I vividly remember the first time I heard Public Enemy. It was the most exciting new music since I first saw and heard the Pistols, Ramones and Clash.
It was the summer of 1987, my first visit to America. I was in New York City, getting out of a cab in the middle of of 2nd and B in the heart of what was then called Alphabet City.
A dealer standing in the centre of the intersection, calling out his wares – “Works!” – while a disinterested NYPD cop on the kerb swung his baton, just like the movies. (I had to ask my friend Ben, when he threw the keys to his loft out of an upper window, what that meant).
On one side of the dilapidated block was a skeletal gas station that was actually an artwork that turned into a bar at the weekends; when it closed patrons would cross the road to an after-hours club called Save The Robots.
And on the wall outside the window of Ben’s loft – the only occupied building on the block back then, apart from a bar just known as “2B” – was graffiti in huge letters, reading “NO WAY NORWAY.”
I never did find out what that meant.
The sound of the streets was tinny Puerto Rican salsa blasting out of doorways, windows and ghetto blasters: a new sound to ears accustomed to a diet of post-punk, but the talk was all about a band called Public Enemy.
Someone had a cassette of a song called Rebel Without A Pause, which opened with a sample of Jesse Jackson calling the listeners to arms: “Brothers and sisters! I don’t know what this world is coming to!”
What you remembered most was the insistent whistle of what sounded like a boiling kettle – in fact a sax glissando sampled from an old James Brown instrumental – behind a beat that was way faster than any other rap I’d heard.
Not that I’d heard much: like everyone else I loved The Message, and was mildly amused by Run-DMC’s Walk This Way but at the time I saw hip-hop (or was it just ‘rap’ then?) as a short-lived trend, and not for me. Not without guitars.
The whole set-up was bafflingly unfamiliar: Chuck D’s raps interrupted by hype man Flavor Flav yelling out encouragement (“Yo Chuck!”), a DJ called Terminator X scratching on the decks, and a “Minister of Information” called Professor Griff somewhere behind the scenes.
But I would catch up. And Public Enemy was my gateway drug.
The parallels quickly became clear. As with punk a decade earlier, it was the antisocial attitude as much as the sound that appealed: most people I ran in to immediately dismissed them as unmusical rubbish.
Which reminded me of many conversations I’d had back in 1976-77, and only made me like them more.