LEVEL Q
Chuck D Wants a Black Woman in the White House
The revolution is being televised, and it’s still scary for Black folks. PE’s fearless leader believes it’s time for men to step aside.
Update 6/7/22: Level has a new home. You can read this article and other new articles by visiting LEVELMAN.com.
Public Enemy’s greatest albums are 1988’s It Takes A Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back and 1990’s Fear of a Black Planet. No cap. No debate. The two works are hip-hop institutions. It Takes A Nation…, arguably the genre’s most transformative album, changed the sound of rap forever. Fear of a Black Planet, which invited in ebony academia and raised the stakes in the fight against American racism, sounded like a protest by day and riot by night. B-boy dissertations like “Rebel Without A Pause,” “Bring The Noise,” and “Welcome To The Terrordome” were alarm clocks for hip-hop fans awakening to both the power and shackles of being African American. And at the heart of the messaging, ringing the alarm, was PE frontman Chuck D.
While in his late twenties, the leader of hip-hop’s first golden era befriended Louis Farrakhan and the late Huey P. Newton — and studied scholars like Noam Chomsky and Dr. Frances Cress Welsing. The former inspired “Don’t…
