy, in their late 1980s/early 1990s heyday, were enormously influential both inside and outside of hip-hop; they influenced everyone from Harlem rapper 2 Black 2 Strong to Nine Inch Nails to Rage Against the Machine. And while Public Enemy’s popularity had faded by the mid-1990s, they continued to make exciting albums—although Most of My Heroes STILL Don’t Appear on No Stamp is not an album in the physical sense. The July 2012 release marks the first time that a Public Enemy album will not be coming out on CD; like The Evil Empire of Everything (a PE album due out later this year), My Heroes STILL Don’t Appear on No Stamp is only being released digitally. 

In terms of production, Most of My Heroes STILL Don’t Appear on No Stamp isn’t a radical departure from Public Enemy’s previous albums. Public Enemy, unlike many of the rappers of 2012, aren’t using sleek melodies or bringing in singers to sweeten things up with lavish R&B-style choruses; their productions still tend to be noisy, dissonant and abrasive. Long-time Public Enemy followers will know that the album’s title references some classic PE lyrics of the past (the title Most of My Heroes STILL Don’t Appear on No Stamp is based on a line from their 1989 hit “Fight the Power,” which was heard in Spike Lee’s film Do the Right Thing). But many of the album’s references—Occupy Wall Street, the Tea Party, President Barack Obama, Julian Assange’s Wikileaks, Lady Gaga—are clearly 2012 references.

The economic crisis of 2008-2012 is a recurring theme on Most Of My Heroes STILL Don’t Appear on No Stamp, and Public Enemy take dead aim at corporate criminality on “Hoover Music,” “Fass Food,” “WTF,” “Get It In” and “I Shall Not Be Moved.” Indeed, most of Public Enemy’s new album sounds like an Occupy Wall Street manifesto. On “Catch the Thrown,” Chuck D declares: “Feed the people, fight the power, fix the poor/But that 1% done shut the door.” And on “Catch the Thrown,” “Truth Decay” and “RLTK,” the PE leader decries Wall Street’s rape of the American middle class by asserting that “never have so many been screwed by so few.”

Indeed, anyone who fails to understand why Occupy Wall Street are protesting need only listen to Most of My Heroes STILL Don’t Appear on No Stamp. Chuck D spells things out perfectly. And it’s obvious that the Public Enemy leader has no use for the Tea Party. On “WTF,” he slams the racist Prison/Industrial Complex and the Tea Party at the same time, rapping: “I’m against this prison industry, where most of them look like me/Motherfuck the what? The Tea Party.” No, the Tea Party didn’t invent the Prison/Industrial Complex. But when members of the Tea Party allied themselves with corporatists and the worst elements of the modern Republican Party (as opposed to building a third party movement), they became complicit in Wall Street’s crimes. And while it’s true that the first Tea Party rallies were held by libertarian Ron Paul supporters back in 2007—when George W. Bush was still president—the movement was totally co-opted by the likes of Dick Armey, Karl Rove, Sarah Palin and other GOP neocons in 2009. Chuck D is right to call out the Tea Party and denounce them for what they are: useful idiots for banksters, Wall Street, corporatists, the Prison/Industrial Complex and the 1%.

Thirty years ago, Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five’s “The Message” brilliantly captured the frustration and pessimism that many Americans felt during the early 1980s recession. The lyrics “It’s like a jungle/Sometimes, it makes me wonder/How I keep from going under” became hip-hop’s first sociopolitical battle cry, giving voice to those who were poor, broke or unemployed during Ronald Reagan’s first term as president. But as painful as that early 1980s recession was for many Americans, the economic crisis of 2008-2010 cuts much, much deeper. Economist John Williams (of Shadow Statistics) has said that in December 2011, the real unemployment rate in the United States was a whopping 22.4%—not the bogus figure of the U.S. government, which fails to take into account all of the Americans who have been unemployed for so long that they have fallen off the government’s radar. And it should be noted that Williams’ 22.4% figure is for Americans on the whole; in the African-American community, the unemployment rate is even higher. Chuck D is absolutely right about how brutal the economic downturn of 2008-2012 has been for black Americans.

These are perilous times that we are living in, and political hip-hop is needed more than ever. Most of My Heroes STILL Don’t Appear on No Stamp isn’t quite in a class with It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back or Fear of a Black Planet, but the Public Enemy of 2012 is compelling and riveting nonetheless. It’s good to see that Chuck D and his allies are still fighting the power after all these years.

Alex Henderson is a veteran journalist whose work has appeared in The L.A. Weekly, AlterNet, Billboard, Spin, XBIZ, Creem, Skin Two, The Pasadena Weekly, JazzTimes, Cash Box and a long list of other well-known publications. He can be followed on Twitter @alexvhenderson.