Blame him on Bernie: Did Public Enemy Really Split Up on Politics? | The music

The Democratic Party primary season is a high-stakes spiteful affair that divides families and breaks friendships. This year's campaign has the unfortunate distinction of breaking one of the oldest alliances in hip-hop.

When the founder and leader of Public Enemy Carlton Ridenhour, AKA Chuck D, announced that the group would play a rally for Bernie Sanders in Los Angeles last Sunday, the lawyer for his sidekick livewire William Drayton, AKA Flavor Flav, sent a letter of complaint: The public enemy movement cannot allow its cultural identity, likeness and life to be hijacked by political agents in support of a fictitious revolution. Perhaps recklessly, he quoted one of Chucks' most indelible words: Don't believe the hype!

Flavor position in the group had survived not only a crack habit of $ 2,600 a day, but also four seasons of the dating show Flavor of Love. However, this was the last drop. Chuck quickly dismissed his old friend. Are you kidding me right now ??? … on Bernie Sanders ??? You want to destroy something we have built for 35 years ON POLICY ???, Flavor tweeted, as if POLICY was a ridiculous distraction from the core business of the group behind Fight the Power and Rebel Without a Pause.

Chuck clarified that it was not about Bernie with Flav, he did not know the difference between (former NFL player) Barry Sanders or Bernie Sanders. For Chuck, it was a trite tragedy: Flavor doesn't like to perform for free and was already on thin ice, having missed several shows in the past few years, including a charity fundraiser for Harry Belafonte in 2016 (Flavor would have chosen to judge a bikini contest instead); in 2017 he sued Chuck, alleging unpaid royalties (the lawsuit was dismissed). The appearance of the Sanders Rally has actually been touted as Public Enemy Radio, the Flavourless incarnation that Chuck launched to escape this ridiculousness. It seems that Flavors' unreliability, rather than his overwhelming affection for Joe Biden, was the last drop.

Bands are inherently unstable coalitions. Take a group of young people on a sightseeing bus for a few weeks, add alcohol and sleep deprivation and watch the cracks begin to form. Add to that a combination of musical differences, commercial pressure, scrutiny of the media and opposing ego, and it is a miracle that any group lasts longer than a few albums. Group dynamics are as difficult to understand as other peoples' marriages, which is why our cultural obsession with division and reunion goes far beyond music. These are case studies of the forces that bring people together and separate them.

Chuck described himself and Flav as Mick Jagger and Keith Richards of hip-hop. When he founded Public Enemy in the early 1980s, Chuck drew inspiration from the Rolling Stones and Clash, as well as sports teams, to build a range of different personalities, each with unique skills. He described Flavor, with his cartoon smile and giant clock locket, as a visual character with audio bonuses: the convertible hypeman in a group otherwise defined by stony-faced gravitas. On tracks like Bring the Noise and Fight the Power, Flavor is halfway between performer and fan, babbling with excitement about what's going on around him.

What made Public Enemy great also made them volatile, but when they fell in a media firestorm in May 1989, the problem was not Flavor but Richard Griffin, AKA Professor Griff, Minister's Groups Severely objectionable information. As Chuck told NME: flavor is what America would like to see in a sad black man to say, but true while Griff is what America would not like to see. Anti-Semitic remarks by Griffs were already causing unrest when he gave an explosive interview to the Washington Times in which he accused Jews of the majority of the wickedness that plagues the world. The backlash caused an existential crisis for Public Enemy, with Chuck forced to choose between reputation and unity. The controversy almost shattered them before Chuck stabilized the ship, minus Griff.

Their next notoriety brush came out of nowhere during the 1992 presidential campaign. Public Enemy didn't approve a candidate (they rarely do, although Chuck later called Obama the right person for the job) , but one of the candidates certainly noticed them. In 1991, their single By the Time I Get to Arizona starred a young rapper and activist called Sister Souljah. In May 1992, after the Los Angeles riots, Souljah commented: If black people kill black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people? The full quote made clear that it did not actually encourage violence, but Bill Clinton saw an opportunity to distance himself from the radical left by denouncing it as racist. The practice of a candidate repudiating perceived extremism in his own party in order to appeal to moderates is still known as a Sister Souljah moment. Chuck compared his experiences with Griff and Souljah playing paintball: he was ready to take the flak for his own positions, but found himself caught in the crossfire generated by the words of his associates.

These were extreme situations. When the media are not on fire, it is quite possible that gang members with diametrically opposed political opinions will coexist. In the police, for example, Sting was on the left while the drummer, Stewart Copeland, the son of the famous warmongering CIA officer, Miles Copeland Jr, was a delusional capitalist who described himself. As he cheerfully acknowledged at a roundtable with Billy Bragg and Paul Weller: Me and my companion Sting are violently opposed to each other politically, not a single inch of shared land. (To his credit, Copeland agreed to assemble the police in 1986 for the Amnesty International Conspiracy of Hope tour, thereby helping the victims of some of the regimes his father had conspired to bring to power.) But politics didn’t Has not dissolved the police, more so than the divided Spice Girls over Margaret Thatcher or Slayer over Donald Trump. Groups break up on musical direction, money, infidelity, or just because they need a vacation, but not who to vote on.

A song, however, can raise tensions. In 1985 Joey Ramone, who was Jewish, was scandalized by Ronald Reagans' visit to a military cemetery in Bitburg, West Germany, which housed the graves of Waffen-SS members, and wrote the furious protest song Bonzo Goes to Bitburg. It didn't go well with longtime Republican Johnny Ramone, who insisted that the title be changed to My Brain Is Hanging Upside Down. They couldn't talk about my favorite president like that, he whispered in his memories, Commando. I never wanted the Ramones to talk about politics. Whos Brexit leader Roger Daltrey refused to sing the original words of Street Song about the Grenfell Tower fire last year because there were a lot of political words from that kind of pointy fingers, so Pete Townshend wrote less accusatory version.

The question is often not to take specific political positions but to know where to take them. With rare exceptions, Bragg, Jay-Z, the musicians of Bono have no stomach for the dirty machinations and compromises of serious politics. Most would rather ask questions than commit to solutions; throw their weight behind a problem rather than a candidate. It’s understandable. If the campaign to which you have nailed your flag loses, it is embarrassing. John Lennons' intense phase of political activism ended with a cry of despair on the night of November 7, 1972, when Democrat George McGovern lost to Richard Nixon in a historic landslide. If your party wins, however, you are bound to its record in government and any further criticism becomes worthy of interest. In 1997, Pet Shop Boys Neil Tennant was a major Labor donor; nine years later, he wrote scathing satirical lyrics on Iraq and identity cards.

If it is risky for a single artist to endorse a candidate, and even more difficult for a group, it is almost impossible to rally a broad coalition. The Red Wedge music collective may have failed in its mission to elect a Labor government in 1987, but its very existence was an extraordinary achievement, creating an umbrella large enough to accommodate everyone from Labor supporters to life of suspicious strangers, at least for a while. Whatever my reluctance about being involved in the Labor Party or becoming such a supporter, they have been overshadowed by the fact that we should make people think about politics and maybe changing the way we go around the country, naive or not, reflected Weller. But I think we were used to it and that put me out of politics. I'm not really the type to join clubs.

That says a lot. The musicians, as a whole, are not so much left or right as instinctively libertarian. They want to be free to do what they want. It has been suggested that the first rocknroll protest song was Summertime Blues, in which Eddie Cochran protests to his congressman about his parents and boss who are hindering his dating plans. You can draw a line from this at Rage Against the Machines more radical version of this overriding complaint: Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me.

In 2017, the Grime 4 Corbyn movement sparked disagreements that would have been familiar to Red Wedge veterans. Your main goal is to live with what does not exist in your life, Skepta has informed the Guardian of his refusal to participate. I don't want to have a say in the country. When his younger brother JME-Corbyn protested: You must have an idea of ​​something that you think is bullshit in the country you live in today and that could change, Skepta has stayed true to his ultra- libertarians: everyone should lead themselves.

The brothers' altercation was not party politics; it was the eternal question of whether there was value in making musicians political at all. In this exchange, Skepta was the Flavor to JMEs Chuck, the Keith to his Mick. Many successful groups benefit from the push and pull between a member who believes that music should be a vehicle for ideas and activism and one who just wants to give people a good time, the optimal result being a music that is both fair and fun. Chuck D, hes the group’s politician, told Flavor the Guardian this week. I'm just the friendly buffoon. It's a shame that after 35 years Public Enemy is no longer able to contain the two impulses, but whoever is to blame is not Bernie Sanders. Election politics is a breeze compared to group politics.