In preparation for this weekend’s Super Bowl, NBC has been running a promo soundtracked by the instrumental of Public Enemy’s "Harder Than You Think", while the trailer for the Academy Award nominated/snubbed film Selma features the group’s song "Say it Like it Really Is". Though both of these track’s come from the more recent stages of Public Enemy’s career, they’re far from the first time the revolutionary rap group has managed to infiltrate the mainstream, despite decades of defiantly making music with no overtures towards pop music acceptance.
Public Enemy has found followers in a range of predominantly white subcultures by combining furious energy, a radical approach to production, an insistent political perspective in their lyrics and a strange sense of humor, all along with their on-point aesthetics. Still relevant as ever, we should all be listening to Public Enemy’s music, especially their stuff from the late 1980s and beginning of the 1990s, the era of the recently reissued classics It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back and Fear of a Black Planet. It’s easy to drop the blanket statement that when these two landmark albums were originally released, they had a massive ripple effect on contemporary music, but their impact is actually visible through a strange bit of pop culture ephemera: famous white guys wearing Public Enemy T-shirts in public.
Below are the stories of five men who tried to refract the rebellious power of the Public Enemy via their T-shirts.
Scott Ian
Anthrax’s Scott Ian was probably the first semi-famous white dude not from the rap world to rock a Public Enemy T-shirt. He was doing it back when he actually had hair. You can even buy a pinup poster of Scott Ian in one of said shirts and with said hair from a vendor on eBay with a 99.9% positive feedback rating.
The thrash metal guitarist became a fan of rap music through Run-DMC’s first single, "It’s Like That/Sucker MCs". When a couple of his friends got jobs at Def Jam in the mid-1980s, he started hanging out at the young label’s office on the Lower East Side. That’s where he first heard an advance for the Public Enemy song "Miuzi Weights a Ton". "They were instantly my favorite band," Ian says. "The voices of rappers for me were like guitar tones from guitar players of metal bands. Chuck D was the Eddie Van Halen of rap. For me, it was the best. He had the greatest tone I had ever heard."
Or as Ian writes of his introduction to Public Enemy’s music in his recently released autobiography I’m the Man, "[I]t was like the first time I heard ‘Rock and Roll All Nite,’ the first Iron Maiden album, or Metallica’s No Life ’til Leather. It made me want to run down the fucking street and punch people in the face as hard as I could!"
Ian made his Public Enemy T-shirt his on-stage shirt for several years, even when few people in the audience probably knew who the rap group was. "It definitely set a tone," he says. "Me wearing that shirt sends a message, even if people just look at it for the face value of those two words. What we were doing as a band in Anthrax was dangerous and against the grain back then as well."
The two groups became friends and famously teamed together for a cover of P.E.’s "Bring The Noise", which appeared on both Anthrax’s Attack of the Killer B’s and Public Enemy’s Apocalypse 91…The Enemy Strikes Back. (In I’m the Man, Ian reveals that despite telling everyone differently, they had to reuse and then finesse Chuck D and Flavor Flav’s original vocals instead of re-doing them.) Anthrax and Public Enemy also toured North America together in 1991 along with openers Primus and Young Black Teenagers. There were probably some sick T-shirts worn at those shows.
Natas Kaupas
Natas Kaupas, the innovative street skateboarder out of Santa Monica, wore a (possibly bootleg) Public Enemy shirt in many of the photos from an extensive 1989 story on him in Transworld Skateboarding. People were already taking cues from what Kaupas was into by the time the piece ran, but photographer J. Grant Brittain, who is responsible for those famous shots, explained that the other folks he was shooting from the skate world weren’t really up on Public Enemy at the time. And that included him. "I was listening to New Order and Bauhaus and Eno, so I probably had no clue who Public Enemy was," Brittain says.
Now Public Enemy songs have become staples of skate videos for over two decades. Their song "By the Time I Get to Arizona" and the version of "Bring the Noise" with Anthrax even appeared in two early editions of Tony Hawk’s mega-popular video games series.
Donnie Wahlberg
Donnie Wahlberg, the bad boy of the New Kids on the Block, arrives in the video for the group’s 1990 single "Step by Step" riding a motorcycle, hair on poof and wearing a T-shirt for Ice-T’s crew the Rhyme Syndicate. Later Wahlberg changes into to a Public Enemy shirt, sometimes worn under a baggy black blazer, for when he has to jump on or over things.
Patrick Petty, the New Kids’ longtime stylist and current owner of the boutique House of Culture in Boston, says that the Public Enemy shirt was completely Wahlberg’s idea. Though at the time many viewed Wahlberg’s embrace of hip-hop as the ultimate symbol of white suburbia’s co-option of the culture, Petty didn’t see it that way. "You got to understand where he grew up," Perry says. "He had relationships with guys like me and other people from the inner city. He wasn’t sheltered from all the different cultures. No one [of his friends] looked at it like, ‘What are you doing? You should be wearing a Beastie Boys T-shirt.’ It wasn’t like that."
Petty maintains that Wahlberg was buds with Chuck D at the time, and in January of 1991, NKOTB brought Flavor Flav onstage during their performance of "Games" at the American Music Awards. Thirteen years later, Flav and Jordan Knight of the New Kids reunited on Season 3 of The Surreal Life. It was uncomfortable.
"John Connor"
For the duration of James Cameron’s Terminator 2: Judgment Day, young John Connor (played by Edward Furlong) wears a Public Enemy T-shirt. The little delinquent’s fandom of both Public Enemy and Guns N' Roses (whose song "You Could Be Mine" soundtracks his tiny badass adventures in the movie’s beginning) were historically accurate, despite the two groups baiting each other in the press and in song.
The idea to have Connor wear a Public Enemy shirt came from costume designer Marlene Stewart, who was just getting into films after years of outfitting Madonna. "I knew who the group was, but it was more that the symbol made sense," she says. "It was a reflection of the same reason they called themselves Public Enemy. It's the fact that they feel targeted in some sense, whether it's real or imagined."
The choice is also kind of a joke. Throughout the film the viewer can see the group’s stenciled name on the front of Connor’s shirt, but the back of it, which features Public Enemy’s iconic man in crosshairs logo, remains hidden beneath Connor’s green camo jacket. "He literally has a target on his back, and it's camouflaged. It's a double entendre," Stewart says. "It was kind of the perfect literal translation."
Anthony Kiedis
In the third verse of "The Power of Equality", the album opener of the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Blood Sugar Sex Magik, Anthony Kiedis name checks Public Enemy. He immediately follows it with a cringe-worthy line—a field where the singer famously excels—that explains part of PE’s appeal in the ugh-iest way possible: "My lilly [sic] white ass is tickled pink, when I listen to the music that makes me think."
Blood Sugar Sex Magik was the first Red Hot Chili Peppers album produced by crucial Public Enemy supporter, Rick Rubin. In Funky Monks, the loony documentary about making the record, Kiedis is shown recording the vocals to the Parliament-indebted "Sir Psycho Sexy" while wearing a Public Enemy shirt. Footage from Funky Monks was repurposed for the video to "Suck My Kiss" and you can catch a few more glimpses of Kiedis in the shirt there as well. He also has on black and white Public Enemy snapbacks throughout the documentary. He only wears them backwards. Of course.