Livin' Loud: ARTitation

Product Information

My deepest thanks to Genesis for giving me a place to be able to display all of this through my artwork. A focused, fresh, urgent text filled with pictures worth 1,000 words and rhymes worth thousands more. Morello’s not-entirely-unbiased assertion that Chuck D is ‘as gifted a visual artist as he is a microphone master’ turns out to be pushing it somewhat, but he’s fluent and Livin’ Loud is additionally a multidirectional surprise, riding not only on political consciousness and Black pride but also qualities one might not immediately expect from this famously stentorian rapper, not least intimacy, tenderness and nostalgia.

Chuck's journey into the arts began years ago when he attended Adelphi University in Long Island, where he studied graphic design, deepening his interests in the medium.

Now aged 63 and still wearing his trademark LA Raiders cap flipped back to front, Chuck D – whose real name is Carlton Ridenhour – has swapped lyrics for drawing. Livin’ Loud: ARTitation, a coffeetable book whose punning, brow-furrowing subtitle clearly flowed from the same pen as album titles like Muse Sick-n-Hour Mess Age (1994), showcases approximately 250 examples of his predominantly greyscale pen-and-wash art, accompanied by enough annotation and reminiscing to constitute a compact autobiography, though also enough polemic to situate it in the present. They were the rabble-rousing rappers that brought the 1980s racially charged streets of New York to the masses and turned hip-hop into a potent political force. The book, which currently doesn’t have a release date, will guide readers “through his thought process and inspirations, sharing anecdotes and discussing the connotations behind his striking, one-of-a-kind pieces of art”.

In Livin' Loud, Public Enemy founder, hip-hop pioneer and revolutionary activist, Chuck D, presents a body of art, each piece reflective of the man behind the music, alongside a biographical commentary tracing his musical and artistic trajectory. Come down the travelators, exit Sainsbury's, turn right and follow the pedestrianised walkway to Crown Walk and turn right - and Coles will be right in front of you.

No song may be more reflective of 1980s America than Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power;” no document may come to capture our COVID era like Chuck D’s StewDio . The book launch coincides with the launch of Chuck D’s new PBS/BBC documentary, Fight The Power: How Hip-Hop Changed The World. The intimate conversation with Chuck D, which will be filmed at the Clive Davis Theater at the Grammy Museum in Los Angeles, will be available for fans to view starting on February 16 at 7pm GMT/7pm EST/7pm PST.

In the last six years, I've reverted back into the arts, combining all of these elements in my work, still trying to change the world.He has been featured in more than one hundred documentaries on music, technology, politics, and race, and cocurated the Smithsonian Anthology of Hip-Hop and Rap .

A separate publication, Summer of Hamn, a blistering critique of America’s gun violence, will be published in October. Before that, he grew up on Long Island, obsessed with the New York Knicks and Motown – though to judge from this book’s opening salvo of musician portraits painted in a confident, appealingly scribbly hand, he had his ears wide open: to Nina Simone, free-jazzer Archie Shepp, blues meister Taj Mahal and hobo folkie Woody Guthrie.It will include portraits of some of his biggest musical inspirations including Nina Simone, Bob Dylan and the Beastie Boys as well as his original creation of the Public Enemy logo. Recently, I’ve reverted into the arts, combining all these elements in my work, still trying to change the world. There was another black freshman from a neighbouring town, and we were a formidable pair – he was doing super heroes, I was doing college madness.