It started with a disgruntled tweet.
Last year’s war of words between Public Enemy’s Chuck D and shock jock Peter Rosenberg brought societal issues to the forefront.
The rampant usage of the “N-word” at WQHT Hot 97’s annual Summer Jam and the renowned New York City radio station’s lack of diversity within its daily rotation incited the Hip Hop pioneer to vocalize his displeasures.
Nearly six months later, tensions have eased on both sides. Rosenberg has apologized and Chuck D has forgiven him, but the PE frontman hasn’t exactly forgotten about the situation, nor his initial discrepancies.
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“The whole thing with Peter Rosenberg, I never looked at him as being the problem” says Chuck in a new interview with TheRealHip-Hop. “He was never the problem. The things that he was saying were totally irrelevant. Dude, you aren’t even making sense to your friends and supporters [laughs]. I’m just saying give me some answers, man, and cats couldn’t come up with answers to support it.”
Chuck’s dissatisfaction with Rosenberg’s radio station, Hot 97, seems to have stemmed from an incident that occurred when the rapper performed at Summer Jam in 2008.
“It was sloppy when I was part of it,” he recalls. “The first thing that the host said that year was, ‘Yo, you gotta peep these niggas. These was the niggas that started the revolution. Give it up for these niggas PE.’ This was the host. Don’t try to tell me what you did and what you didn’t do. That’s some bullshit. It was wack when I was there. It was bound to get sloppier with nobody there to hold y’all in check.”
PE’s unruly introduction was unacceptable to Chuck. Still, he remains firm in his stance that the radio station should have more control over the explicit content and slurs that are blasted through the speakers during the concert.
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“Hot 97 was sloppy,” he says, “and it’s not censorship but damn, man, control the Goddamn performance. While everything has gotta be a nigga-fest, you gotta have White folks in the stadium.”
Regardless of his passionate opinions on the way things should be, Chuck says Rosenberg was “absolutely right” about one thing: “nobody did” make him President of Hip Hop.
“It’s a job that I wouldn’t have fuckin’ took anyway,” he says.
For additional Chuck D coverage, watch the following DX Daily:
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