Public Enemy’s Chuck D on sketching, satire and 1980s graffiti: ‘Most of it was trash’

Before forming the rap group Public Enemy in 1985, Chuck D was a graphic design student. He created their celebrated logo, a silhouetted figure with arms crossed in a B-boy stance targeted in the crosshairs of a rifle scope. It encapsulated the seditionary mix of radical black politics, battering-ram beats and moral trenchancy that the Long Islanders brought to hip-hop. It also marked the end of Chuck’s plans to become a professional illustrator.

“Well, my thing is I first got into this industry wanting to do flyers and artwork attached to hip-hop,” the 62-year-old tells me. “I was so visual-minded that it wasn’t until my twenties that I wrote my first poems, which were raps. Up to 25 years old, it was art all of the time. At 25, Public Enemy began. From then to 55, it was just music, music, music.” 

And what music it was. With knockout albums such as 1988’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, Chuck and his bandmates spearheaded rap’s spread overseas from its New York base. His authoritative voice is among the most distinctive in hip-hop history. But as he has got older, he has found himself drawn back to his first love: illustration. “It seems like artworks and art books have captured my fancy,” he says.

We speak by video call. It’s midnight in Los Angeles, where Chuck, real name Carlton Douglas Ridenhour, lives with his wife, UCLA associate professor Gaye Theresa Johnson. “I work at night,” he explains. “I get up early in the morning too, although not as early as in the old days.” He gives a baritone chuckle. Behind him are shelves stacked with CDs and books. He wears a black baseball cap and sits at a desk with a mug filled with pens and pencils at his elbow.

Up to 25 years old, it was art all of the time. At 25, Public Enemy began. From then to 55, it was just music, music, music

Chuck is an inveterate draughtsman. He dashes out drawings at a ferocious rate, pencil scribbling on paper like the pressing tempo of a Public Enemy song. “Courtroom speed,” he calls it, as though sketching the suspect at a murder trial for the evening news. His style is messy and impressionistic. “They’re illustrations with the pulse of the human mistake,” he says. The dashed-off quality is deliberate. “Yeah, it’s jazz.”

Hundreds of his pictures feature in his art book Livin’ Loud with short textual accompaniments. There are portraits of musical heroes ranging from Woody Guthrie to James Brown, alongside contemporaries from hip-hop’s golden age in the 1980s such as Run DMC, DJ Kool Herc and his Public Enemy sidekick Flavor Flav. Basketball and baseball scenes attest to a love of sport: his forthright vocal style was partly influenced by sportscast commentators. Tableaux from life on the road while touring were made after he discovered that the Rolling Stones’s Charlie Watts drew every hotel room he stayed in. “I was like, wow! Every hotel room? I went from there with it.”

As to be expected from the vocalist of perhaps the most forceful protest song ever, Public Enemy’s 1989 anthem “Fight the Power”, there’s much social commentary in the book. Scrawled pictures of Black Lives Matter protests and Donald Trump do the work that his sternly rapped verses often have done. “I wanted to be a political satirist at university, commenting about what I saw in the world,” he says. “It’s funny that from 25 years old onwards, the words in Public Enemy became my foray into the world and my art took a back seat.”

I was a firm believer that everybody didn’t deserve a can. When you looked at the trains you’d see lesser work covering up great work

Chuck’s zeal for illustration started as a child. His parents were supportive, even when he was chastised at school for doodling in lessons. “They were independent enough and young enough to encourage me, like: ‘Learn the arts. If you’re going to do that, do it.’ I really give them the utmost credit for their encouragement.” (His mother, Judy Ridenhour, ran a community theatre company whose attendees included a young Eddie Murphy.)

His Long Island home was in the so-called “black belt” of African-American suburbs fringing New York, which played an outsized role in the city’s hip-hop scene. By 1980, 40 per cent of white New Yorkers lived in suburbs, compared with only 8 per cent of black New Yorkers. Yet Long Island’s black belt produced a significant number of 1980s rap acts alongside Public Enemy, such as De La Soul and Eric B and Rakim.

Chuck credits his suburban upbringing with giving him self-belief and aspiration. “No question. My eyes were open because we were from the city but not of the city,” he says. His ambition to be an illustrator led to Adelphi University in Long Island where he studied graphic design. While undertaking his formal training, he was never tempted to take up a spray can with the graffiti crews that were illicitly tagging and painting New York’s subway system and buildings.

Graffiti is one of the four branches of hip-hop culture with breakdancing, rapping and deejaying. But Chuck takes a dim view of its merits. “I thought most of it was trash in the ’70s and ’80s,” he says. “I was a firm believer that everybody didn’t deserve a can. When you looked at the trains you’d see lesser work covering up great work. When someone great bombed the train [with graffiti] they knew that their shit was temporary because someone else would bomb over it.”

His stentorian mode of rapping owed something to his father, Lorenzo Ridenhour, a US Marine Corps veteran whom he idolised. “My father’s voice was big. It was similar to hearing Martin Luther King’s voice on the radio.” When he died in 2016, Chuck was bereft. Unconsoled by religious talk of an afterlife, he sought spiritual answers in the powerful psychedelic ayahuasca, taken in the company of a shaman.

“It gave me answers to go full blast into my artistic self,” Chuck says of this mind-expanding rite. That was the beginning of his return to drawing. While his music career has continued — he was in the rap-rock supergroup Prophets of Rage with Tom Morello until 2019, and the latest Public Enemy album came out in 2020 — illustrations have come to occupy much of his time. In June, he will publish a graphic novel trilogy called STEWdio, a huge three-volume hardback affair about Covid and current affairs that he hoists up to show me. With typical punning wordplay, he calls them “naphic grovels”. 

In March, he launched an app for older hip-hop fans called Bring the Noise, named after a famous Public Enemy single. He has a network of internet radio stations and narrated the recent PBS/BBC documentary series Fight the Power: How Hip Hop Changed the World. Even with Public Enemy quiescent, with no tours or new music on the horizon, Chuck is as irrepressibly busy as the frantic cross-hatching in his drawings.

“It’s a process of being able to stay ugly at it and not be afraid if something misses,” he says. “Because if it misses it hits something, you know what I’m saying?”

‘Livin’ Loud: ARTitation’ is published by Genesis Books