The story of Public Enemy

Long Island roots

Public Enemy's story starts not in the Bronx or Brooklyn but in the black suburbs of Long Island, in towns like Roosevelt, Hempstead and Freeport. Carlton Ridenhour, the future Chuck D, was born on the first of August 1960. His mother played Motown and show tunes at home, and his father belonged to the Columbia Record Club. Around 1970, as young children, Chuck, the brothers Hank and Keith Shocklee and Richard Griffin, later Professor Griff, were bussed to a radical summer program on the Hofstra University campus. College students, among them Muslims and Black Panthers, taught them black history. Chuck later said that when they went back to school and heard that Columbus discovered America, they rejected it. He called that program the seed of Public Enemy.[1] [2]

Chuck went to Adelphi University in Garden City to study graphic design. By his own account he was thrown out in his first year for skipping classes, then let back in. He drew a cartoon strip for the student paper, designed flyers for local parties and found his way to the campus radio station, WBAU. Around the station gathered a crew who took hip hop as seriously as science. There was Bill Stephney, who hosted a show, the writer Harry Allen, Andre Brown, later famous as Doctor Dre of Yo! MTV Raps, and Hank and Keith Shocklee, whose Spectrum City sound system threw the best parties on Long Island. Several of them sat together in a black music history class taught by the drummer Andrei Strobert. Chuck graduated in 1984.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Hank Shocklee has said he first noticed Chuck when he grabbed a microphone to announce a party, and that it took him about two years to convince Chuck he could really be a rapper. Chuck's version is that he first approached Hank offering to design better flyers. Spectrum City even released a single, Check Out the Radio backed with Lies, on a dance label, but nobody paid attention. Chuck's booming delivery owed a lot to the rapper Melle Mel and to sportscasters like Marv Albert. By day he drove deliveries for a photo lab, listening to black talk radio for six or seven hours at a time. Years later he counted seventeen jobs between 1977 and 1986, from loading mail trucks to moving furniture.[1] [2] [3] [4]

William Drayton Jr was born on the sixteenth of March 1959 in Roosevelt and grew up in Freeport, where his father ran a restaurant called the Soul Diner. He taught himself piano at five, sang in his church youth choir, and Chuck would later claim he could play fifteen instruments. His teenage years were rougher. He dropped out of high school in eleventh grade after spells in jail for robbery and burglary, then went to culinary school. His stage name, Flavor Flav, began as his graffiti tag, and at WBAU he shared a show with a DJ called Mellow D, a tall, quiet young man named Norman Rogers. Flav is also a cousin of the Wu-Tang Clan's RZA, GZA and Ol' Dirty Bastard. After graduating, Chuck got Flav a job delivering furniture in his father's truck.[1] [2] [3]

Building the Enemy

When Bill Stephney left Adelphi, Doctor Dre took over his radio show. As a promo, Chuck and Flav cut a boastful freestyle called Public Enemy Number One. Chuck chose the name partly because he felt hounded by a local MC who kept wanting to battle him. It was only ever meant for WBAU, but a tape reached Rick Rubin, the young cofounder of Def Jam, and he fell for Chuck's voice. Stephney says the members of Run DMC were walking around playing it as well. Stephney, by now working at Def Jam, was given the job of helping Rubin sign Chuck. Chuck held out at first. He was already in his mid twenties and later said he saw becoming an entertainer as a step down.[1] [2] [3]

Rubin wanted a solo rapper. Chuck refused to come in alone. He has described himself as a group loyalist, and said that if he got in, everyone got in. The hardest sell was Flavor Flav. Rubin could not see what Flav's clowning added, and even Stephney admits he thought Flav was a clown who would water down the politics. Hank Shocklee argued the opposite. A voice like a preacher's needed contrast, and he later put it in radio terms, saying Chuck was the record and Flav was the DJ. Stephney, meanwhile, had sketched an idea for a group that combined the street sound of Run DMC with the political urgency of the Clash. That idea became the blueprint.[1] [2] [3]

The team came together around it. Hank, his brother Keith and the musician Eric Sadler became the production crew later known as the Bomb Squad, with Chuck credited under the name Carl Ryder. Richard Griffin, an Army veteran and martial arts teacher who ran security at Spectrum City parties with a crew called Unity Force, became Professor Griff, the Minister of Information, a title borrowed from the Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver. His guards became the S1Ws, the Security of the First World, drilling on stage in military fatigues with plastic Uzis. Norman Rogers became Terminator X, a name Chuck gave him and he reportedly disliked. And Chuck drew the logo himself, a silhouette of a young man in a rifle's crosshairs.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Money was scarce. Hank Shocklee recalled that the first deal was really a five thousand dollar deal for a twelve inch single, far too little to hire musicians, so he built the tracks from his own records, samples in a drum machine and the DJ's scratches. They rented cheap time in a small studio near Wall Street, waiting until Mantronix finished his sessions at two or three in the morning, and turned one single into an album. Yo! Bum Rush the Show came out on Def Jam in early 1987. Most radio ignored it, black stations included, and it peaked at number one hundred twenty five on the Billboard album chart. In Britain, though, NME named it the best album of the year.[1] [2]

Before the album was even out, Public Enemy opened for their label mates the Beastie Boys in fifteen cities at the height of Licensed to Ill mania, confronting party crowds with sirens, marching S1Ws and Flav's cry of yeah boy. In the Village Voice, John Leland reviewed the debut under the headline Noise Annoys. Chuck took offence, and Bring the Noise became part of his answer. Sales were slow at first, around two hundred thousand by Stephney's count, while Def Jam's other stars sold millions. Stephney stepped back from day to day production, and Chuck and Hank went back into the studio determined to hit harder and faster.[1] [2] [3]

A nation of millions

Touring Europe with LL Cool J in 1987 taught the group something. Chuck remembered London crowds throwing coins when LL sang his ballad, then going wild for Public Enemy. He relished Britain because he knew the music press would write seriously about them, and he later called it Public Enemy's own British invasion. Back home he felt the debut already sounded dated. Most rap records then ran at around ninety eight beats per minute. Chuck and Hank pushed theirs to around one hundred and nine, to capture the heat of their live shows. The first result was Rebel Without a Pause, which Chuck wrote in less than a day and nailed in three takes.[1] [2] [3]

Hank built Rebel Without a Pause around a squealing saxophone slide from the J.B.'s instrumental The Grunt. The Bomb Squad could not find a drum sample they liked, and rather than loop the overused Funky Drummer break, they had Flavor Flav, the best drummer in the group, play the beat himself on a drum machine for the whole five minutes. Terminator X asked for a chance at the scratching and delivered what fans called the transformer scratch, because it sounded like the robots in the Transformers cartoon changing shape. Chuck said that after hearing the final mix he could die tomorrow. Hank knew it was a hit when he saw kids rush the floor at Madison Square Garden.[1] [2]

The next album was meant to be a hip hop answer to Marvin Gaye's What's Going On. Sessions began at Chung King Studios, where the group clashed with engineers who looked down on rap, and moved to Greene Street Recording. Working under the title Countdown to Armageddon, they cut It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back in about thirty days for roughly twenty five thousand dollars, then mixed it by hand with no automation. Chuck called Hank the Phil Spector of hip hop. Eric Sadler was the musician, Keith knew the breakbeats and sound effects, Chuck hunted vocal samples, and Hank had the final word. If a record sounded too clean, he would sometimes stomp on it.[1]

It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back came out on the twenty eighth of June 1988. It sold half a million copies in its first month with little promotion, topped the black albums chart and went platinum the next year. Don't Believe the Hype, which Chuck said drew on Noam Chomsky's ideas about the media, and Night of the Living Baseheads, about the crack epidemic, carried the message. It became the first hip hop album voted best of the year in the Village Voice's Pazz and Jop critics' poll, and in 2020 Rolling Stone ranked it the fifteenth greatest album ever made. The record also praised Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, and that would soon matter.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Fight the Power and the Griff crisis

In 1988 Spike Lee was making Do the Right Thing, set on one scorching day on a Brooklyn block where racial tension boils over, and he wanted a defiant song as its heartbeat. According to Okayplayer, his first idea was a new version of Lift Every Voice and Sing with the trumpeter Terence Blanchard, but the group talked him into something else. Flying over Italy on tour, Chuck wrote most of Fight the Power. The title and spirit came from the Isley Brothers' 1975 hit, a record that had hit him hard at fifteen. He chose not to sample it. He wanted to carry its meaning into what he called the R and B years, meaning Reagan and Bush.[1] [2] [3]

The Bomb Squad stacked loops on top of loops, most fragments shorter than a second, with James Brown grunts, a civil rights speech and a snatch of Afrika Bambaataa. The only live players were Terminator X and the jazz saxophonist Branford Marsalis, who noted with amusement that they laid his solo over the wrong chords and liked it more the stranger it sounded. The third verse caused the uproar, dismissing Elvis Presley and John Wayne as heroes of a white America that ignored black ones. Spike Lee shot the video on the twenty second of April 1989 in Bedford Stuyvesant as a staged youth march. In the film, the character Radio Raheem blasts the song from his boombox.[1] [2] [3]

Then came the crisis. Professor Griff had already made homophobic and antisemitic remarks to British music papers in 1988. On the twenty second of May 1989, the Washington Times ran an interview by David Mills in which Griff said Jews were responsible for most of the wickedness in the world, among other antisemitic claims. The Jewish Defense Organization announced a boycott and later picketed screenings of Do the Right Thing. Def Jam's Lyor Cohen, the son of Israeli immigrants, has said he arranged for a Holocaust museum to give the band a private tour. Chuck apologized for Griff's words, and people who worked with the group began to question his leadership.[1] [2] [3] [4]

What followed was chaos. On the twenty first of June 1989, Chuck announced Griff's dismissal at a press conference. Days later Def Jam said Chuck had disbanded the group, and Chuck went on MTV suggesting Public Enemy was pretty much over. In the middle of it, Fight the Power came out on the fourth of July on a one off deal with Motown. With the group out of sight, it rose to number one on the rap chart and stayed there six weeks. On the ninth of August, Public Enemy announced they were back in action. Griff was rehired with a community relations title, but more protests followed and he was soon out. Chuck insisted he had never said they had disbanded.[1] [2] [3] [4]

That summer the song became a real world rallying cry. After sixteen year old Yusef Hawkins was murdered in Bensonhurst in August 1989, it played at the marches that followed, and students chanted its title as police clashed with crowds at Greekfest in Virginia Beach. Village Voice critics named it single of the year, it earned a Grammy nomination, and in 2021 Rolling Stone ranked it the second greatest song of all time. Chuck has called it the most important record the group ever made, and Public Enemy close their concerts with it. Harry Allen, the WBAU friend heard on Don't Believe the Hype, now became their publicist, calling himself the media assassin.[1] [2] [3]

Fear of a Black Planet

The third album was recorded between June and October 1989, across Greene Street in Manhattan and two Long Island studios. Chuck wanted a deeper, more focused record, built partly on the psychiatrist Frances Cress Welsing's theory about color and racism. The Bomb Squad pushed their wall of noise even further. Chuck guessed they used a hundred and fifty to two hundred samples, and said that ninety five percent of the time it sounded like a mess, but five percent was magic. Much of it was improvised on the spot. It was not a happy process. Eric Sadler later said the album should have been better, if they had had more time and if people had been talking to each other.[1]

The first single, Welcome to the Terrordome, came out in January 1990 and was Chuck's furious answer to the summer before. It referenced the murder of Yusef Hawkins and the Virginia Beach riots, and it hit back at the critics and Jewish leaders who had protested over Griff. Some of its lines were condemned as antisemitic, including by the critic Robert Christgau, which reopened the wound. Others heard a career peak, and AllMusic called it arguably the production high point of the Bomb Squad. Def Jam's Bill Adler said the Griff crisis partly fueled the writing of the whole album, and a promoter recalled their tour insurance nearly tripling per head that summer.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Flavor Flav got his own spotlight. Chuck suggested he write a song, and Flav came back with 911 Is a Joke, a satire about emergency services failing black neighborhoods. Flav later admitted he was high when he wrote it. The video, directed by Charles Stone the Third, features a then unknown Samuel L. Jackson. The single went to number one on the rap chart even though, according to Billboard, only one station on its top forty panel was playing it. Flav's other solo track, Can't Do Nuttin' for Ya Man, turned up in the comedy House Party. In 1995 Duran Duran of all people covered 911 Is a Joke.[1] [2]

Fear of a Black Planet came out on the tenth of April 1990, with a cover by the NASA illustrator B.E. Johnson showing two planets in eclipse. Radio still largely shunned the group, so Russell Simmons went back to street promotion, sending crews out with posters and personally lobbying club DJs. The album reached number ten in America and sold about two million copies there, by one Chicago critic's estimate more than half of them to white fans. Burn Hollywood Burn, with Ice Cube and Big Daddy Kane, was one of the first times MCs from different crews teamed up on record, and it led the Bomb Squad to produce Ice Cube's solo debut. The album was later added to the Library of Congress's National Recording Registry.[1] [2]

Apocalypse and Arizona

After Fear of a Black Planet, the Bomb Squad quietly drifted apart. The Guardian reports that Stephney and Hank Shocklee fell out. Hank also said that the disks holding years of their work had been stolen, and that they never really recovered from the loss. Into the gap stepped Gary Rinaldo, a young Long Island DJ known as Gary G-Wiz, who handed Chuck a tape of beats. A planned EP grew into an album credited to a team called the Imperial Grand Ministers of Funk, two of whose members, Stuart Robertz and Cerwin Depper, were fictional. The sound was leaner, with more live musicians, but the anger was intact.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Apocalypse 91, The Enemy Strikes Black came out on the first of October 1991. It debuted at number four in America, went platinum within two months and finished second in the Pazz and Jop poll, behind Nirvana's Nevermind. Can't Truss It, about the legacy of slavery, gave them their first Billboard Hot 100 hit. The album closed with a thrash version of Bring the Noise with Anthrax, the metal band Chuck had name checked years earlier. The two groups toured together, and Chuck admitted Anthrax flattened them at first, forcing Public Enemy to raise their intensity and hire a dedicated lighting operator. On stage Flav would crow that people said this tour would never happen.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

One song on the album came from pure outrage. In 1987 Arizona governor Evan Mecham had cancelled the state's Martin Luther King holiday, and in November 1990 Arizona voters rejected it. Chuck, who likes to start with a title, borrowed one from Isaac Hayes's version of By the Time I Get to Phoenix and wrote By the Time I Get to Arizona. It was first rapped over the beat that became Shut 'Em Down. Mid session, Chuck told G-Wiz to erase the middle of the track, and they filled the gap with an organ sample from the Jacksons. The video, directed by Eric Meza, showed black paramilitaries killing Arizona politicians, one of them with a car bomb, intercut with scenes of King's persecution and assassination.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The video's premiere on MTV in January 1992 caused a storm. King's widow, Coretta Scott King, said she had not seen it but condemned violence in any form. A spokesman for Governor Fife Symington called it repugnant, and a leading black campaigner for the holiday said it did a disservice to King's legacy. Chuck called it a trip into the fantasy world of Public Enemy, and later said he was answering the violence done to King, not contradicting his message. On stage the group hung an effigy of a Klansman during the song. Opening for U2 at Sun Devil Stadium in Tempe in 1992, they played only that one song and left, Chuck says with Bono's blessing.[1] [2] [3]

Sister Souljah, an activist and writer who had worked with the group and appears at the start of the Arizona song, was briefly their Minister of Information. In May 1992, after the Los Angeles riots, a remark she made about violence in a Washington Post interview drew a public rebuke from presidential candidate Bill Clinton, coining the phrase a Sister Souljah moment. That summer Public Enemy became one of the first rap acts at the Reading Festival, headlining its second day, and they played to vast crowds as guests on U2's Zoo TV tour. Greatest Misses, a collection of remixes and new songs, arrived that September and was nominated for a Grammy. The glory run, though, was ending.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

Falling apart, starting over

Behind the scenes, Flavor Flav was in freefall. In 1991 he pleaded guilty to assaulting his then girlfriend Karen Ross, the mother of his first three children. He served thirty days in jail, lost custody of his children and sank deeper into addiction. In 1993 he was charged with attempted murder for shooting at a neighbor and spent ninety days behind bars, followed by more charges for domestic violence and drug possession. His family staged an intervention and he entered the Betty Ford Center for crack cocaine addiction. He later said that at his worst he spent up to two thousand six hundred dollars a day on crack. It was a painful irony for a group that had preached against drugs.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In 1994 Terminator X was badly hurt in a motorcycle accident that shattered his left leg and kept him in hospital for a month. That August the group returned with Muse Sick-n-Hour Mess Age, a pun on music in our message. Its single Give It Up reached number thirty three on the Billboard Hot 100, their only top forty hit in America. Many critics were harsh, saying the group sounded out of touch in the age of gangsta rap, and sales suffered when Def Jam moved from Sony to PolyGram just before release. Still, the album went gold. Afterwards Public Enemy went quiet for four years, and Chuck made a solo record, Autobiography of Mistachuck, in 1996.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In 1998 Spike Lee called again, and Public Enemy made the soundtrack to his basketball drama He Got Game. Professor Griff and members of the Bomb Squad returned, and the title track reworked Buffalo Springfield's For What It's Worth with Stephen Stills himself singing on it. It reached the UK top twenty, but in America the album sold poorly. The Los Angeles Times critic Robert Hilburn argued that young rap fans wanted heroes of their own and saw Public Enemy as another era. It was also their last album for Def Jam for twenty two years. As part of leaving the label, Chuck got the rights to his Public Enemy compositions back.[1] [2] [3]

That year Terminator X decided to retire. He had moved to a farm in Vance County, North Carolina, and left music altogether. To replace him, Professor Griff spotted a young turntablist called DJ Lord at a DJ battle, and Lord joined just in time for the group's fortieth world tour. He has been their DJ ever since, winning battle titles along the way. Around the same time Chuck became one of the loudest musicians defending the internet. In May 2000, when most of the industry was attacking Napster, he debated the subject on Charlie Rose alongside Metallica's Lars Ulrich, and he later testified before Congress in support of sharing music online.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Public Enemy put that belief into practice. There's a Poison Goin' On was sold online through the website of the label Atomic Pop in May 1999, weeks before it reached record stores, making it one of the first albums by a major act released that way. Its closing track, Swindler's Lust, attacked the record industry, but the Anti Defamation League said its title played on Schindler's List and used antisemitic code words. The label replied that the song contained no antisemitic references. Chuck had his own legal fight too. He sued the estate of the Notorious B.I.G. over a sample of his voice counting on Ten Crack Commandments, settled in 1998, and later called the decision to sue stupid.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Reality TV and reinvention

By 2000 Flavor Flav was living in a small Bronx apartment with his girlfriend and her children, scalping baseball tickets to get by. In 2002 he spent nine weeks on Rikers Island for driving with a suspended license, unpaid parking tickets and turning up late for probation. Afterwards he moved back in with his mother on Long Island. Worried about him, Chuck suggested at the end of 2003 that Flav move to Los Angeles. Within months the producers of the VH1 show The Surreal Life sought him out. Flav thought the show was for fading celebrities and said no, until MC Hammer, a former cast member, talked him into it.[1] [2] [3]

On The Surreal Life, Flav fell for the Danish actress Brigitte Nielsen, and VH1 gave the couple their own show, Strange Love. It ended with Nielsen returning to her fiance, and the Guardian reported that Chuck found it so tedious he wrote to complain. Then came Flavor of Love, a Bachelor style dating show in which contestants got clocks instead of roses. It ran for three seasons and spun off several shows of its own. In the final reunion Flav proposed to Liz Trujillo, the mother of his son Karma. In 2007 Comedy Central roasted him. Griff mocked his stint milking cows on British reality TV, and Flav admitted he should have talked to his group first.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Public Enemy themselves kept working on the margins. They released Revolverlution in 2002, New Whirl Odor in 2005 and, with the Oakland rapper and producer Paris, Rebirth of a Nation in 2006. They toured relentlessly. In 2006 the Guardian found them on their fifty fourth world tour, playing to two hundred and fifty people in a bar above a pizza restaurant in Stockholm. Chuck ran his own label and praised the internet for letting artists bypass gatekeepers like MTV. In 2005 they received a MOBO award for outstanding contribution to black music at London's Royal Albert Hall, and in 2007 marked twenty years with an album titled How You Sell Soul to a Soulless People Who Sold Their Soul.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]

One song from that 2007 album got a remarkable second life. Harder Than You Think, produced by Gary G-Wiz around a horn part borrowed from Shirley Bassey's Jezahel, was chosen by Channel 4 for its coverage of the 2012 London Paralympics. The trailer made it a phenomenon, and in September 2012 it reached number four in the UK, their biggest British hit ever, a quarter of a century after they first played London. It became the theme of the comedy show The Last Leg and of Channel 4's Paralympic coverage for years afterward. The same year Public Enemy released two albums, Most of My Heroes Still Don't Appear on No Stamp and The Evil Empire of Everything, which Chuck called fraternal twins.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

Flav's troubles did not end with fame. His fried chicken restaurant in Clinton, Iowa, closed within about four months in 2011 amid squabbling owners and bounced checks. On the seventeenth of October 2012 he was arrested in Las Vegas after a fight with Liz Trujillo, accused of assaulting her and threatening her teenage son with a knife. He later pleaded guilty to two misdemeanors and was ordered to attend counseling. On the last day of 2013 his mother, Anna, died. Days later he was stopped for speeding on a Long Island parkway on his way to her funeral, and police found his license had been suspended sixteen times.[1] [2] [3]

Hall of fame, hoaxes and homecoming

In 2013 Public Enemy were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, one of the few hip hop acts to be honored there, with Terminator X inducted alongside them. That same year Adelphi gave Chuck an honorary doctorate. The records kept coming, often released directly to fans. Man Plans God Laughs arrived in 2015, a title Chuck took from the basketball great Julius Erving, and Nothing Is Quick in the Desert was given away free on Bandcamp in 2017 for the group's thirtieth anniversary. Chuck also launched PE 2.0 with the Oakland rapper Jahi, and he lost his California home in the Thomas Fire, which burned from December 2017 into 2018.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

In 2016 Chuck and DJ Lord joined three members of Rage Against the Machine and Cypress Hill's B-Real in a supergroup named after a Public Enemy song, Prophets of Rage. They toured and released an album before disbanding in 2019, when Rage reunited. Meanwhile the partnership at Public Enemy's core was strained. In 2017 Flavor Flav sued Chuck and the group's management, claiming he had been shut out of profits they had agreed to split. The case against Chuck was dismissed in 2019. That same year Chuck sued his own publisher, Reach Music, claiming it had cheated him out of royalties, a claim its president firmly denied.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

In early 2020 the rift went public. Chuck was booked to perform as Public Enemy Radio at a Los Angeles rally for Bernie Sanders, and Flav's lawyer sent the campaign a cease and desist letter saying Chuck alone did not speak for Public Enemy. On the first of March, Chuck, DJ Lord, Jahi and two S1Ws announced that the group was moving on without Flav. They said he had been suspended since missing a Harry Belafonte benefit in 2016 and always chose partying over work. Flav answered that he could not be fired. Then on April Fools' Day, Chuck declared the whole split a hoax inspired by Orson Welles's War of the Worlds. Flav replied that he was not part of the hoax.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Whatever happened behind the scenes, they were soon side by side again. In June 2020 Public Enemy opened the BET Awards with a new Fight the Power featuring Nas, Rapsody, Black Thought and YG, reflecting the protests over the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. They returned to Def Jam, and What You Gonna Do When the Grid Goes Down came out that September, with guests from Run DMC and the Beastie Boys and a cameo from Terminator X. Earlier that year the group had received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. In late 2021 Flav was charged with misdemeanor domestic battery in Nevada, but the charge was dropped when he pleaded no contest to coercion for grabbing a phone. He was celebrating a year without alcohol at the time.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

In his sixties, Flav found an unlikely new role. In October 2023 he sang The Star Spangled Banner at a Milwaukee Bucks game, calling it a bucket list item. In 2024 he signed a five year deal as official hype man and sponsor for the United States water polo teams, cheered them in Paris and helped Olympic and Paralympic athletes pay their bills. In June 2025 Public Enemy surprise released their sixteenth album, Black Sky Over the Projects, Apartment 2025, pay what you want for three days, played London's Royal Albert Hall and toured European stadiums with Guns N' Roses. Chuck, about to turn sixty five, said there was no template for doing this in your sixties. As of 2026, Chuck and Flav remain the only members who have been there from the very start to now.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

The people around Public Enemy

Chuck D and Flavor Flav. They met around WBAU and Adelphi in the early eighties, and Chuck refused to sign to Def Jam without him. Chuck was the preacher and Flav the comic release, and Chuck has called them the Mick Jagger and Keith Richards of hip hop. Their bond survived Flav's addiction, jail terms and reality TV, a 2017 lawsuit over money, and the strange public firing of 2020. They were still recording and touring together in 2025.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Chuck D and Professor Griff. By Wikipedia's dates they were born on the very same day, the first of August 1960, and as children both attended the same radical summer program at Hofstra. Griff built the S1Ws and gave the group its militant look. His antisemitic remarks in 1989 nearly destroyed Public Enemy, and Chuck fired him. Griff returned for He Got Game in 1998 and toured with the group again in the two thousands before parting ways once more.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

Chuck D and Hank Shocklee. Hank ran Spectrum City, the Long Island sound system, and spent two years persuading Chuck he could be a rapper. As leader of the Bomb Squad he shaped Public Enemy's wall of noise, and Chuck calls him the Phil Spector of hip hop. The production team drifted apart after 1990, but Chuck still credits Hank's daring for the records that made their name.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Public Enemy and Rick Rubin. Rick Rubin heard Chuck's WBAU promo and pushed Def Jam to sign him, though he wanted a solo rapper and could not see the point of Flavor Flav. Chuck insisted on bringing the whole crew. Rubin left Def Jam in 1988 after falling out with Lyor Cohen, but kept working with the group and later called them the only important breakthrough artist of their kind with a significant political message.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Public Enemy and Spike Lee. Spike Lee asked them for a song for Do the Right Thing, directed the Fight the Power video in Bedford Stuyvesant, and stood by the group as the Griff scandal threatened his film. Nearly a decade later he hired them again to make the soundtrack for his basketball drama He Got Game, which became their last Def Jam album for twenty two years.[1] [2] [3]

Public Enemy and Anthrax. Chuck name checked the thrash band in Bring the Noise, and Anthrax started playing the song live in 1989. In 1991 the two groups recorded it together and toured as a double bill, helping to invent rap metal. Chuck admits Anthrax outplayed them at first and says they were among his best teachers, showing Public Enemy how to perform stronger, harder and faster.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Flavor Flav and Brigitte Nielsen. The Danish actress and the hype man met on VH1's The Surreal Life in 2004 and began a relationship that got its own spin off, Strange Love. It ended with Nielsen going back to her fiance. She stayed a friend, appearing on Flavor of Love and at the 2007 roast of Flavor Flav, days after leaving rehab.[1] [2] [3]

Chuck D and Bill Stephney. Stephney met Chuck at Adelphi in 1982 and compared it to meeting a star. He hosted the WBAU show where the crew gathered, joined Def Jam, helped sign Chuck, and dreamed up the idea of a group that sounded like Run DMC with the politics of the Clash. He coproduced the debut, then stepped back from daily production when Def Jam colleagues complained he was favoring the group.[1] [2] [3]

Chuck D and Gary G-Wiz. When the Bomb Squad drifted apart, the young Long Island DJ Gary Rinaldo handed Chuck a tape of beats. A planned EP grew into Apocalypse 91, and G-Wiz became a longtime Public Enemy producer, working on their albums well into the twenty tens and producing Harder Than You Think, the song that finally gave them a UK top five hit.[1] [2] [3]

Public Enemy and Harry Allen. Harry Allen met Chuck in a graphic design class at Adelphi in 1982. He wrote one of the first articles explaining the group's politics, is the voice answering Flav at the end of Don't Believe the Hype, and after the Griff scandal became their publicist, calling himself the media assassin. He also built the group's first online presence in 1991.[1] [2]

Chuck D and Sister Souljah. The activist and writer joined Public Enemy's circle after Griff's departure and appears at the start of By the Time I Get to Arizona. When Bill Clinton attacked her words about the Los Angeles riots in 1992, she became the center of a national political storm. She later became a bestselling novelist and has appeared on later Public Enemy projects, including Rebirth of a Nation.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Rare facts about Public Enemy

• Flavor Flav, not a sampled break, played the drum beat on Rebel Without a Pause. The Bomb Squad could not find a drum sample they liked, so Flav, the group's best drummer, played the pattern live on a drum machine for the full five minutes of the track.[1] [2]
• The squeal on Rebel Without a Pause is a saxophone slide from the J.B.'s instrumental The Grunt. Hank Shocklee first built the demo on a cheap sampler that held only about three seconds, and the tiny delay as it reloaded became part of the sound they chose to keep.[1]
• Terminator X's famous transformer scratch was named after the Transformers cartoon. The scratch was said to sound like the robots changing shape. Terminator X asked for a chance to scratch on Rebel Without a Pause after the track was meant to go to Johnny Juice.[1] [2]
• It Takes a Nation of Millions was designed to be exactly one hour long. The group wanted thirty minutes a side so that cassette listeners would not sit through long stretches of silence. Hank Shocklee also flipped the two sides at the last minute before mastering.[1]
• The famous breakdown in Bring the Noise began as a mistake. The wrong sequence came up on the sampler, leaving the Funky Drummer kick drum playing alone. Hank Shocklee kept it and had Chuck rewrite his rhyme to fit.[1]
• Flavor Flav's phone call in Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos was a real phone call. To get the effect, Flav went into another room and phoned the studio while they recorded him.[1]
• Joey Ramone turned down a role in the Black Steel video. The group wanted him to play a prisoner in the video, shot in the abandoned Essex County Jail in Newark. He refused because of Professor Griff's antisemitic remarks.[1]
• A then unknown Samuel L. Jackson appears in the video for 911 Is a Joke. The video, directed by Charles Stone the Third, shows an injured Flavor Flav being mishandled by a late, careless ambulance crew.[1]
• 911 Is a Joke samples Vincent Price's laugh from Michael Jackson's Thriller. It also borrows from Parliament and from Eddie Murphy's comedy routines, part of the dense sample collage typical of the Bomb Squad.[1]
• The cover of Fear of a Black Planet was painted by a NASA illustrator. B.E. Johnson drew Chuck's idea of two planets eclipsing. Def Jam's creative director said it was unusual for a black hip hop act to skip a photo and go for rock style art.[1]
• Under later sample clearance rates, Fear of a Black Planet would have lost money. Law professors Peter DiCola and Kembrew McLeod estimated that if its samples had been cleared at 2010 rates, the album would have lost at least five dollars on every copy sold.[1] [2]
• Branford Marsalis played on Fight the Power and was amused by what they did to his solo. The Bomb Squad laid his improvisations over the wrong chords on purpose. Marsalis said the more unconventional it sounded, the more they liked it.[1]
• The Fight the Power single had no instrumental on the B side. Instead Motown's single offered Flavor Flav Meets Spike Lee, nearly five minutes of the two talking and arguing over the beat. Okayplayer argues an instrumental would have sold far more.[1]
• In 1991 a banned Belgrade radio station fought back by playing Fight the Power. When B92 was barred from reporting on the protests, it played the song on heavy rotation to rally the crowds, which is why Time Out later ranked it top of its songs that changed history.[1]
• The Public Enemy logo was first drawn for an imaginary group. Chuck sketched the crosshairs silhouette for a made up act called Funky Frank and the Street Force on a radio flyer, and later reused it. Designer Eric Haze cleaned it up for the first album.[1]
• The back of Yo! Bum Rush the Show labels its sides E and F instead of A and B. Hank Shocklee says it was a nod to the E and F subway trains, which people had to ride from Queens to reach Long Island.[1]
• Chuck D once road tested new tracks on his girlfriend, and scrapped any she liked. If she enjoyed a track, it was judged too soft for Public Enemy, according to the Guardian's 2006 profile.[1]
• Chuck D and Professor Griff share a birthday, the first of August 1960. By Wikipedia's dates, the two were born on exactly the same day. They also attended the same Hofstra summer program as children.[1] [2] [3]
• Flavor Flav's clock was set to five past six, according to a 2006 profile. He told the Guardian he wore it so he always knew what time it was. Chuck later joked that it never had new batteries, so he was the one keeping them on time.[1] [2]
• Chuck D says Flav can play fifteen instruments, and jokes that he himself can't play the lottery. Flav taught himself piano at five, and Chuck has called him the most musical member of Public Enemy, able to play everything from drums to oboe.[1] [2]
• Before becoming Terminator X, Norman Rogers was a WBAU DJ called Mellow D. Chuck gave him his new name, which the Guardian says he disliked. He cohosted a radio show with Flavor Flav packed with train station announcements and skits.[1]
• Professor Griff's title, Minister of Information, was borrowed from the Black Panthers. It was the title Eldridge Cleaver held in the Panther party, and Griff turned his security crew, Unity Force, into the uniformed S1Ws.[1] [2]
• Two of the producers credited on Apocalypse 91 never existed. The Imperial Grand Ministers of Funk included Stuart Robertz and Cerwin Depper, both fictional names, alongside real producers Gary G-Wiz and the JBL.[1] [2]
• By the Time I Get to Arizona was first recorded over a different beat. Chuck's vocal was originally laid over the track that became Shut 'Em Down, and somewhere in the tapes that version still exists, he told Spin.[1] [2]
• Public Enemy sampled a Mr. Magic radio diss that Flavor Flav taped off the air. Magic, a leading New York radio DJ, had dismissed the group on his show, and his line ended up on the Nation of Millions track Cold Lampin' with Flavor.[1] [2]
• Chuck D voiced a DJ in Grand Theft Auto San Andreas. He hosted the in game station Playback FM, which also played Rebel Without a Pause. Harry Allen worked at Rockstar Games at the time and called the game credit his proudest byline.[1] [2] [3]
• Chuck D sued the Notorious B.I.G.'s estate over a sample of him counting. Ten Crack Commandments used Chuck's count from Shut 'Em Down. He settled out of court in 1998 and later called the decision to sue stupid.[1] [2]
• A fan mashup of Shut 'Em Down turned into an official Prodigy release. After Liam Howlett saw a fan's mix with the Prodigy's Stand Up online, the band released it as Shut 'Em Up, and it was later used in a Nike advert.[1]
• Harder Than You Think became Public Enemy's biggest UK hit thanks to the Paralympics. Channel 4 used it for its 2012 Paralympics trailer and coverage, sending it to number four in September 2012, five years after release.[1] [2] [3]
• Chuck D does not drink alcohol, and the Guardian says he has never drunk coffee either. Early on he promised fans the group would not put anything harmful in their bodies, a vow that made Flavor Flav's later addiction all the more jarring.[1] [2]
• Before their debut album was released, Public Enemy opened for the Beastie Boys in fifteen cities. The tour came at the height of Licensed to Ill, and the Guardian says the S1Ws marched on stage in fatigues with plastic Uzis.[1]
• Public Enemy's tour insurance nearly tripled per head after the Griff scandal. Promoter Darryll Brooks recalled it jumping from fifty five cents to a dollar fifty five a person in the summer of 1989.[1]
• Flavor Flav wore a number fifty nine jersey to sing The Star Spangled Banner at a Bucks game. The number marked the year he was born. He called the October 2023 performance a bucket list item and shrugged off the mixed reaction online.[1]
• Flavor Flav is the official hype man of US water polo. In 2024 he answered captain Maggie Steffens's online appeal for funding by signing a five year sponsorship deal, then cheered the team in Paris wearing a waterproof clock.[1]
• Public Enemy sold their 2025 album on a pay what you want basis for its first three days. Black Sky Over the Projects, Apartment 2025 appeared on Bandcamp without warning on the day of their first UK show in nearly a decade, at the Royal Albert Hall.[1] [2]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.