In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

that could not be played, including John Lennon’s “Imagine” and the Gap Band’s “You Dropped a Bomb on Me.” The only artist whose entire catalog was singled out was Rage Against the Machine. q: How do you reconcile being anti-corporate and being on a major label? morello: Rage Against the Machine sold 14 million records of totally subversive revolutionary propaganda. The reason why is that the albums were released on Sony and got that sort of distribution. You have two choices. I admire bands like Fugazi that take the other route. They are completely self-contained and independent. But if you do that, then you have to be a businessman. Then I have to sit there and worry about the orders to Belgium and make sure they get there. That is not what I’m going to do. We’ve had, in Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave, complete artistic control , 100 percent over everything. Every second of every video, every second of every album, every bit of advertisement comes directly from us. I don’t even look at it as a tradeo¤. You live in a friggin’ capitalist world. If you want to sell 45s out of the back of your microbus, God bless you. And maybe that works better, I don’t know. I’ll see you at the Wnish line. An Interview with Chuck D, Hip-Hop Artist Antonino D’Ambrosio august 2005 q: Do you think that hip-hop can escape the corporate grip? chuck d: I always remain optimistic. There are three levels of music production: the majors, indies, and what I call “inties,” music distributed via the Internet. The Internet is one area that I have used pretty e¤ectively to break free of corporate control . Alternative spaces, independent media, satellite, these all provide some tools by which we can work more independently and deal more directly with communities we hope to reach. Distribution is key, and Wnding alternative ways to do that with new media is critical. q: Why did you get involved with the Internet? chuck d: I became tired of submitting my art to a panel of corporate strategists who decide if it meets their standard of what gets into stores or not. It was quite simple for me: They act like judge and jury of my art, and that is unacceptable. I wanted to give it right to the public. q: How would you describe Public Enemy? chuck d: Public Enemy started out as a benchmark in rap music in the mid-1980s. We felt there was a need to actually progress the music and say something because we were slightly older than the demographic of rap artists at the time. It was a time 350 part 17 writers, musicians, & performers of heightened right-wing politics, so the climate dictated the direction of the group. The Berlin Wall was up. Nelson Mandela was in prison. Margaret Thatcher was running the U.K. Reagan was out of control in the White House. And Bush Senior was Vice President soon to be President. You can say we were up against it. q: What kind of political and cultural resistance did Public Enemy encounter? chuck d: We were coming out of the black community with this thing called rap music, which was basically black men yelling at the top of their lungs about what we liked and what we didn’t like. It was disturbing to the status quo. It really shook things up. And those in power didn’t know what to make of us, but they knew that we had to be silenced, stopped in any way from expressing our outrage. q: Hip-hop is thirty years old and now a dominant global musical force. What has been the biggest change in hip-hop over this period? chuck d: The biggest thing that has happened to hip-hop in the last ten to twelve years is the clinging on to the corporation as the all-mighty hub of the music. When culture is created in boardrooms with a panel of six or seven strategists for the masses to follow, to me that is no di¤erent than an aristocracy. It’s not created from the people in the middle of the streets, so to speak. It is created from a petri dish for the sake of making money, and it is undermining the longevity of the culture. Rap comes from the humble beginnings of rebelling against the status...

Share