Chuck D Is ‘Not In The Business Of Making Black People Look Bad’
Chuck D refuses to paint a bad image of his black creative colleagues by putting them down, and that goes for Kanye West and his recent antics.
The Public Enemy frontman spoke to USA Today and explained that he would simply judge others by their art and look no further in their personal lives.
“I don’t consider Kanye to be any different from Salvador Dalí. I’m going to stick to your art and go no further,” he said. “I’m not here to make black people look bad or black art.”
The New York native opened up about how celebrity culture in the United States is different from that around the world and he called celebrity the drug of choice in the United States.
“Fame is a drug of the United States,” he continued. “They try to tell you it’s a world drug, but you go somewhere else and they’ll tell you you’re an artist, you don’t have a political voice.”
Kanye has seemingly doubled and tripled his German allegiance as he was recently spotted wearing a controversial German Reich t-shirt that has links to the Nazi Party during a recent shopping spree with his new wife Bianca Censori.
Chuck D and KRS-One Respond to Bow Wow’s “Hip Hop Needs A Board” Comments
However, Chuck D went on to explain how he understood the concept of differentiated celebrity overseas and said that if Public Enemy hadn’t, they would have run into trouble outside of the United States, just like Brittney Griner. did so while the WNBA star spent nine months detained in Russia. before his release in December.
“They say, play a song and don’t say anything to the public,” Chuck D said. “And an artist’s No. 1 job is to uphold that law. I learned that with Public Enemy where we would have been Brittney Griner a long time ago. And no one came looking for a black man.
Meanwhile, Chuck D’s long-awaited docuseries Fight the Power: How Hip-Hop Changed the World debuted on PBS Tuesday night (January 31). The four-episode series is now available to stream.