The Enemy made it! Just shows how old we all are, with Malcolm X being on a postage stamp and all……  🙂

Will Terminator X speak at the induction ceremony? 🙂

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(VIDEOS BELOW ADDED ON JULY 30th, 2014)

Public Enemy – Prophets of Rage – BBC Special… by dreadinny

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DECEMBER 18th UPDATE: From Rolling Stone:

Chuck D on Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: Of Course Hip-Hop Belongs
‘I’d like to smash the award into 10,000 pieces and hand each piece to a  contributor’

By Andy Greene

December 18, 2012 12:10 PM ET

Next April, Public Enemy  will become the fourth hip hop act to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of  Fame. Right now, however, Chuck D is extremely frustrated. He just wrapped a  grueling cross-country Hip Hop Gods tour featuring Public Enemy, X-Clan, Monie  Love, Schoolly D, Leaders of the New School and Awesome Dre, and he feels it  didn’t receive enough attention.

“I’m perturbed at the major media for not covering us,” he says. “You didn’t  hear about any tours over the last 10 years that weren’t Eminem or Rick Ross or  Dre or Jay-Z or Kanye. The media was licking their ass, but we did quite well  across the country and got no attention.”

Older rap acts are often called “old school,” but Chuck D thinks they need to  be rebranded. “We created another genre called ‘classic rap,'” he says. “I was  inspired by the classic rock radio of the Seventies. They separated Chuck Berry  and the Beatles from the Led Zeppelins and Bostons and Peter Framptons of the  time. In many ways, classic rock became bigger than mainstream rock.”

He also drew inspiration from an unlikely source. “I turned on the TV and saw  Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus still golfing,” he says. “I’m like, ‘I thought  they were retired.’ Someone was like, ‘Nah, that’s the senior circuit.’ The same  thing can be happening in hip-hop. To confuse Schoolly D from Drake is  absolutely ridiculous. It’s related, and there can be some interaction there,  but the fan bases are different. The meanings are different. These categories  protect the legacy of hip-hop.”

Classic rap artists have been playing together for years, but Chuck D was  dismayed by the quality of their shows. “They were being treated like shit,” he  says. “They threw a bunch of artists on a bald stage. People would come, see a  bunch of old records and go home. I realized there had to be a better way to do  this. I called up a bunch of people personally and told them the idea for this  tour is that nobody is bigger than anybody else. It’s like what Ozzy Osbourne  did with Ozzfest. We have a great camaraderie between the artists. We put 33  people on two buses and we all had the same agenda.”

The first Hip Hop Gods tour just wrapped with a show in Los Angeles, but  Chuck D is already planning five more for 2013. “I’m not physically going on all  of them,” he says. “I’m going to orchestrate them, and my team will actually be  an integral part of them. I won’t let them become a circus, which has happened  to tours in the past. If you look at hip hop touring now, it’s practically  nonexistent. There’s a lot of one-offs like Rock the Bells, but a tour that goes  east to west, north to south, 3,000 miles, it’s a different kind of animal.”

In the meantime, Chuck D is extremely gratified that Public Enemy are  entering the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame next year. “I’m very fortunate to be  acknowledged by my peers,” he says. “I take this very seriously. I grew up as a  sports fan, and I know that a hall of fame is very different than an award for  being the best of the year. It’s a nod to the longevity of our accomplishment.  When it comes to Public Enemy, we did this on our own terms. I imagine this as a  trophy made out of crystal. I’d like to smash it into 10,000 pieces and hand  each piece to a contributor.”

Chuck D has little patience for people who say hip-hop acts don’t belong in  the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. “Hip-hop is a part of rock & roll because it  comes from DJ culture,” he says. “DJ culture is the embodiment of all genres and  all recorded music, if you actually pay attention to it.”

Public Enemy will be inducted into the Hall of Fame on April 18th at  a Los Angeles ceremony alongside Rush, Heart, Randy Newman, Donna Summer and  Albert King. “We guarantee we’re going to tear that damn place down,” says  Chuck D. “I might tell DJ Lord to rock the beginning of ‘Tom Sawyer.’ Then  people will be shaking their heads like, ‘What the fuck is going on?’ That’s the  ability of what I consider probably one of the greatest performing bands in  hip-hop history. It’s not bragging, because I don’t brag about myself, but my  guys are the best in the business. There’s nobody that can touch Flava Flav.  There’s nobody else like him in the world.”

There’s been no talk of any onstage collaborations with any of the other  artists, but Public Enemy has a long history of working with rock groups. They  recorded a new version of “Bring the Noise” with Anthrax in 1991, toured with U2  in 1992 and recorded “He Got Game” with Stephen Stills in 1998.

“The goal was to enhance [‘For What It’s Worth’], to take it to another  level,” Chuck D says. “I totally hate when somebody takes a classic and  desecrates it. I like Jimmy Page and P. Diddy, but what they did to ‘Kasmhir’  was a debacle. They are giants in their own way – and you can print this – but  that was a fucking travesty. When I get involved with a classic, I knock the  fucking ceiling out of it or I leave it the fuck alone.”