Chuck D refuses to make his fellow Black creatives look bad by speaking down on them, and that goes for Kanye West and his recent antics.
The Public Enemy frontman sat down with USA Today and explained that he’ll be just judging others by their art and not looking any further into their personal lives.
“I don’t look at Kanye as being any different than Salvador Dalí. I’m gonna keep it to your art and go no further,” he said. “I’m not in the business of making Black people or Black art look bad.”
The New York native dished on how celebrity culture in the U.S. is different than around the globe and he branded celebrity as the drug of choice stateside.
“Celebrity is a drug of the USA,” he continued. “They try to tell you it’s a drug of the world, but you go other places and they’ll tell you that you’re an entertainer, you have no political voice.”
Kanye has seemingly doubled and triple-down on his German allegiance as he was recently spotted donning a controversial German Reich t-shirt which has ties to the Nazi Party during a recent shopping spree with his new wife Bianca Censori.
Although, Chuck D went on to explain how he understood the celebrity concept differentiated overseas and said if Public Enemy didn’t, they would’ve run into trouble outside the U.S. much like Brittney Griner did as the WNBA star spent nine months detained in Russia before her release in December.
“They say, play a song and don’t say anything to the audience,” Chuck D stated. “And the No. 1 job of an entertainer is to abide by that law. I learned that with Public Enemy or we would have been Brittney Griner a long time ago. And no one was coming to get a Black male.”
Meanwhile, Chuck D’s anticipated Fight the Power: How Hip-Hop Changed the World docuseries debuted on PBS on Tuesday night (January 31). The four-episode series is now available for streaming.
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