A number of rap groups have come and gone, but no group has widened the conscience of its peers and a nation like Public Enemy has. Cofounder and frontman Chuck D (Carlton Ridenhour) became the voice of the sleeping giant of black consciousness. With their first single, "Public Enemy # 1," in 1987, the world got a real eye-opener from a startling combination of Chuck D's commanding orations and his hard rhyming exhorting revolution and activism, with the help of Hank Shocklee's layered cacophony of musical noise and Flavor Flav's show-stopping antics to keep the message entertaining. Along with Professor Griff, DJ Lord and The S1W's, Public Enemy recorded Yo! Bum Rush the Show (1987), It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (1988), Fear of a Black Planet (1990) Apocalypse 91 … the Enemy Strikes Black (1991), Muse Sick-N-Hour Mess Age (1994), teamed up with Spike Lee for You Got Game (1998), and who can ever forget "Fight The Power" from Do The Right Thing, which has become the group's signature song. "By The Time I Get To Arizona," a fiery message aimed at the state's refusal to honor the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, still maintains a strong following.
     Chuck D's anger at having his voice exploited in a beer commercial, his chronicles of the way he saw black neighborhoods being exploited by big corporations who put little back, his interest and his vision took him beyond Public Enemy. He found himself in very high demand as an activist on the lecture tour, speaking at over 500 major universities, high schools, organizations and prisons. He did commercial productions and in 1996 released his first solo album, Autobiography of Mistachuck. He broke ground in other areas, launching an Internet radio station called bringthenoise.com that includes old-school hip-hop, charts, news, reviews, and he hosts two shows weekly. The Web site was rated Best Internet Radio Station in 2000 by Yahoo. In April 1999, he was the first major artist signed to the Atomic Pop online record label and, reuniting with Public Enemy, was the first major artist to release an online-only album, There's a Poison Goin' On, which was banned by retail.
     Public Enemy is back with a new release, Revolverlution. With it comes another first: Four tracks are new versions of Public Enemy hits produced by winners of a worldwide contest held on slamjamz.com.
     The New York Times named Public Enemy on their list of "25 Most Significant Albums of the Last Century," and Entertainment Weekly listed Fear of a Black Planet as one of the most important records of the 1990s. It's one thing to take it upon yourself to make your life "Significant," like that of Chuck D. The added bonus is that people you touch feel the same way.
     InsideCx: My first question is: What drives you? Why are you so motivated and driven? C.D.: You're motivated because you try to make a difference. You come from an environment where your world seems to be controlled by everything else except your community, so the thing that drives me is that I think we, as black people, can do. We can create for all the weak and old, we can be significant outside of just creating art, athletics. I try to think of significance. And increasingly, we are becoming less and less significant as far as creating structure, for us to be creative with this. So I try to go against that grain.
     InsideCx: Tell me about bringthenoise.com. [It] is a rap station, a radio network. We have products like, for example, we run four studios and we have always believed in music. But regular radio has its own levels of politics as well as corporations. They are connected with record companies, but my thing was that the Internet provided the alternative to actually get music across without having to go through the red tape of politics. So I said, "Why can't we be actively involved in building our own network?" That's where the Internet came through for bringthenoise.com, the radio network. Wildman Steve pretty much heads up the network. Gary C. Williams—the awesome two. Half Pint is the Howard Stern of hip-hop radio. That's what bringthenoise.com is all about.
     InsideCx: You also launched a full-service online information network called rapstation.com. Tell me about that. Rapstation embodies all of that information delivery but also allows the fan, the listener, or the person who wants to get information about rap music and hip-hop to be interactive with it. If somebody wants to become involved in the music business from a creative standpoint, they can launch their own record label and get that activity through a fan base or through a population base based on rap music.
     InsideCx: In 1999, you and Public Enemy were the first artists to release an online-only album [There's a Poison Goin' On]. Retail stores banned it. Did you have any idea of the door you were opening when you thought about doing something like that online? Of course. If doors are going to be closed to you, you don't care how many doors you open as far as getting inside the house. And the house this time was being able to open up a new way of thinking on how to distribute music. We did that with Public Enemy because we knew Public Enemy would bring attention to it, and it will probably always be groundbreaking. I made up my mind in 1994, after we had broken a lot of ground in hip-hop and production and whatever, that we were going to be groundbreaking and significant for each record released. The He Got Game record was significant because it was the first time a rap artist did an entire soundtrack for a movie. There's a Poison Goin' On followed that and just for the fact that it was the first downloadable album by a known group. And even up to Revolverlution, there have been revolutionary different arrangements in allowing people to interactively create the production of the record as well as the artwork.
     InsideCx: Also the first major label artists to sign to MP3. We didn't sign to MP3; we created our own MP3 network. MP3 as a company is different from MP3 as a format. We were one of the first known groups actually to involve MP3 as a format to distribute and delivery. And that made history in the process.
     InsideCx: Tell me how the contest came about. When you got the music we already built up through the Web, rapstation, bringthenoise.com, publicenemy.com and slamjamz.com, its first obligation was to take this community and involve them in something that they had respected and followed. We didn't know what we would lead into. The a cappellas we put up of four classic songs were downloaded 11,000 times, 462 remixes came in and were evaluated by 50 people who [never saw] each other, but [were] in contact on the Web and evaluated the remixes. They selected the mixes, and they [were on slamjamz] making their own top 10s of what they heard. It was a brilliant process.
     InsideCx: Revolverlution is entertaining, but it's also kind of like a history lesson. Revolverlution is both previsionary, like you said, and revolutionary. Public Enemy is going to be doing a lot of albums, a remix album, then a brand new album, and I said, "We can condense the package and make a project similar to how people burn their own CDs." And that's how Revolverlution comes across.
     InsideCx: Why was it important to include the post-concert interview on "By The Time I Get To Arizona"? To give people a historical marker on what really happened when we made that song and the impact of what's happened around it. I was able to have that interview right after I got offstage in Preston, Arizona, and later on in the next year they passed the law saying they would have a Martin Luther King Day. I think that was significant.
     Too often, when we talk about recording, we don't record enough things that are significant. Yeah, we will make you shake your ass and nod your head, but if you are making a whole album, I think firstly that albums are outdated unless you do more with them. And [that doesn't] necessarily mean filling it up with songs. You have to do more with everything that's recording, and enjoy the recording process of putting together an album.