Hank Shocklee
Public Enemy is without a doubt one of the most influential rap groups in history. And that’s all thanks to Hank Shocklee. The founding member of P.E and legendary DJ/producer gives an insight into the beginnings of the rap group and his sonic approach in this talk at the 2005 Red Bull Music Academy. Hear about about the night he discovered Chuck D, their first recordings and the early Def Jam years. When it comes to sound mastery, Shocklee digs deep into frequencies. Whether it is the complementary combination of the voices of Chuck D and Flavor Flav or the now legendary noisy and soulful sound design behind P.E, which made rock 'n' roll by means of hip hop, Shocklee’s beats have always been balanced out ingeniously in order to be charged with fierce energy.
Hosted by HANK SHOCKLEE Back in the days, I don’t know if you guys are familiar with a drummer by the name of Mantronix? AUDIENCE MEMBER Yeah. HANK SHOCKLEE OK, well, you know, hip-hop was a derivative of dance [music] at the time, and Mantronix was one of the early pioneers that bridged the dance or freestyle, as it’s called, into hip-hop. And Pinky Velazquez was one of those dance producers, he produced a record called Electric Kingdom for Twilight 22. And, you know, that record was a big hit in New York as far as, it had rappers on it. And we used him, you know, to do our first record. And I didn’t like it because he made the record about 118 beats per minute. I was on the streets all the time and we was feeling a whole other groove on the streets. We was feeling something around 90, 92 beats per minute, and he insisted on doing this uptempo dance commercial record, so we did that side of it. We had 30 hours of time to do the record, and he spent 26 of them doing his dance mix. And so they gave me four hours to go in there and do my version. OK, now I have got four hours to do my version, so it means I got to put it together, mix it, and everything else in four hours, which is almost impossible. So, what I did was we went in and we brought the tempo down to 92 beats per minute, made the beat on just like a Roland 8000. And I don’t know if you are familiar with the Roland 8000. It’s like you really can’t program those beats. They program it with some sort of step-sequence time, but the step sequence time you have no control over, so you just kind of like hit buttons as the lights going and then you listen to it and hope you got something funky. And if something funky is there, “Alright fuck it, that shit is hot, I just use that.” And so we made a record called “Check Out the Radio,” and that was my first time in the studio. But my real first time to be in the studio was when I went to Chung King Studios. And we just got our deal with Def Jam. TORSTEN SCHMIDT ”We” meaning? HANK SHOCKLEE Public Enemy. And actually we just contracted to do a 12”. And so we went into the studio, we were like in the studios with that where Russell did all his first... TORSTEN SCHMIDT ”Russell” meaning? HANK SHOCKLEE Russell Simmons did all his first records there. He did the Whodini record, he did the Kurtis Blow record, he did the Run-DMC record, he did the Beastie Boys album and LL Cool J out of Chung King. And Chung King was the studio to be at, and Steve Ett was the number one engineer because he engineered all those records. So being in the studio with him was truly an honor, and it was a very good experience because in the studio they had a 1973 Neve board. They said that Carly Simon made records on this. It was that how old it was. TORSTEN SCHMIDT ”Want to make love to you.” HANK SHOCKLEE Yeah, yeah. [laughs] So, and they had these Electro-Voice speakers. The loud speakers were Electro-Voice speakers and the small speakers or the desktop speakers were the Yamaha NS-10s. And the Electro-Voice speakers, I don’t know if you are familiar with, that was a 15” woofer that was big and it had the high frequency inside the middle of the speaker cone. I don’t know if you have ever seen those speakers or any others, but go back and look at the early EV / Electro-Voice studio speakers and you’ll see that. And that speaker had a nice warm tone and along with the Neve board, the Neve board gave the sound a nice, warm, rich sound. That’s why, when you listen to those old Def Jam records, you’ll listen to the beat and that’s basically a drum machine. You are talking about the early LL Cool J records, which were basically a DX or a DMX, one of the two, and that drum machine is very brill and very harsh. But going through the Neve, you know, the Neve EQs and using the inputs from the Neve board gave it a nice, warm tone. That’s why those beats sound so big and so large and so fat, but yet so warm and inviting to listen to. TORSTEN SCHMIDT Before we start all fantasizing and masturbating about one day having a Neve board, any chances of getting somehow close to it on the budget? HANK SHOCKLEE What do you mean, I’m sorry? [laughter] TORSTEN SCHMIDT Can you somehow get close to a Neve sound on a shoestring budget? HANK SHOCKLEE Oh, no, no, no, no... [audience laughs] TORSTEN SCHMIDT OK, then, we go... [pretends to leave] HANK SHOCKLEE Well, only because sound is a very tricky thing. We’ll talk a little bit about sound today. Sound today is digital. What is digital, basically? Digital is a photocopy or a photograph, I should say, of the analog sound. Well, if you would take a picture with a camera that was a 35-mm film camera, that picture was going to give you a resolution that would be equivalent to having a 30 or 40-megapixel camera. And I believe today, what is the highest megapixel like, 12 or something or other? [participant suggests 22] Twenty-two, is it 22? Well, you probably can get like 22 if you buy something that’s about 80 billion dollars or something. But I am talking about the 12 or something, and you can probably get 12 for like about like five grand, six grand, somewhere in that neighborhood, which a lot of photographers are using. Well, sound is the same equivalent. So, if you was to try to capture the Neve sound in digital, you would need – I don’t know if you could ever do it, but you would need some sort of super-computer. And now, with the Macs that you can Logic those things up. You probably be noting about 12 computers to give you the kind of processing that you would need to get what you will get out of a Neve board. So, the sound is very much high def when you going through a Neve board and using the more analog stuff. TORSTEN SCHMIDT Before we get all depressed and... HANK SHOCKLEE Why is that depressing? But see, here is the trade-off. You can do things in a digital realm that you cannot do in the analog world. So, there is a trade-off. TORSTEN SCHMIDT That’s a probably a good thing because obviously you recorded a lot of things before automation and all these things were really at what they are now, and to have like all these stacked sounds, you must have had an army of people working the desk. HANK SHOCKLEE That’s funny that you say that. Yeah, I mean, I remember mixing a bunch of records, and we were just bringing people that was just out in the lobby just to help us make our mutes, you know? I mean, one time we had, you know, Fab Five Freddy was happening to hang out in the studio, “Yo, Freddy, come on,” run in the studio and we would all grab like three faders or something each. And we needed to do a mute where you want a mute at all the instrumentation and just have the vocal in there and then come back on. You have to wait for that part of the song going by and then everybody goes, “OK, one, two...,” and everybody had the be on the same beat, the same time because the minute you got somebody coming a little late or a little early, that whole take has got to get done over. Then you’ve got to start over again. So the process of making records back then was very much a team method. This is why we had the Bomb Squad because everybody at the time had to have a specific function and a specific duty. And especially from the things we were doing with records, combing through records, finding the right sound or the right part or the right drum break or the right turnaround or the right horn hit or the right tambourine loop or the right spoken word piece, the right bass piece. That’s hours amongst hours on top of hours of combing through the records. I’m quite sure you guys have been digging and doing a lot of things, and you have been saving your samples and stuff as you go along. Well, we was a team doing that. TORSTEN SCHMIDT How large was the team? What were the roles in the team? Who was the general? HANK SHOCKLEE Well, it was basically me, Chuck, Eric and Keith. And then we would have Norman, which is the Terminator, we would have him come in and he is our DJ, so to speak. We wanted to make the statement, and this is something… because I’m a DJ, I wanted to make the DJ a part of the instrumentation. So, if you listen to all the records, a lot of the stuff that you are hearing is cut in with turntables. So you might hear a bassline just being cut in because instead of sampling that bassline, we didn’t want that feel. There is a feel when something is cut-in as opposed to when something is played through the sample, and there’s another feeling when something is played out live. So it depends upon which particular record it was that we want to get that effect across, but I always wanted to make everybody feel the element of a DJ always being involved. TORSTEN SCHMIDT A lot of you guys have a DJ background, right? HANK SHOCKLEE Yeah, except for Eric, who was a musician. Eric was a bass, sorry, guitar player. And he was the only one of us that had like a cultured musical training. He didn’t read music or anything, but he played it, you know? So, he would kind of like frown upon some of the stuff that we were putting together. I would put music together that created dissonant chords, and he would frown upon that because he would say, “Hey, that bassline is not in key with the other guitar or the main loop or the main sample part that’s in there.” And with me it’s not about lining everything up so that the keys matter. It’s about what kind of vibration that you want to achieve from it, because there is a certain amount of tension that happens when something is slightly out of key. Because the ear and the body picks that up and you notice that something is not right with it. But, at the same time, it’s giving you a certain kind of energy, a certain kind of charge. Well, that’s what I want to get across. And keep in mind, you know, because I’m big into frequencies and things of that nature, that Chuck’s vocal is very, very baritone. He has what I considered to be almost like a gospel minister kind of a voice. If you put lovely, pretty chords and pretty harmonies behind them, he would sound like an R&B record. So Chuck needs something that in order to get the message across, I wanted to design something that would be juxtaposed what his sound was. He is giving you a warm baritone vibration. I want to create something that was all outside of here [motions arms in big circle], that was getting all the other tones that he wasn’t providing, alright? So that when he sits in the track, he is in that world by himself, and the music is doing some chaotic thing all around [waves his arms around] and thus creating an aggression that I want to get across because I think that hip-hop and rock & roll to me is pretty much all the same. I just want to show that hip-hop and rock & roll, that you can get that same kind of energy out of it by using different kinds of instruments. Because if you look at rock & roll, rock & roll is just using all guitars mainly. If you wasn’t playing a guitar, you was considered that you wasn’t doing rock & roll. Well, I wanted to do rock & roll but I was also into hip-hop so deep that I wanted to do a combination of breakdance and rock & roll and see how you can smash those two together. TORSTEN SCHMIDT Speaking of rock & roll and, I think there is not a single record – I mean it’s personal revelations time – and I think there is not a single tape that I listened to more on the school bus than – on the one hand, it had some dodgy-ass token entry or something, some skate punk band, on the other side it was It Takes a Nation Of Millions to Hold Us Back. I mean, obviously the energy that you get from Nation Of Millions is so much higher than all the power chords and all the Marshall amps stacked on the top of it. And I think another person around the time who was really interested in all that was Rick Rubin. What was his involvement in the whole thing there? HANK SHOCKLEE Well, actually Rick´s involvement was, he gave me full creative control. I mean, that right there was the blessing because, as you know now, if you get signed to a record company, the last thing in the world you are going to have is full creative control. Having creative control to me is the most important thing. And him letting us go in and kind of like experiment, you know? Because basically we was experimenting. The stuff that we were doing was the stuff that I knew was not stuff that was going to get on the radio, and I really didn’t care about the radio. I just wanted to create something that I felt that was different and unique and was cutting edge. TORSTEN SCHMIDT When you said “we” and “I,” it always comes back to – and you are talking about Chuck a lot – there are rumors that you really were conceptualizing the whole thing for Chuck being the center part and that he was not all too happy being there on his own and so the group was more or less built around him? HANK SHOCKLEE Yeah, I don’t think it was that way. I just wanted to make sure that if I’m going to have Chuck out there – because at that time Chuck was very, very introverted. He was not a person that wanted to be in front of large crowds. He did not want to be around a lot of people. I tell you a story. At his first tour when he was with the Beastie Boys, Chuck used to perform with his back to the audience like this [turns around], and I used to get all kinds of calls like, “Yo, why doesn’t Chuck turn around?” Because he couldn’t face the crowd. So I wanted to make sure that Chuck had pieces on stage that balanced him out, because Chuck is a heavy dude. And the first person that I want to make sure that was with him was somebody that lightened him up a little bit, which is [Flavor] Flav. Flav is dark but he lightened Chuck up, it’s funny. [chuckles] Chuck’s voice is baritone. Flav’s voice is close to being a tenor. He is in that high-frequency zone, and I never thought that the two vocals would work together but those vocals really complement each other. Whereas, you knew Flav and you knew Chuck and they were distinct and they were different parts. So that also added another element because when we produce records, I see a lot of producers spend a billion years on instrumentation, and I think that instrumentation is part of it, but to be the most important part of any song is the vocal. I want to produce vocals like you produce music because that’s the other side of it. So, I make sure that all my instrumentation is outside of the frequency of the vocals, and I want to make sure that the vocal frequencies add something to the body of the song. So that way whoever is on my record becomes the star, you know? I also, because I have a lot of jazz influence – my father was a crazy jazz buff and all my musical background comes from the aesthetics of jazz – I want to create what is known as counter rhythms and rhythms that juxtapose the main melody. And I wanted to have the vocal be the main melody. I want to have the vocal to be the main melody of the song, and the music is kind of like very similar to, if you listen to a Sarah Vaughan record or if you listen to a Billie Holiday record, the vocal is the star, and the music is basically almost like a score. It goes around the vocal, it just accompanies the vocal. Well, that’s what I wanted to provide with Public Enemy. It was almost a kind of tribute to those throwback records that were made back then. TORSTEN SCHMIDT How did you find Chuck’s voice? Or where did you find it? HANK SHOCKLEE Well, it’s funny because I found Chuck in – he was actually at Adelphi University – it was at a party, a Thursday night party, and it was thrown by one of the fraternities, and Chuck came on the mic and made an announcement for one of the events that were coming up. Back in the days, when you put on a record like Chic’s “Good Times” or something or other like that, everybody, the whole audience stopped dancing and started grabbing around wherever they thought the microphone was. Because everybody wanted their turn to rhyme. So the DJ would play the song for an hour-and-a-half [laughter], and the worst fucking rappers in the world would be getting up, time after time doing their little piece. And when they ran out of words, somebody else would come on doing some wack-ass shit and it was just wack after wack after wack. So, they took a break somehow and then, because Chuck had to make an announcement for the next fraternity party, and Chuck made the announcement. And when I heard his voice, I thought, “Yo, his voice sounded better than the 75 cats that came up there before him,” alright? I went to Chuck and said, “Yo man, would you like to do some MCing? Because I liked what you was doing.” At that time, I just wanted to do him some MCing. I didn’t know about his other stuff, and Chuck really wasn’t into it at all. But I eventually convinced him. AUDIENCE MEMBER What year was that? HANK SHOCKLEE Oh god, ’83? Yeah, ’82, ’83. TORSTEN SCHMIDT So, he was the black steel in the hour of chaos and all that? HANK SHOCKLEE So I guess, I’m not sure if I understand what that means. TORSTEN SCHMIDT But I mean, we have the same feelings sitting there because most of us don’t have English as their first language and just the amount of lyrics and stuff… I don’t know how many of you had to sit down with dictionaries listening to rap records. HANK SHOCKLEE OK. TORSTEN SCHMIDT What are they talking about? And who is this Farrakhan guy? And it’s like, “Hhmm. Oh shit, am I even allowed to listen to this now? No, I am not black. Oh, what is wrong with Elvis?” And, you know, oh my god, all these questions... [everybody laughs] HANK SHOCKLEE Oh, I see what you are saying, alright, alright, OK. [applause] Alright, that’s a good look. [laughter] The ”black” in ”black steel” was not reminiscent to Chuck. You know, if you pull out your gun, what is the color of the gun mostly? It’s black. And it’s made out of steel. So basically, when Chuck was referring to black steel, he was talking about his piece, and he was in the hour of chaos because he was going through this whole prison break. So that was what that was about. But yes, I mean the consciousness about being black and all that stuff. It’s funny because I think that Chuck gets underrated as a poet because he used… “black” had basically two meanings, it had double meanings. Black, it meant a color or race or state of being a people, but at the same time it would also represent an attitude. It represented like, “Yo, you was black,” so it was built at the time when the saying was, “I’mma black out on your ass.” That just means I’m just going to get crazy, medieval, buckwild, whatever the situation is that’s going to happen. [laughter] So he used that, and I thought that that was very, very clever. He used a bunch of words in that fashion. And it’s funny because his approach to the language is not like the typical American rappers would pretty much approach it. I mean, he approaches it from a very literary sense, so thus his words reverberated outside of the rap community. And that’s why I think that Chuck was pretty much heralded as one of the best rappers. His vocabulary was a lot bigger, the words that he chose were different. He had you vibing to words that you thought was slang interpretation, but it really wasn’t. It was actually words that were in the dictionary that had a correct meaning, but he used it in a way that made it feel like it was slang. So I think he had a very good command on the language himself, which was really interesting. TORSTEN SCHMIDT Which obviously propelled you to totally different audiences as well. HANK SHOCKLEE Exactly, yeah, yeah. And it also made it fun to work with because I didn’t hear the same kinds of things that I was hearing from a lot of the other MCs that were out there. Almost like George Clinton in a way, when you listen to any of the P-Funk, Funkadelic records, and you’ll find that those guys had their own language, you know? Well, Chuck had pretty much his own language and dialect as well, but his dialect wasn’t based upon colloquialism. It was based more on dictionary words that people didn’t know were available. AUDIENCE MEMBER In existence. HANK SHOCKLEE In existance. There you go. TORSTEN SCHMIDT Can you give us a scheme of what your organization looked like then? HANK SHOCKLEE Well, it’s funny, everything kind of like began and started with me and then Chuck, you know? I was the one that had the record collection. I was the one that kind of like mentored everybody through the process. I showed everybody what breaks were, what loops were. I showed them little parts about sampling. I gave everybody the background that they needed because I had the record collection. TORSTEN SCHMIDT You were a DJ at the radio? HANK SHOCKLEE Yeah, I was DJing and everything else, and I was always into pieces and snatches of records. When you are DJing you are always backcueing. And when you are backcueing [backcues on turntable], what are you looking for? You are looking either for a snare hit or you are looking for a kick drum hit, and whenever you find those things, that would be the thing that you kind of line up the next record off of – it was a snare or a kick drum. So that in the terms the turntable got me to understand the sample aspect. And so when I was in the studios trying to put together beats and stuff, I used to always wonder why the beats never sounded and felt like the records. And I thought that that had to be something that I was doing wrong. That’s when I enlisted Eric. I said, “Eric, show me how to make my records or my beats feel and sound more like the record itself, or the record that we are taking.” And lo and behold, we sat there for three years trying to figure that out, you know? TORSTEN SCHMIDT Perhaps people are still doing that today. HANK SHOCKLEE Yeah, and it’s funny because we’ve have learned a lot through that process because first of all, the one thing that I have learned was that it’s very difficult to try to recreate a live drummer that’s not going to any timing and trying to have a drum machine that’s going to quantize the time in some numerical value. It may be very loose, but it’s going to put it in some sort of a numeric value. And that numeric value is very difficult to try to make feel like a natural cat that’s playing out. And then the other aesthetics also is the sound. You know, what type of room was they in? Was there any compression that was on it? How many microphones did they have on the drum? Because one of the things that I find in a lot of the newer recordings is that cats started mic-ing drums with two overheads capturing the stereo ambient room, they’ll have a mic on the top snare, a mic underneath the bottom snare, a mic inside the beater, and then on the kick, and then another mic that’s getting the drum of the kick, and then mics on the toms and everything else. When you listen to the sound quality of all those things working together, everything is so tight and so precise, and the micing level is so correct that it loses its kind of ambient feel. And if you go back to a lot of those old ’70s records, they was like maybe two microphones – one in the kick area kind of and another one overhead. They didn’t have ten tracks devoted to drums and micing. So, when you listen to those records, those records had a perspective and a feel. You’ve always felt the perspective of the snare drum coming from somewhere. It’ll be to your right side as you were listening to it because the snare was on the left side of the drummer. And then those ghosting snares that you are listening to is the timing of the sticks striking the snare and the reverb and everything else and the little taps in between. And all those things in between was stuff that was very, very difficult to try to recreate with a drum machine. So we said, “Well, why don’t we just lift it? You know, somehow.” So then the soul search was to figure out a way to record just that snare. And the ghosting stuff afterwards. That’s why we noticed that when you listen to most of the Public Enemy records, they sound a little off, alright? They don’t sound as tight as other records that you hear today because the truncation of the snare is not as precise as the records that you hear today. Today, the records are truncated so correct that you hear like one uniform sound. With the Public Enemy records, I specifically did not want that sound. I wanted a looser feel. So, if the snare hit you hear like a ta and then you hear something like ta, krch! and that little krch! is what I was looking for is because what that does, all it does is add a little more character to the sound. And I think that anything that you could do to add more character and more color to your sound is going to put you in a better space because now people are going to recognize you for that ta, krch! as opposed to just the ta. It’s just like anything else, if everybody is doing the same thing, well then how are you going to get known doing it? And the other big thing that we always wanted to do was, I always wanted to create my own sounds. If you listen to those records, those records are a combination of three to four different snares, three to four different kicks, the hi-hats were doubled and tripled just to come up with that sound that you hear. So that when you listen to it, that sound does not sound like anybody else that just happened to get a 1200. Well, you can have a 1200 but you are not going to have those sounds because we created those sounds. So it offered that. Or you can take the record. You can go and lift the record. Let’s say we took “Impeach the President,” we used the snare that everybody uses. I see it as if you are baking a cake, you got to have milk and eggs. Well, there are certain things when you are making a record I consider to be milk and eggs. The “Impeach the President” snare is like milk, you just got to have that in there somewhere. You know, James Brown’s “Funky Drummer,” the more piccolo can kind of snare, that’s more like eggs, that gives it an extra little flavor. But the meat and the gist of everything is that “Impeach the President” snare. But we never would have the “Impeach the President” snare laid out there all naked, like, for example, Marley Marl would use. So Marley Marl would have that snare butt naked, and that would be out like ta [throws fist], you would be like, “That’s from ‘Impeach the President,’ you know that.” Me, I want to do something more subtle. I would layer that with a bunch of different sounds. Sometimes, I pull a stock sound from a DMX and layer it in there. Sometimes, I take it from a Linndrum. Sometimes, it would be laid in with a clap. So it’s all different ways, you know? By the way, you guys [talks to audience] can fire questions, I don’t want to make this like a [monologue]. AUDIENCE MEMBER When you got to the point of adding snares on top of one another you weren’t working with the simple tape-pause-tape method, were you? HANK SHOCKLEE No, no, that’s when we... AUDIENCE MEMBER How did you do that back then to put a snare on top of the other? HANK SHOCKLEE Well, at that point, that’s when we had drum machines that would allow – and then what the drum machine didn’t allow was, e. g., if I used the DDD-1… First of all, let me just explain something about drum machines real quick. Drum machines to me are not like – you know, I have never used one drum machine. I think that’s just like, you know, why handcuff yourself? I think that each drum machine brings a different characteristic to the table. So, you know, a 1200 is not the only drum machine, and you’ve seen a lot of articles that we’ve been quoted about using the 1200. No, the 1200 was one of them. The other one we would put drum sounds in the S-900 as well. We would have drum sounds in the MPC-60 and use. We would have a DDD-1. You know, we would use the Mirage and get the Mirage Ensoniq. You know, it all depends upon what we was trying to get across at that particular moment. And so, yes, if it was a DDD-1 that only allowed a kick and a snare and only gave you a second for each, you know, so all you can get is a b and ts, alright? We would use those two sounds, and then we would run it back again and put two different sounds in there and run the same program, put two more sounds in there, run the same program. So the process was just a lot longer, but it assured us our eventual end. And the other thing is what we did, I can tell you some little things – somebody said he would use a 1200, just bought it. [points into the audience] I’m sorry, what’s your name there? AUDIENCE MEMBER Nick. HANK SHOCKLEE Nick. I was talking to Nick upstairs, and Nick said he uses a 1200 now and I said that’s cool but there’s another thing that we used to do with the 1200. You know, the 1200 has eight outs on the back when you want to record each different instrument onto different tracks. I would never use them. I hated the fucking sound out of that. So because there is a different type of a sound that you get out of the mix-out, alright? The sound is a lot more compressed, you get a little more attack, you get a little more meat on it. So what we were doing was we were laying down each instrument, just let the drum play the kick through the mix-out. Then go back, overdub the snare, and then do the hi-hat and so forth and whatever other sounds in there because we wanted that compression that was coming out of the mix-out on the 1200. And it was another thing that we also discovered by using that same machine. It’s basically called filtering now, it’s a preset. Well, that’s something that wasn’t a preset when we was there. It was something that we had to find out by trial and error, and one of the errors that we found out is that if you take that mix-out output and you put the plug-in half way, it filters the sound. So we found that out, so we was like, “OK, so let’s lay a path down with that sound.” So you get this filtered kind of like [makes vibrating sound] and then you get another sound with the bright, so that this way it just allows you a little more control over the sample. These are all techniques that you guys pretty much know about today, you know? All these techniques you guys know about today. But you just got to understand, when we was doing it, it was something that we had to find, create and then put together. So getting back to my thing about 12 drum machines, I think that each drum machine brings its own different characteristic to the table. Right now, I use Logic, but I use Logic in ways that are so fucking retarded because I don’t want no one to know. Everybody has... How many who have Logic in here? [takes his hand up as some in the audience do] OK, how many people in here have some sort of a sequencing program? [everybody rises their hands] OK, so when you look at it, basically, we all get the same sounds, right? Pretty much. We all have pretty much the same instruments such to say. What makes you different from the next is basically what? You know, how you pretty much freak it for the moment. But after a while when you start freaking, it still starts sounding and feeling all the same. I’m using it in very unconventional ways. I would use like three different audio instruments doing one thing. Why would I do that? It’s because I just want the feel, I want the timing, I want to blend, I want to blend things together so that when you listen to it and when you get it, that you can’t just go over to preset and go, “OK, I found it. I see what they are doing,” and use it that way. So you try to think of unconventional ways. TORSTEN SCHMIDT So, as Leon would have summed it up, you are always looking for the natural bits and not the silicone? [audience laughs] HANK SHOCKLEE Well, yeah, yeah, you know, you always want something that’s natural, that’s yours. Because every producer out there, you guys should all be making your own sounds and stuff. I mean, I would have like eight kits that I’m using. Because I know they are mine, I made them, anything else we put on top of that could be... You know, that comes from anywhere else, you could take it from records, you could use a live bass, you could use everything you want to use. But the main application was pretty much making up your own kits and then working from there. Another thing that we used which was for bass, the S-900 has a tone. Everybody knows probably a trick that, you know that trick came from us. When you take the 1000 Hz tone before you put a disc into the machine, you turn it on, and if you play the keys you know how you get that one tone. Well, if you play that in a lower register, you get the bass. And we used that bass sound for everything because it sounded like no other bass instrument that we could get. AUDIENCE MEMBER Was it the bassline or a kick drum? HANK SHOCKLEE Both, yeah, we used it as both. We used it as a kick drum, we just truncated and added an attack piece into it so that would be the kick drum. We would take it and elongate it, add a little attack and elongate it and that’s the 808 bass that we feel. And when you listen to the Public Enemy records and you listen to the 808 on those records, well that 808 is not an 808 that we have taken, like Marley Marl… going back to Marley again. TORSTEN SCHMIDT Poor Marley. [audience laughs] HANK SHOCKLEE No, it’s not a diss or anything. I’m just trying to – so you have something to differentiate from – is that he would take the 808 and pretty much use the 808 from the TR-808 drum machine, you know? I didn’t want to do that because there is an inherent, distinct tone that comes from that that identifies that particular machine. And I didn’t want you to identify that particular machine so I wanted to use the tone isolated from the S-900 was my bass on the records, and bass wasn’t everything. And the other thing I would mess with, I would mess with ultralow subharmonics. It’s like I would have a sound in the record that you couldn’t hear, you just feel. So those were things – stuff that you are doing now, right? That I was doing along with my partners, we were all doing all that stuff then in an analog world. AUDIENCE MEMBER Going back to your samples, using all those different machines, how would you put them all together, using multitrack or ... ? HANK SHOCKLEE Well, first of all, it would be a multitrack, you are right. Whatever was there whether it was a Studer, whether it was a Sony, didn’t matter, just anything that could record. AUDIENCE MEMBER With two-inch tape? HANK SHOCKLEE Yeah, two-inch tape, of course. Yeah. What the difference is, is that a lot of that stuff wasn’t sequenced, alright? A lot of it was played live. AUDIENCE MEMBER There was no synchronization between the different machines? HANK SHOCKLEE No. See, that’s the whole key. We was using every technique in the book. Sometimes we may sync, like if we felt that we could sync we can get by with just running these as a sync, we’ll sync them. We’ll snyc that through SMPTE. So that was the way that we were doing it because there was no other way to do it. There was no MIDI that you could use back then so you pretty much had SMPTE and then have the SMPTE trigger the drum machine. And then you hope to God that they would line up. You spent an awful amount of time just shifting the bits to make sure that it starts when that song starts or when you want it to start. The other thing... [points at someone in the audience] Go ahead. AUDIENCE MEMBER The samples you are using are very thick... Can you explain some of your compression techniques? HANK SHOCKLEE We used compression very little only because compression smooths out the transients. Sometimes, the transients is what you want. I want that uhu as opposed to like that hu-hu, you know? It just doesn’t have the same kind of bite. We don’t use much on the compression but we used EQs like crazy. I mean, we would EQ on top of EQ on top of EQ. The lovely thing of EQs, man, you know, you can EQ the shit out of anything, you know? You could take out all the bass from, let’s say, the kick drum and all you got is just the knock from the tab [knocks on the table], and then you could add another EQ and go back and give it some bottom so that that knock now has more balls. [knocks harder on the table] Those are the kinds of things that we were always doing. We would take an SSL EQ and I hate SSL EQs – I think they are the worst shit on the planet – but they are really good for zoning in on the attack of a kick or the attack of the snare. That’s something that they are really good for and then you back it up with a Neve to give it some balls, and those are techniques that you can use now because I’m quite sure that they have those in plug-in forms now. So you could use a lot of those techniques now. The beauty about analog was that we can get a natural compression going to tape. Well, digital you don’t have that natural compression going to tape. The other thing about digital is that it’s like analog is like this room. You can see the ceiling and if you get on a ladder, you can possibly touch the ceiling, you know? The distance between you and the ceiling is what is known as headroom, alright? In the analog world, that headroom was the area that you could use to create tape saturation, which gives your sound a certain amount of compression. In the digital world, there is no ceiling. So it’s like us watching the sky. So in order for you to get that compression or that saturation, you have to create that saturation artificially. So everything in digital you have to give it. If you want to have color, you have to give it color. If you want this thing to sound like an old analog tool compressor, well you have to give it all the sonic characteristics of an analog tool compressor. So you’re not getting any help because if you go back to... I tell you a really cool trick. Go back and take a cassette. Nobody fucks with cassettes any more, but you can get some really, really cool distortion effects from cassettes. You take a piece of music, record it onto a cassette, and then distort the shit out of it and then re-record that again. That’s a different sound than if you were to go in and put a plug-in on it that had an effect. You are not going to get the same sound. There is a warmth to that distortion that’s there. There is a certain amount of enjoyment that you are going to listen to when you hear that. That’s the reason why rock & roll is not doing very well right now as a music because the compression techniques are not the same. When you are listening to a piece of vinyl, you are listening to a needle that’s actually a microphone that’s picking up the frequencies out of the groove of the record and sending that signal to your speakers, and the signal from the speakers is then coming back through the needle again. So you are getting that kind of like feedback loop, but it’s not to the point where it’s oversaturated. It’s just enough where it’s distorting. You get the same thing when you are playing a cassette. When you get a cassette and you are playing it very, very loud, you get that kind of nice, warm, ballsy distortion that you don’t get with any sort of digital compression or digital distortion. It’s a nice little trick. AUDIENCE MEMBER Can you talk about how “Rebel Without A Pause” was created? HANK SHOCKLEE “Rebel” is interesting because that was originally done with the only sampler that I had at the time, which was the Mirage. And the Mirage, if you know the Mirage, it’s a four-bit sampler that gives you three seconds of sample time and that’s it. And it was, the stars lined it up for me. I was doing this thing again [backcues on the turntable], and I was trying to catch it, and I caught the right piece of it in three seconds. Because one thing about the Mirage is when you have three seconds, and you know you only got three seconds, and you know your piece is really three-and-a-half seconds long, but you really want to catch the best three seconds out of that, well, you got to keep doing it until you catch it right the way you want it because to me there was really no truncation really on that. You know, you can’t put on and you didn’t have all… It was like what you caught was what you had to use. So you had to make sure that you caught it, and you caught it right. And so that record, I happened to catch the right moment. And for me, I don’t look for, you know, most people are looking for... Just let me know if I’m boring you guys [everybody laughs] because I can go geeky, you know, I’m trying to keep it basic. But let me just finish the question. I caught that record right, and when I sample, I think that the beginning point on a sample is the most important point to me. Most people get a formula, and the first thing they want to do is, they want to go for that downbeat. Boom and then the sample. Well, to me, I’m not looking for that. I’m looking for the most unusual point of entry that gives me the most amount of impact. So I may want something that goes like… I may truncate that first boom and I get the second part with that yyyita [imitates reversed sound], alright? So that this way when it’s on, it’s like I’m compensating for the ’boom’ and then the yyyita, so that you get a rush. I may truncate something on the two, on the snare like ta boboom as opposed to boboom ta. It’s a whole different vibration. Same drum loop. It goes boboomboom ta, bobooboom ta, alright? But if you take the ta bobooboom, you are going to get a ta bobooboom, ta bobooboom. You are going to get a whole other jump as opposed to bobooboom ta. Those are different types of feels. I want different types of feels when it comes to sampling. And so we caught “Rebel” at the right moment, at the right piece. And then, there was another piece that I was playing around with. I always want to create a crescendo in the record. That’s from my little classical background. It’s like I like that little [sings a crescendo] daaaaayaaaa! I just love that. I think that’s a cool piece to have but never knew where I could use that. Like, how do you use that in a contemporary song when all the songs are just pretty much linear? Mhmh tzgtzg mhmh tzgtzg, everything is pretty much linear. Nothing just goes linear and then also it goes Pow, Neeeeeeneeh and then you go back to like mhmh mhmh [laughter], you know? You didn’t hear that! So I just happened to catch that piece. And everything that I do and anything that we did in the studio, we always record. And then the other aspect of what we also did was, each person, we would all jam at the same time. I don’t see cats doing that no more. It’s like you have a CD turntable here and a turntable here. We would put the fader over here, and one person on the CD turntable here, another person on the turntable here and we would just be going back and forth and see what kind of vibe we can have between the two. And while we are doing that, we’re recording onto DAT or to cassette or whatever the case may be. So as you are playing around, somebody may be on the drum machine making some [noise]. And if you came into the studio you would be like, “Oh, that is some bullshit, what the fuck is going on? They don’t know what the fuck they doing.” So it would sound like complete utter garbage and mess. But within that mess, there’s a moment, there was a moment that everything just kind of like all came together, and it was like [hums and dances], and we captured that and that ended up being “Don’t Believe the Hype.” So just to go show that you can catch those pieces. But that particular record to me was, as we got those two pieces, Chuck went and wrote to it. In one day, came back and said, “Yo, I got the song, shit is done. It’s crazy.” And I was like, “Word? You just got it like last night around two in the morning.” He calls me at nine in the morning because I thought he went home and didn’t do nothing, he calls me at nine or ten in the morning like, “The shit is done, I want to record it.” So I go back and listen to him, I say, “Yo, the shit is crazy,” and then we went in and finally did it in the studio. We put it down. They came into the studio with the S-900 at that moment, at that point. Well, the S-900 is now 8-bits, alright? And it was blowing out. It could give me a whole 30 seconds. It was like, ”Whoa, that shit is crazy!“ Alright? [laughter] I listened to it. 8-bits?! First of all I didn’t like it… It was smooth; instead of it being like iiiiing, it was like nnnnnnng nnnnnnng. [makes a soft expression on his face] It was like, “What the fuck is?” It was like, “Uh, that’s disgusting.” It was real whimpy, it was like nnnnnnng. [laughter] And then, because of the three seconds, the beauty about that Mirage was, they didn’t have things that you can do today where you could turn the ending of a loop down to the point where, when it gets to the three seconds it gets tail off, you create a tail-off. No, man, back then it was like, three seconds [claps]! You have three seconds [claps]! So, but that little nnnnng and that little iiiiing. It was like a small fraction of a second of a delay before it came back around again. That was the funkiest part of the whole shit! [applause] AUDIENCE MEMBER Was “Rebel” the most experimental in the studio? It was like making different ways of… or how you say, you would take like a tape-deck and distort it. Was that your most like experimental one? HANK SHOCKLEE Oh no, every record that you heard was experimental. AUDIENCE MEMBER But which of them did you like that you thought was the most experimental? HANK SHOCKLEE Oh God, I tell you. For me personally, my favorite is a song on Yo! Bum Rush The Show which is called “Right Starter.” And I like that one, and to me, that’s more experimental because I had programmed the beat in there but I didn’t like the way it was. It just felt regular. It felt good, it was tight, but at the same time it felt regular. So what I did was I brought in Johnny Juice, and I gave Johnny Juice a kick drum on the turntable and basically what he did was he was scratching the kick drum part. AUDIENCE MEMBER Do you have that to play? HANK SHOCKLEE [looks at Torsten Schmidt] Do you have that there? Yeah, you got that. And I thought that that was the most experimental because there is no kick drum in this record, the kick drum is the DJ. And he had a good timing. (music: Public Enemy – “Rightstarter”) TORSTEN SCHMIDT Let’s probably get back to the kitchen, and we had the milk, we had the eggs with some bacon. [laughter] I want the sugar, the saffron, the wheat... HANK SHOCKLEE [laughs] Go ahead, you are saying what else, what is the next? You know, everything else is just the matter of whatever we want to bring to the table. Keep in mind that when you are making tracks, you are just making stuff with things in mind. I’m a fan of dark. I like dark music. I like depressing music. I like music that makes me sad. I like music that makes me feel angry. I want that shit that when you’re walking down the street, you just want to feel like you just are the most baddest motherfucker on the planet. [laughter / applause] Alright? It’s something that fuels me, and so we look for sounds that help get that, to help complement that or help us to grab the essence of that. So we would use samples. I would look for samples to use in that way. Anything that made me feel heroic, like I can fucking jump off buildings, or anything that made me feel like I can just go in and just smack everybody upside the head with a bottle. Whatever that feeling was, you wanted that. And not because of the violence aspect of it, but it’s just that you wanted that feeling like you could. And that feeling is so inspirational. It’s something that you just feel. And that’s another thing I think lacks in a lot of music. It’s the inspirational aspect of it that makes you want to get up and do something. Music is metaphysical, alright? At the same time as it’s audible, alright? It has a physical component to it as well. So you can make someone feel a certain emotion by going to certain elements. If you play certain chords in a certain fashion, well, people are going to feel the vibration of those frequencies. And if you play low frequencies enough, you can create nausea, you know? You can create chill or you can create extreme nausea. It depends upon how deep and how much you want to go. The same is with high frequencies. You can create something that sounds very brash or you can reach the threshold of pain, alright? It depends upon how far you want to push that. And one of the things that I always want to do is, I want sound to come out and touch you. I think people make beautiful records where you can listen to. I don’t want to make records that you listen to. I want records to move you. I want records to invoke you to do something. And the testament of it is that, I was at Madison Square Garden and Public Enemy was performing, and halfway through the set, “Rebel” or some shit came on that was just fucking retarded, and I saw kids just running in the Garden just like mobbing kids, stealing their chains and shit, alright? Because that was the high point, the scene was a fight breaking out on the floor, but there wasn’t no fight, that was just the energy. Cats was just running in packs up at the top, just snatching cats’ chains and everything. And that’s when I know that I have achieved that level that I wanted to get, which was that incredible frenzy that you should get, and that’s what to me music is. This whole art thing is all about creating that tension, creating that emotion, creating that charge, making people go out there and do something that they would not have normally done if they had not have heard or witnessed your situation. TORSTEN SCHMIDT So how did you uphold that sort of energy when you were booking two rooms, the green room, and recording Public Enemy in one and Vanessa Williams in the other one? HANK SHOCKLEE Ah, that’s a really good [question]. Well, only because I get bored, man. One of the reasons why Public Enemy records changed up a lot, I get bored really quickly, man. I want to have an intro. You know, to me records have to have some sort of fucking intro, like, what’s telling me, ”Check this out.“ And that’s what to me an intro is. An intro is not necessarily eight bars or four bars or whatever it is that intro beat piece that people put in. That’s one form of an intro, but to me an introduction is just any way that your record starts, that lets people know, “I’m here, check me out, listen to me.” So records have to have that. You know, choruses is always important but choruses doesn’t have to be achieved in the same way that choruses are now. As we listen to “Rebel,” you are going to listen to the chorus in “Rebel” and the chorus in “Rebel“ is going to be “Terminator X,” OK? That’s the chorus in that record, alright? And that record doesn’t conform itself to the typical verse-chorus-verse-chorus. And that’s another thing that music has to do too. Every record can’t be eight bars of verse, eight bars of chorus or 16 bars of verse, eight bars of chorus. Sometimes, you really have to experiment with the arrangement factor, because the arrangement in a song determines the frequency in which you play the song, alright? To me I want you to play the song over and over and over and over and over again. Well, the arrangement is going to determine how much you play it. If the arrangement of a song is predictable, you’re going to play the song once and then you are going to go, like, “Oh, I’ve had enough because I would know what it’s about. There’s nothing fun in that.” But when the arrangement is unpredictable, when you listen to “Rebel,” there is a big guessing game that we usually have and that is try to depict when that crescendo happens. That’s the hardest thing in the world because that crescendo happens on a timing and an arrangement that is so experimental. It just comes in. It just comes in at the most awkward and weirdest of moments. So, if you take the vocal off and you didn’t have the vocal there, you probably wouldn’t listen to it. TORSTEN SCHMIDT Before we listen to this, you said it right there, music is metaphysical, and with Public Enemy, it was a lot about the sonics, about the wall of sounds, but it was about a lot of other things as well. Before we listen to this, could you take us back to the summer of ’88 and probably tell us what the general mood was and the whole thing with the Reaganomics and what was going on with Bensonhurst [Brooklyn] and all that kind of stuff? HANK SHOCKLEE It’s funny because, as I listen to it now, people go back and they had time to think about music and everything. I don’t think about it that deep. Back in the days, if I’m on the streets 12 hours a day, I’m on the streets all the time. I’m the last to go home, I’m the first to be out there. And so somewhere around two or three o’clock in the morning, after you came from the club, you heard everything, you are going home now. What is the music that you put on that’s still going to charge you? Because now, you are on the other side, you’re music’d out. You are like, “If I hear another fucking beat I am going insane.” What I want is to keep your attention span, I want to motivate you at three or four o’clock in the morning. I want to motivate cats that’s on the block scrambling to be able to be like, “Yo, how can I stay up? How can I stay motivated?” Alright? That was the energy and the feel of that time. I wanted to keep everybody in a state of emergency because I don’t think that there is nothing for us to be relaxed about. And if you listen to PE’s music. PE’s music is nothing relaxing about it. You know, everything is an emergency. Everything is in a state of emergency. So I want to always drill that home and I want to find out a million different ways of which we can do that. TORSTEN SCHMIDT What was the climate politically? HANK SHOCKLEE OK, politically, the time was just about, was almost as bad as it is now. If you go back to the ’80s, and I’m going to say anywhere from the mid-’80s to the late ’80s, the times was fucked up. Crack was running rampant through the communities. No one had jobs. There was no way for cats to make money on the streets, basically. The only thing that was for us to do was we decide to do this record because that was our only way out. And we didn’t even know that you can even make money from this shit. So we just went to the studio because we wanted the five grand that Rick [Rubin] promised us to go in and to make the 12”. And so that was our only motivation that we needed five grand at the moment to pay some bills. So, the time was really fucked up. And music was standing still for a moment. You know, you had the Whodini and Run, and I saw Whodini go out on stage and pull the pants down, showing their naked behinds. You know, I mean, it was funny in one respect, but then when you see the amount of 16-year old girls that are there. When you see the 11-year old kids that are witnessing this, and this is their high point now, this is that big moment in the show, and they all turn around pulling their pants down and start humping the ground. And I said, “That’s not impressive to me.” So that’s what the climate was. Rappers didn’t have no creativity at that moment, they were just doing the fuck whatever they could to get cats to do anything. I think that I was sick of what was going on. R&B was not saying nothing, was not talking to the people. Rock & roll was at a zone where you just couldn’t reach it, it was like they were gods. So I wanted to make something that could reach the people, something that we thought that we could speak to us, because we was those kids coming up on the block that was looking for that voice. TORSTEN SCHMIDT Can you remember what your initial reaction was when you saw Kanye West saying his thing on the TV a couple of weeks ago? HANK SHOCKLEE What did he say? TORSTEN SCHMIDT A thing like “George Bush doesn’t care about black people and that stuff”? HANK SHOCKLEE Oh, he was voicing his opinion on what he thought was fact. Do you think that George Bush cares about black people? TORSTEN SCHMIDT It’s pretty obvious, isn’t it? No, but I mean, it has been a while, it’s certainly different than, “Yo, the Game and 50 [Cent] don’t have beef anymore.” I mean that’s certainly an opinion. HANK SHOCKLEE Well, you have to understand that rap is big business now, and whatever is going to give you a marketing edge, you have to utilize. The reason why Game and 50 Cent had beef had really nothing to do with them having beef at all. It was basically simple. Game’s record was coming out six weeks before 50 Cent’s album was coming out. Well, Game doesn’t stand a chance if he comes with that record and he doesn’t have some kind of energy behind it because once the 50 Cent record drops everybody is going to forget about Game’s record, right? Isn’t that the way it works? So what kind of marketing ploy can I do that’s going to allow me to have some sort of foothole so that 50 don’t come and stomp all over my record? Well, I’ve got to create some sort of beef with him. It’s just a marketing move. Sometimes, they reenact those marketing moves out there in the public just to let everybody feel that it’s real. And sometimes, some of the stuff got some legitimacy to it. You know, there is some sort of beef with the crews, so to speak. But in general, man, most of the stuff is all pretty much marketing. TORSTEN SCHMIDT So, Kanye’s thing was marketing as well? HANK SHOCKLEE I think his whole scenario is a marketing [scheme], you know? [clapping] And you know something? That’s not a diss, it’s just that he figured out a way where he can get his niche, you know? He figures that, “Oh, right now we are in desperate times.” So he realized that people want to hear anything that’s conscious. AUDIENCE MEMBER So he just wants to create some kind of controversy? HANK SHOCKLEE Yeah, and if he comes across like he’s conscious, he knows that he’s going to win supporters because you have got a lot of people that’s over the whole rap game because of the misogyny of women, the violence that’s depicted. There’s a lot of things that’s going on. And keep in mind that this shit’s been going on for ten years, 1995 to 2005. That’s been ten years of gangster rap, so to speak. And so right now, it’s a time for a new voice. So Kanye, he comes out. He knows that he can’t go down that aisle because, shit, he ain’t been shot. So first thing, somebody is going to look at him like, “Son, not that, alright?” So, he’s got to do something. So he does what he thinks is the next step. I’ve got to bless him because at least, even he may do it for what I consider might not be the right reasons, he’s still sending out the message. And that’s what we want in the first place. You always want to keep the message alive, because you always want to keep some sort of balance in the game. I don’t think that 50 Cent and what they talk about is wack. You know, I don’t think that that’s bad. I don’t think that what Common and Talib [Kweli] and Mos Def and Kanye talk about is the greatest. I just think that you have to be able to have room to express both. TORSTEN SCHMIDT Street wisdom is a lot better than no wisdom at all. HANK SHOCKLEE Exactly, because we are going down the slippery slope of cutting out people’s freedom. When I stop your originality, whatever that may be, well, I’m in this essence dictating to you what I want everyone else to be like. And that, to me, is a dangerous road. I think we have to allow people the freedom and the room to grow and express themselves any which way they want. Even though you may not like it. But you should be allowed to express it. As long as you are not hostile or you are not hurting the next man, I think that it’s all good. I think that more people need to speak their minds because the more people speak their minds, then we will have lot less fakers going around. Because there is a lot of fakeness going around because everybody is afraid to be themselves and to say what they really are for fears of something that they don’t even know is going to happen in the first place. And so everyone just runs around scared of the issues. If you don’t like black people, say it. It’s all good. Nobody’s going to beat you down or anything. OK, certain circles it might happen. [laughter] It opens up a discussion dialogue. Now I know, oh you don’t like black people, now we are going to find out why. So now we’re opening up some sort of real dialogue instead of this fake-ass dialogue where I assume that you like black people because you dress a certain way and you are kicking it in a certain way, but I’m making a bad assumption because really deep down you don’t like [black people]. So now we never going to get to the bottom of the real issues. And your music is your weapon, man. That’s your weapon of creating social change. So, therefore, you have to use it as a tool of communicating and making sure that you communicate it in its best possible manner that invokes a real-live discussion. And I think that anything that does that, does its job. If it’s the beef between Ja Rule and Jadakiss, if that’s the thing that spawns you to have some kind of debate and some type of issue about it, well that’s good too. I just need to think that that’s how it needs to be used for that, you know. That’s your power. TORSTEN SCHMIDT How did you hook up with Spike Lee? HANK SHOCKLEE Well, it’s funny because there was a friend of mine named Bill Stephney who brought Spike to the table and said, “Yo, Spike wanted you guys to make the song for ‘Do the Right Thing,’ the movie.” And Spike says he wanted me to work with his main guy, which was the guy doing the score, Mr. Terence Blanchard. I don’t know if you guys are familiar with him. Terence is an accomplished musician, arranger, writer, composer in the jazz field, and he wanted us to come up for him to take a jazz version of “Lift Every Voice and Sing” and then we was going to put the beat to it. And we was going to rap on top of that, and that’s what he wanted to present in his movie. And you know, once again, I’m from the streets, I can’t fuck with that. I had to go, “Spike, that shit is not real. Nobody out there in their mind is listening ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing.’” I don’t know if anybody is familiar with it, that’s a negro national anthem that’s from the South, it’s a very traditional black piece. But nobody, nobody is playing it, you know? That’s something that we may hear at a football game. That’s something if we go to a black play in a college, we may listen to and feel a vibration. We are not rocking to that in the club. We are not. We are not fucking rocking that shit in our cars on the streets. So I told him, ”I’ll put something together that I think will give you the vibration of what you are trying to achieve with ‘Do the Right Thing.’“ And “Fight the Power” was basically my version of what I consider to be an inspirational record. I wanted to take PE at that point and move them into inspiration instead of identifying the problem, I wanted now to start to identify solutions. And that was one of the records that I wanted to do for that particular movie. Once again, after about five or six meetings of about three hours each, of me beating Spike upside the head explaining why I didn’t want to do that fucking “Lift Every Voice and Sing” thing with Terence Blanchard, he just said, “Alright, fuck it. I just need to get the shit done.” [laughter] TORSTEN SCHMIDT And then you really got an iconic moment, and it’s pretty unknown in cinema history that you got an opening shot, which is basically just one person dancing for what? Four minutes? HANK SHOCKLEE Well, it’s funny because he didn’t even tell me, when we gave him the record, he kind of like acted like, “Well, yeah, OK, cool. I’ll see where I can put it.” So I was like, “Alright.” I didn’t hear anything, you know, I’m still doing other records and things of that nature. And then somebody goes and says, “Yo, man. I was at one of the screenings of ‘Do the Right Thing.’ Yo, they put the record all through the whole movie!” And so I’m sitting and going like, “OK.” I go and I get to see the selected screening and sure enough, it was throughout the whole movie. And once again he never really offered any kind of explanation of why he changed his mind so much. TORSTEN SCHMIDT It works. HANK SHOCKLEE You know, to me I’m like, “Yo, if it works for you, then that’s cool.” As long as it’s good. But I personally thought I got kind of used, because when you do it for a movie, you license that for a particular scene that happens one time. What he did was kind of like sample me in a movie. So what he did was paid me for one spot in the movie and then ran the motherfucker a billion times throughout the whole movie that I didn’t get paid for. And I didn’t even know that you are supposed to get paid for it, you know, every time that he plays it in the movie. So we got our one little check for that and that’s... whatever. TORSTEN SCHMIDT Speaking of timing, I mean, definitely the time was right, the season was right, and you did a trilogy of albums that was absolutely seminal for this genre. What comes after? How do you go on about that? Everything from then on must be a downfall. HANK SHOCKLEE I don’t know how many of you know the PE story that much, but I wanted the group only to do three albums. The group was supposed to do three albums and then just disband and do other things. Because after three albums, you’ve got your message across. I think that anything after that is kind of like you regurgitating what you’ve already said. And so, I wasn’t involved with the group afterwards when they decided that they wanted to continue and move on and do more records and things of that nature – which, once again, to each his own. I’m not going to tell somebody, “Yo, you have got to stop this.” Because everybody gets paid and whatever their case may be. Me, I’m just the kind of person where I’m always looking for the next. What’s the next future? What are we doing? What’s going on? And it just so happened that those particular records were one of a kind, and those records can never be created again on a multitude of levels. One major thing is that the sample clearances alone, you can never do that again. There are billions upon billions of tiny little morsels of goodies on there. I can’t tell you all the goodies in there because people will still sue me today for those things. But it's just for you to know that it can’t be done from that perspective. And then the other thing is that you can’t recreate that moment. I saw you guys have a couple of rooms in here, and I know you guys have also rooms in your own rooms. Just let me give you a quick rundown of what I think about studios. I think studios are sacred, man. They are like the temple because what you record inside the studio, the vibration, the feeling, the moment, whatever is there, is what is going to coming out of it. That is what people are going to hear. So, for example, what does that mean? If you are going to the studios and you are feeling like, “Damn man, my fucking girl she’s on my ass, my man, all this fucking bullshit, man. I know where you’ve been last night, he’s motherfucking telling me some bullshit.” If you are going into the studio with that attitude, and you are singing a song that’s about happiness and love and respect, well, you know that that attitude is going to creep into that song. This is what I mean when I say that the studio is sacred because the studio is your shrine. It’s innocent. Whatever you put into it is what you are going to get back from it. So thus, when I’m in the studio, there is nobody allowed to come in the studio if I’m working with an artist. There is nobody allowed to come in. Your boys, your crew, your managers. Managers especially cannot come in the studio. [laughter] A&R people can never come into the studio. And you have to demand that because you don’t want somebody in the studio talking about writers’ splits when you are trying to fucking sit there and come up with a hook with three people. You know, that blows the whole fucking moment. Or you got this hot record and you put it on a platter and you get ready to sample it and somebody says, “Yo, you know they let nobody clear that, son.” [laughter] “B, who let you in, son?” So, you don’t want that vibration because they kill us, man. They just choke and destroy the entire creative process. So, the studio has to be clean, the studio has to be cleansed. Only the creative people working on that particular situation at that particular moment [are allowed in the studio]. TORSTEN SCHMIDT Did Son of Bazerk ever get a magazine cover outside of Germany? HANK SHOCKLEE Not really. You have to understand something. [talks to audience] Who is from overseas? [some hands] Almost everybody. That’s a good look, I can speak differently ’cause I don’t have to speak in the third place, I can speak to you now. You guys have a whole different appreciation for music than the States, alright? Music to us here is just an extension of shake your ass at the moment. If it’s hot, I’m flowing with it and then the minute that it’s not hot, I’m not messing with it. Or if it’s never hot, I’m not fucking with it. If you notice that we got an incredible amount of underground MCs that you guys all know who they are, whether it be the J-Lives or the Aesop Rocks or the Jerus. You know, there is a billion cats that are out there that are incredible lyricists, but they are not getting any due, simply because they are not famous. That has nothing to do with their skills. But you guys are more passionate about music than the A&R and the music people in the States. The record companies in the States are disgusting. I just came from Geffen, Interscope and what’s the name from that in LA? Interscope, that whole A&M Records. And the people there, they don’t give a fuck about music. They don’t know about music. I mean, the kinds of things that are going on, that you see at the record companies is just amazing what they do to artists. They take an artist that’s a multi-platinum artist, and, for example, someone like Common delivers his album, alright? What’s his last album? AUDIENCE MEMBER Be. HANK SHOCKLEE Be, that’s right. There’s some Common fans here, that’s cool. He delivered that to the label and the label said, “No, that shit ain’t hot, man. That shit is wack.” So he went in and had Kanye listen to the album, bless him and give him a beat, and then walk back in there with the same record. “Oh, that shit’s fantastic! It’s the greatest shit on the planet!” [stretches out his arms] Now, let’s be fucking real, man. How long has Common been in the game? TORSTEN SCHMIDT Ten, 15 years... HANK SHOCKLEE OK? I think Common knows what’s hot. Especially for his record. [laughter] Hello? When you need the new cat that just came out on the block, and because everyone says that he’s a backpacker, now he’s the official spoken word for that particular zone to validate your shit inside your own record company, you know that there is fucked up times for you. For me, I would have been like, “OK, how the fuck do I get out of this place?” (music: Public Enemy – “Rebel Without a Pause” / applause) Real quick, that record has four different beats. One is the change beat, one is the original verse beat. The other is the short verse beat, and the fourth being the ride on the beat. And it has ten different turnarounds, all those little kicks, all that stuff is programmed. Each one does not repeat itself, so it gives you the illusion of the record is constantly getting better [motions hand upward diagonally] as opposed to it just staying linear. The other notable thing is that the endings is just as important as the beginnings to me. You know, records need to end not like that record just psssssh, it needs that kind of, because you just want to make a drop. AUDIENCE MEMBER What about the crescendo? HANK SHOCKLEE The crescendo? That deeeeeh. [imitates a crescendo] I call it a crescendo, whatever. AUDIENCE MEMBER One of the big debates is did Terminator X really do the scratches or not? It’s kind of a rumor, some people say he didn’t do the scratches, he didn’t do all the cuts in the studio. Is that true? HANK SHOCKLEE I’m going to say this. Terminator was probably the most underrated Bomb Squad member. And the reason why I say that is because his turntables was just as important as... When he first did that piece, the rock & roll part. When Chuck said “Terminator X,” I was expecting something. [shows something huge with his arms] And then he came in and he would ... [makes very small moves with his hands] tchgtchgtch. I was disappointed when I first heard it. So to answer your question, yes, he did do it. I was disappointed when I heard it. You know, I took it home and I listened to it. And then I said, “There is something in here that I like but there is something that I don’t like about it.” And so, when I went back to the studio, I had the engineer pull off the bottom on it because there was a lot more bass in it, and it just sounded muddy to me. Once Steve pulled the bottom off it, the whole shit popped out like crazy and it was my favorite piece in life. And even to the point when he took the Pee Wee Herman “get-a-get-a-get” [scratches in the air] to give it a extra like [waves with his arms] – oh shit – I thought that that was probably the most brilliant piece of scratch work on a record to me ever. I mean, I’ve heard a lot great pieces of records. To me, that was the biggest piece next to the ziggaziggazigga. [imitates baby scratch] That has to be the first famous piece, the ziggazigga, and then the second has to be the Terminator transformer. I think that most black people, I shouldn’t say most, I should say all black people are descendants of Africans, so that’s our heritage. To me, black is a culture. It’s a vibration. It’s like you can sport black, like you can be black, like you can just wear all black and be black. It’s an attitude, it’s a feeling, it’s a vibration. That’s why when we did Fear of A Black Planet, OK? Yes, it means the black is going to rise, black people, people of color, African Americans, whatever you will call them. Africans is going to unite and involve. But it’s also going to mean that everyone who has the consciousness of black is going to rise. What does the consciousness of black mean? That doesn’t mean that white people have to now start being black, or black people have to start being – no. That just means that we now have developed one consciousness. And this is what hip-hop has done. Hip-hop has created us to be one consciousness. And once we are one consciousness, now we are going to experiment and develop and build things on levels that cats is not even going to come to. So as far as I’m concerned, hip-hop, as for in the States where it was, it may be old because it’s been around for over 20 years. But it’s just beginning in the world, OK? Hip-hop is now going to start taking on new expressions. Most of you guys in here are from different parts of the world, but you were influenced by hip-hop. So thus, your different perspective on it is going to take it to new heights. You are going to add things and put things in it that we won’t think of, but it’s still going to make it banging, and it’s going to move and it’s going to elevate the music, alright? And once again, keep us on one consciousness. Because now, the one thing before hip-hop, we didn’t have much in common. I don’t know about you, I could speak for most black people in here is that we didn’t have much in common with white people. We didn’t, it was like two different worlds. All of a sudden hip-hop came in, now we can at least communicate. We can at least vibrate, “Yo, what do you feeling, son? You like Aesop Rock?” “Yo, I’m kind of feeling him,” you know? Whatever. “I think 50 is kind of – he blew his load now. I think he’s on the other side. I’m really feeling this kid T.I. right now or Young Jeezy.” Whatever the case may be, you at least can conversate and we can vibrate about something that now we share a commonality. Now, we just got to like say, “OK, let’s break down all the bullshit walls.” Because I think race is a divisive mechanism designed to hold back our consciousness. As long as we start thinking that we are better than the next based upon how we look, what bullshit is that, son? [applause] I’m not trying to get preachy or anything, but it’s purely cosmetic. You start seeing where everything has gone. Now we get to the point where we are discriminating on many different levels. We are discriminating against people who are thin, versus people who are fat. Once again, a cosmetic, a visual image, where in the black world there is the light skin black versus the dark skin black. You are black? Hello? What difference does it make? You look at everything that we have seeing in front of us is nothing but a mechanism to stop us from reaching our true potential. All I know when I look into the mirror, or when I bleed, we all bleed the same blood. We all got heart, lungs, livers. They are interchangeable and we can still live, alright? Am I correct? Doesn’t that tell us that we are all one? All of the other fabrication is bullshit. And music is the only thing that really speaks to that and brings us together. And if you notice that, what has music been? Music has been the thing that has been under attack because it does that, alright? The rap industry has been under attack because of its consciousness-raising ability. It has been under attack because of the collectiveness that it brings people together of all different shades and colors and from all different parts of the world. So thus, it’s under attack. That’s why it’s segregated, it’s taboo. Everything is, ”Oh, they’re heathens! They are not doing this!“ They have a billion and one different reasons why you should not be into it. And why? It’s because why should you, man? Because once you raise your level to another consciousness, you can’t go backwards. Once you go black, you can’t go back. [laughter] AUDIENCE MEMBER So, what do you feel about what they say that Little Brother songs retaliate to BET? HANK SHOCKLEE See, that’s another part of the plan. Once again, the attack is on your consciousness, people. As long as I can make everybody dumb, ignorant, stupid... And I do that in many different ways. I do that through religion, which is the biggest farce on the fucking planet, yo. It’s like, what is this about? Who cares what you believe in? Since when is that a point of difference? My belief makes me different? “Oh, I can’t fuck with you because I believe in a certain way, and you don’t believe in that.” So that means I can’t build with you? No no no, this plan is about moving forward. To me, you know what evil is? Evil is not the devil, that’s bullshit. Because there is no such thing as God or the Devil, alright? I’m not going to get crazy, just not get crazy. Alright? ”He didn’t say that, he didn’t say that...“ Because good and evil is in each and every one of us. I know I can tap into your good nature, and I know I can tap into your evil nature as well. It’s just the matter in which way you are going to handle the situation. Which one is good or better? You know, sometimes you have got to bring the devil out to make motherfuckers understand some shit. Am I right? And sometimes your good nature has to reign because it gets the job done better, alright? So you use those as tools. There is no good, there is no bad. The only thing that’s evil to me – there is evil. There is no good and bad, but there is evil, alright? Evil is anything that prevents us from moving forward. OK? If we come to our consciousness and say, “Yo man, I like to wear my pants baggy. That’s the shit right now, it’s feeling like that, son.” If we want to move forward in that zone and it’s not hurting anybody and it’s for the bettering of the situation, then what’s the problem? What’s the problem? Only a problem is when somebody’s trying to tell you you can’t do that. That’s the problem. “We all want to get together and build a studio.“ “No, you can’t.” “Why?” “I don’t know, I just don’t like your people, you know, you got people come in here, all different kinds of people. I don’t know, looks like a drug house.” [laughter] What the fuck is that? It’s a positive situation, why are you stopping me from allowing myself to be open to myself to build and develop. Anything that allows you to not build and develop is evil. So if you want to get together, if you want to get my man over here and you have to go into the hood, he happens to be black and you happen to be white, and you don’t want to do that because somebody is telling you that’s not cool to do, well that’s stopping you, both of you from benefiting from each other’s blessings that you can give each other. Alright, you feel me? When that happens, what are we doing, man? We are stagnating the game. That’s why anything that doesn’t move us in the positive direction or does not allow us to build, to me, is evil. And that’s what we should be fighting. And that’s why when I was saying in the beginning about your communication, that’s what you want to communicate. It doesn’t matter how you communicate. You want to make sure that whatever you communicate that you’re communicating something that you can allow yourself to be truly free. And that seems like right now everything is set up now to take away or limit our freedom. That to me is the goal of any music. Anything that you do or I anything that I do – whether I’m going do film, I’m going do TV, anything that I do is, I’m going to write a book – I’m going to challenge the way we look at things. I’m going to encourage you to look at things from a different perspective. And hopefully, when you look at things from that perspective, you won’t see things at the same way that you saw it before then. And I think that’s what great art does, you know? When I watch a great painting, and I see something and I go like, “Yo, it’s life-changing.” When I see an episode of a sitcom that has a deep symbolic message, it changes your life, you walk away from it going, “Wow, I’ll have to think about that.” Well, that’s what great art is supposed to do. And when art doesn’t do that, that’s to me what doesn’t make it great. When you watch something and you get nothing from it. It doesn’t mean that it’s bullshit, because then it falls into the zone of entertainment. And entertainment, that’s great, you know? But great art doesn’t just entertain you; it inspires you at the same time. TORSTEN SCHMIDT All those things that you just mentioned there, you are always talking about speaking of perspective, being behind something. Were you ever tempted to go in the limelight? HANK SHOCKLEE No. And I never wanted to be. You know, I spent years crafting my anonymity. Is that the word? TORSTEN SCHMIDT Where is Chuck when you need him? HANK SHOCKLEE Oh, who cares? I love my privacy. I spent a lot of time developing my life to the point where I don’t have that because I don’t want to lose what I consider to be my objectivity. When I become the focus, then all of a sudden my objectivity is gone and then I can no longer be of service to you as an artist because I’m now competing for the same space. You follow me? And so that’s why I spent my years not coming in front of the camera. It’s only been now since I decided to do that because I think that now we are in a time that people need inspiration. People need encouragement, because we are in a great divide right now. Half of the world wants to go right, half of the world wants to go left. And then we got those who just don’t give a fuck which way or anything. And what that leads us to is apathy. That leads us to a world that’s jaded. That leads us to a world that where people really just don’t give a damn about nothing so everybody goes through motions. I consider that to be spiritually dead. I think that life is worth living, life is worth fighting for, good is worth dying for. I believe in the deeper meaning of things. And if you don’t search for those things, if you don’t push the envelope, if you don’t make a stand for those things, well then the very same thing that you are about is going to start to eat you alive. Let me give you a quick example, Puffy is probably the biggest person on the planet, known for giving you a – what I consider to be – a hollow entertainment. He doesn’t give you anything to think about, anything that inspires you one way. He’s just there to get what he can from you at that moment. Well, what’s happening now is that everybody that he has inspired, he inspired those cats to be like that. So now, they have no respect for the game, they got no respect for the art, they got no respect for building and developing and cultivating. Everybody is about getting what they can at that moment. So, he is becoming a victim of his own scenario, because now cats don’t care about him and respect him and put him in that, so now they want to feed off of him. So thus, he has to now move. This is not an attack. Thus he has to move into a higher level of existence, which separates himself from the masses of people. That’s not a good scenario to be in. I’m from the school of thought that we all should be giving back. We all should be not just fishing in the sea but also cultivating the fish in the sea for other future fishers to come and be able to partake in the situation just like us. And I think that once we all tweak our level of understanding and start to move in that zone, alright? Then we are going to see this business. Because hip-hop was all about that in the beginning. It was all about each one develop one, each one give one back. So we were a big family, even though we were competitors. We were all one big family because we all believed in developing and nurturing and helping each other out. So we would help everyone of you guys out to get to where you get to. So when you get to where you get to, you are supposed to help out the next. That’s the way it works. Each one bring one. Each one teach one. But when you get to your zone and now you feel like, “Man, fuck that, I don’t have to give back, I’m here now.” That’s not the way to go. That’s not what this is about, that’s not what we are here for, because we are human beings and we are here for a higher calling. And I don’t want to preach to you all, man. You all look dead and tired already, man, because I’m dead and tired. TORSTEN SCHMIDT But I think you left a room here with people that have probably never been that fulfilled with being called a fish and happy about it and I would say we very much thank you for sharing the fish with us all. [standing ovations] HANK SHOCKLEE Thank you.