The hip-hop legend speaks candidly with Shondaland about his journey as a visual artist, his autobiographical new book of art, “Livin’ Loud,” and his recent PBS documentary, “Fight the Power: How Hip Hop Changed the World.”
In the annals of hip-hop, Chuck D, one of the founding members, along with Flavor Flav, of the rap group Public Enemy, is etched in stone as one of the leading voices of the genre. It’s common knowledge Public Enemy is as much a movement as a musical entity, using bars and riffs to magnify a call to action that demands justice for the victims of pervasive systemic racism and police aggression.
The short of it: Their debut album, Yo! Bum Rush the Show (1987), led to a trilogy of revolutionary, critically acclaimed recordings: It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (1988), Fear of a Black Planet (1990), and Apocalypse 91 … The Enemy Strikes Black. If you’re one of those fans who digs deeper, you’re probably aware of how rumors about mounting intergroup tension, as well as a series of horrible anti-Semitic comments by the band’s “minister of information,” Professor Griff, prompted not just Griff’s dismissal from the group but also an ongoing series of lineup changes to the group over the years.
Chuck, along with Flav, remained a constant in Public Enemy, and after the controversy with Griff, recalibrated, releasing his first solo work, Autobiography of Mistachuck, in 1996, and a memoir, Fight the Power, the following year. After recording songs for the soundtrack of Spike Lee’s 1998 film He Got Game, Public Enemy soon left Def Jam, reportedly after the label wouldn’t allow free internet downloads of their music — something Chuck felt strongly about even back in 1999; he made Public Enemy’s next record, There’s a Poison Goin’ On ..., available for download before most other artists did.
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What you might not be as familiar with is the fact that, apart from the zigzagging of his career with Public Enemy, Chuck D — born Carlton Douglas Ridenhour — was encouraged to be an artist “since zero,” he says. His formative years were spent studying and working toward a career as an illustrator and graphic artist. “People have known me for songs and music and stuff like that, but it’s only because of technology that most people are privy to my art,” Chuck explains during a phone call with Shondaland.
Livin’ Loud: ARTitation, a recently released autobiographical fine-art book of Chuck’s visual art, gives fans a glimpse into another side of the artist: his life, his inspirations, his feelings, and his creative process. It is through his works that Chuck’s knack for storytelling drops you into the moment of capture; his subjects, often musicians he admires or has worked with, human sources of frustration (Trump is in there), or sharply detailed sports scenarios and landscapes of places he visits, are always caught in an act of doing. Using a lyrical, expressionistic approach to his illustrations — which sometimes involves augmentation with commentary and/or symbolism — in lieu of photorealism, Chuck distills the essence of these various people and moments in his life onto the page with uncanny accuracy. “I’m one of those people who was always an artist who became a musician, and not the other way around,” Chuck explains. “When I was 8 years old, I knew I was going to be in a commercial art field because I wanted to be an illustrator, and I knew nothing was going to stop me. I was a little cocky and arrogant. The first 25 years of my life were as an illustrator, trained. I won awards and done all that until the music took me over for the next 30.”
Chuck D Livin' Loud: Artitation
Credit: Genesis Publications
Proud of his Long Island roots (he hails from Roosevelt), Chuck credits his professors at Adelphi University, where he holds a BFA, for helping him develop stylistically — he received an honorary doctorate from his alma mater in 2013. “In my past, I was always humble as a musician because I felt I was coming from the outside to the inside,” Chuck explains. “I wasn’t as humble as an artist ’cause I used to go and look at trains in New York City and be like, ‘That graffiti is wack because he covered up somebody that was dope underneath it, and it’s just arrogant to cover up that work.’ Or I would see people like Basquiat or Haring and say, ‘Ah, they’re cool, but they’re city cats.’ I’m from Long Island. I stayed at Adelphi instead of going to Pratt or Parsons because it’s not about the school; it’s about what I could absorb.”
After decades in the music industry, Chuck rediscovered his passion for visual art when mourning the passing of his father in 2016 — he found the process of making art therapeutic. Chuck describes a transformational journey with ayahuasca that led him from a digital to a manual process: “My dad passed, and I did ayahuasca because I wanted to try to figure out where the spirit was. I was already doing a lot of electronic art on the iPad. A year later, I was asked by my Pilates coach to actually be part of a community, and I was like … I did it once; I thought I had my answer, right? I decided to do it with a community of 10 people coming over to [my Pilates instructor’s] house, and I asked her to give me a stack of paper and some pens. The next thing that I’m about to tell you, I sat there in her living room, and I drew 70 images in four hours. When I looked at the paper, it was like a total recall of my whole existence. I was clear as a bell. When I stopped, of course, the room started to bend, and I started being in that zone, but every time my hand went back to drawing, I was clear. After the journey, I lay down to do my recovery, and only my hands were shaking on both wrists. So, I don’t know what that means, but all I know is, from that point on, I took it from electronic to paper, and I have 30,000 images since.” He laughs. “I’m two artists. There’s Chuck D the artist, but there’s another side of me that is more controversial.”
An illustration from Livin’ Loud.
Genesis Publication
As many artists and creatives do, Chuck feels his ideas and various talents flow through him. “The first time around, the shaman said I was already pregnant with ideas, and I was always able to elevate and de-elevate into myself,” he explains. “This is what makes an artist do art because you can’t explain what comes out of you. Everybody has art in them, but very few people can get art out of them. This is why people seek entertainment because they can’t fill the time. But hell, I ain’t got enough time. I’m a furnace of creativity in sight, story, sound, and style — that’s my whole life. Now, whether somebody else digs it or not is a different point of conjecture, but I’m able to elevate within myself, and this is what this whole journey is about.”
On the topic of journeys, time on the road became prolifically productive for him. “Being on tour, you have a lot of downtime and hotel room time,” Chuck says. “Ron Wood [from the Rolling Stones] was an influence, in a way. They have a story that, in every hotel room he went into, he’d sketch it before he went in there. It just kind of lit a light bulb in me like, I’m going to do something with my downtime. If you do a concert in Madrid and you got three off days, most people are running to the bar, going to some spot in the city. I turn my whole hotel room into an art studio and built a world within.”
The more he drew, the more Chuck reconnected to the expressive, lyrical style of illustration he’d honed in his early years: “I’ve developed my own technique. I think the most important aspect of art, which sometimes dips into fine art, is style. I think I had a style that was significant up to 25, and then I went into music. I still was involved with the art: art direction, helping set up the first art departments in hip-hop music, and record labels wanted to take my visual aspects to that. From 2016 to 2019, when I was a member of Prophets of Rage, I worked on courtroom speed. As an illustrator, the most important thing I thought, for me, was to cover something from beginning to end in the time that might take somebody else two hours; I would do it in 15-20 minutes. It took me about two years to get my style back. Your style is really your pulse.”
Chuck commits to each stroke in his depictions with Sharpies, watercolors, pencils, colored pencils, Wite-Out guns, and whatever materials he can scrounge up on the road: “I use very rudimentary tools, whatever is in front of me. I’m not like, I have to go to Michaels and spend $100 for this special tool, this, that. Michael Jordan played with the same basketball,” he says. “I can paint; I can go into realism. I think a lot of young artists tend to try to do an exact image of what they see in the photo, but in the day of computers and artificial intelligence and filters and stuff like that, an iPhone could do all that,” he explains.
An astute cultural critic, Chuck also recognizes, in considering today’s technology, what is created with the human hand holds unique value. “I’m telling people the beauty of your art is the ability to hang on to your human mistakes,” he explains. “That’s your art. Don’t try to be perfect because that’s where artificial intelligence is trying to be. Let it be, and know who you are.” Technology, then, becomes a tool only when necessary or valuable in service of the art. Take social media, which, for Chuck, became a sort of global gallery that allowed him to display his work in real time: “I think one of the things that led to the people wanting to check my art out is me going to do something and loading it up on my Twitter page, and then people were like, ‘Oh, wow! How can I get that?’ In the beginning, I was like, just download it; keep it for yourself. But then it got into bigger and crazier areas where I started to do it almost incessantly, and it just led to being a beast of its own.”
He elaborates: “The art world is always its own little world, in its own space. Before I’d be like, ‘I think I got something at a gallery,’ and people would be like, ‘I might be, I might not be there,’ most likely not be there. Technology and social media allow people to see your work. With social media, if I saw something wrong with the government and actually did a caricature illustration, I could put it up right away on how I felt, especially in an era like today — people listen with their eyes; they don’t really listen with their ears. They listen with their eyes, and images dictate a lot of the human movement of today.”
Which isn’t to say that Chuck has abandoned the auditory side of his art. He still writes music, and when it comes to songwriting, he takes a concept and runs with it to make it his own. “My process of writing a song is based on the title. If I come up with a great title, that’s going to take the song at least two-thirds of the way. I kind of hear it and see it at the same time — I don’t feel necessarily anything until I fill it up. I’m not a person who is basically like, ‘We’ve got to pick the right type of beat for Chuck.’ I’m like, ‘No, give me anything because I’m going to put my own text into it anyway.’ That’s my MO, which is to take anything that comes my way and turn it back around. It’s like judo.”
A passionate sports fan, Chuck says in his book he took on his career as a musician with a similar approach. “In the sports world, they’re very clear. They cover the gamut, and you can’t go in there with just an opinion, because the fact of the game is right there, and its result. I think we used to have people who followed music and art and had the knowledge and understanding to be able to interpret it, of course, to a mass that might not have been privy to understand things, but that was a different time. Sports is at least accountable because they deal with a larger population; they have to have that population come back every game, or at least 41 times a season in an 82-game season. It used to be that way in music, but a certain amount of people got away with the greed factor. I feel that every industry needs infrastructure. Big respect for how Shonda Rhimes built her own infrastructure. You’ve got to come in there with a concern about how the opportunity came in, and how you can make it better when you leave it than how you found it.”
As executive producer and host of a now-streaming PBS documentary called Fight the Power: How Hip Hop Changed the World — which is part of a yearlong commemoration of the 50th anniversary of hip-hop — Chuck provides even more of his keen insight into the music industry, offering viewers a deep understanding of where hip-hop came from and its considerable impact on the cultural landscape. “I’ve always been at the gate of hip-hop and rap music culture,” he says. “I’m not going to have those conversations with a higher-up like, ‘There needs to be a documentary by PBS,’ but I have to give credit to Lorrie Boula, my managing partner and producer on it, to actually be able to tell, in the 50th year of hip-hop, what’re the social reasons that this evolved about us. You know, it’s very easy for people to talk about what it is, and I love hip-hop and all, but how did it come about? Where did it come from? What led it to be what it is? I thought the greatest documentary ever done on the craft was my brother Ice-T’s The Art of Rap. The reasoning in the political climate that led to it and also behind the music itself, we wanted to take that on with significance, and I think it lined up with that.”
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Very active in the digital music realm, Chuck firmly believes in the value and importance of curation and digging deep to learn the history of what interests you. For him, that’s meant becoming active in the digital music realm, where Chuck has launched, first, RSTVapp.com, which boasts 12 stations “that play hip-hop and break it down,” he says. He’s also just released what he refers to as a cultural media app called Bring the Noise. “I’m thoroughly about the artist, like somebody would be in jazz,” Chuck explains. “We break it down to the science of hip-hop and rap, so it’s not something that’s just posted up as pop music, and it’s not just something for the casual fan. We’re very thorough with it.”
As far as what’s next for the prolific artist, Chuck credits his photographic memory with inspiring another book. “Basically, I do a lot of things off of total recall,” he explains. “I could give you a total recall from 20 or 30 years ago, how a room looked, or how a person looked. Matter of fact, I’m working on a book right now called The Moments That Met Me, and I take moments that I was in the middle of, and I draw everything out how I visualize it — and that goes back 62 years. I shocked my mom and said this is our apartment when I was 1 year old, and she’s like, ‘Well, that is it!’”