IN 1988, Robert Patton-Spruill was a Boston University student who loved AC/DC and thought rap music was little more than fairy floss. Then his best friend gave him a tape of incendiary hip-hop outfit Public Enemy's second album It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back. The hopeful young filmmaker was so taken with what he heard that he blew out the speakers in his car from upping the bass.
"I instantly fell in love," recalls Patton-Spruill, whose documentary Public Enemy: Welcome to the Terrordome is a tidy summation of the seminal group's career and a reminder of how the Long Island line-up completely broke down and then rebuilt rap music in a few cataclysmic years.
"If Malcolm X had a hip-hop group, that would be it," notes Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello, one of several enthusiastic talking heads who profess their admiration. But the documentary's real insight comes with the fly-on-the-wall dissection of the relationship between Public Enemy's two distinct rappers: political activist Chuck D (Carlton Ridenhour) and now reality show host Flavor Flav (William Drayton jr).
"How does this great intellectual deal with Flav?" asks Patton-Spruill, who spent five years preparing the documentary. "On all these trips we watched them deal with each other, so we showed how they're best friends, but they also work together and they argue like cats and dogs. It's like a very strange marriage — they need and love each other, but they don't always get along."
If Public Enemy were a revelation when they first appeared, with their corrosive production aesthetic, Chuck D's booming baritone and their confrontational stage performances, they have since acquired veteran status. The group will tour Australia again next January, even as the mainstream hip-hop scene continues to favour the self-aggrandisement and commercialisation that emerged in the 1990s.
"Hip-hop was corrupted by the dollar and once record companies realised that they make more money by selling music about hate, death and destruction, that's what they were going to do," laments Patton-Spruill, who himself made several independent films in the 1990s about the black urban experience.
As such, debates with the group's management about what could be included in the film were resolved in a suitably old-fashioned way. "Possession is nine-tenths of ownership," suggests Patton-Spruill. "I don't own it, but I possess all the footage."
Public Enemy: Welcome to the Terrordome screens tonight and next Friday at ACMI.
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