He's Down With The Digital Revolution

ATN recently caught up with Chuck D and talked about the rapper's new hip-hop site, The Artist (Chuck D's still allowed to call him Prince) and the Web.

By Gil Kaufman

SAN FRANCISCO



	Photo: Michael Goldberg
(( Prolific website creator Chuck D. ))

F or Public Enemy's Chuck D, keeping it real means keeping it virtual.

The most visible member of a group best known for political rap songs like "Fight the Power" and "Don't Believe the Hype," he has been extolling the virtues of the Net for several years now. But he's not just about the talk. P.E.'s most recent album, There's a Poison Goin' On, was made available at the indie Web label AtomicPop.com via MP3 in May of this year, a month prior to the official CD release. And he recently launched a kind of rap super-site, Rapstation.com, which he calls "the ESPN of rap music and hip-hop." Rapstation features news, interviews with artists and downloads of new music by underground and more mainstream rap acts.

Chuck D, along with The Artist and David Bowie, is a firm believer in the Web's power to circumvent the usual music business channels by helping artists take control of how much and what kind of music they release, when they release it and how much they charge consumers.

Read on to find out how Chuck D envisions the future of music on the Web and what that future might mean for artists, fans and the music business.

The Interview

ATN: Tell us a little bit about the genesis of your website and what you were trying to achieve by creating this sort of umbrella hip-hop destination.

Chuck D: Well, www.rapstation.com was something that would add to a genre that's underserviced and be a vehicle for much of the underexposed aspects of rap. There's videos out there that 85 percent of the marketplace does not see. They catch it once on an underground show, they might never see it again. There's songs that are never played on the radio. There's songs made for the radio, but still can't get the radio play 'cause they can't defeat the red-tape politics. And there's a lot of information about artists — not just from here and in the U.S., but abroad — that deal within the art of rap that will never get exposed to people that love the music and art form. So, we thought that the Rapstation would be a perfect vehicle, that people could come into that portal and get all the aspects of that genre. That's why we chose to microfocus on the genre, because we think the future of music will probably be fragmented in 100 different areas.

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ATN: With rap having started with kids out in the streets playing their music, does this feel like it's sort of a new version of that? People like yourself starting a grass-roots movement, trying to organize people?

Chuck D: I think all music started on the corner, with kids playing in the street. Right now, you have a three-fold process. You have the music that's being exposed as far as people listening to it; so we could be reliving that period where FM radio came in and started playing rock 'n' roll. We could also be reliving that time where MTV first came along and showed music videos. And we're also living that time where hip-hop first came aboard to be this music from the street. Or when rock 'n' roll started from the blues artists and went into the '50s and everybody started to explore these different new sounds. So, the key with the Internet is that all these things are happening at once and that's the beautiful aspect of it. As this particular cultural explosion is happening, our whole [focus] was to deal with the genre I've dealt with for the last 22 years.

ATN: When you look around now, what do you see as the state of hip-hop? Now there's a proliferation of bands like Limp Bizkit and Korn taking hip-hop and integrating it with metal, something you did almost a decade ago with Anthrax. CONTINUE >>