LEGENDARY HIP-HOP ARTIST CHUCK D has been touring the world for four decades, since his band Public Enemy put out their first album in 1987. Now, at age sixty-three, Chuck is frequently asked how he still manages to put on such high-energy performances so many years later. His response is simple: he practices Pilates, a form of exercise and body conditioning that has become increasingly popular over the last decade.

Chuck's appreciation for Pilates took a major leap in 2016 when he was setting out on a rigorous tour schedule with a powerful and energetic new band called Prophets of Rage (a supergroup including members of Public Enemy and Rage Against the Machine). Over the next four years, the group would perform to more than two million people across the globe. As Chuck admits, he simply could not have delivered on such a massive level without his practice of Pilates.

In this volume, Chuck and his Pilates guru, Kathy Lopez, present the RAPilates program of more than thirty mat-based exercises for people of all ages and experiences. The exercises are beautifully illustrated in the inimitable style that Chuck has demonstrated in his previous books of visual art, including STEWdio and Summer of Hamn. Like those two books, RAPilates is published on Chuck's Enemy Books imprint, which is hosted by Akashic Books.

A one-of-a kind survey of rap and hip hop history from 1973 to today by Chuck D, arguably the most influential rapper in the world.

In the more than 40 years since the days of DJ Kool Herc and Rapper's Delight, hip hop and rap have become a billion-dollar worldwide phenomenon. Yet there is no definitive history of the genre-until now.

Based on Chuck's long-running show on Rapstation.com, this massive compendium details the most iconic moments and influential songs in the genre's recorded history, from Kurtis Blow's Christmas Rappin' to The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill to Kendrick Lamar's ground-breaking verse on Control. Also included are key events in hip hop history, from Grandmaster Flash's first scratch through Tupac's holographic appearance at Coachella.

Throughout, Chuck offers his insider's perspective on the chart toppers and show stoppers as he lived it. Illustrating the pages are more than 100 portraits from the talented artists specializing in hip hop.

Like the hard-hitting sounds of a Public Enemy jam, the words of the band's lead singer, Chuck D, excite the mind and senses. In his first book, Chuck D pours out commentary that takes on Hollywood, race, the music industry, the murders of Tupac and the Notorious B.I.G., drugs, and the three E's--education, economics and enforcement. Likening the challenge to scaling a slick mountain on roller skates, Chuck D lets no one off the hook, putting celebrities and street kids alike on notice that the future is up for grabs...and the only way to be part of it, to be players not victims, is to work together.

As an insider's view on Hip-Hop culture slides into intimate revelations about his own life, as lyrics from his songs bump shoulders with top ten lists like The Greatest Rappers of All Time, Chuck D has his say with verve and electrifying energy, with anger, love and truth. A book that brings light into darkness, Fight the Power speaks for a generation. It is a powerful and prophetic message that America, both Black and White, urgently needs to hear.

Nightline with Chuck as the featured guest.

His rejection of celebrity and his constant community activism have made him a hero. For the past five years he's been touring colleges and universities, delivering three hour lectures on everything from the music industry's corruption of young talent, the history of black music from Blues to Rap, his own controversial lyrics, problems in the black community, self-empowerment, contemporary culture and current political leaders to Public Enemy's rise to international stardom. All while maintaining his solo and Public Enemy's recording careers.

Fight the Power examines a multitude of complex social, racial and artistic issues. In his unmistakable voice, Chuck discusses the role of heroes and role models in the black community, Hollywood's negative images of blacks, the effect of gangsta rap, its images on the country's youth and the war between east and west coast rappers that may have spawned the murder of Tupac Shakur, the role of athletes and entertainers in eroding and strengthening values, and other vital contemporary concerns. Candid, thoughtful, and in your face, Fight the Power, the first substantial book by a rapper, offers readers a look into the culture of hip hop and the future of Black culture.

The Public Enemy mastermind combines art and hip-hop rhymes to provide his compelling, personal views on the chaotic years between 2020 and 2022. Though they often feel like diary entries, each installment has an overarching storyline and theme . . . In an engaging, distinctly hip-hop style, Chuck D reveal important lessons from the early pandemic years. --Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review

Legendary hip-hop artist and social activist Chuck D has used every opportunity in his groundbreaking career to stand up for civil rights. His rap group Public Enemy is widely regarded as a revolutionary act both in terms of its impact on hip-hop and its use of music to impart a message of race and class equality. The band emerged from the late 1970s/early '80s coalescence of rap, punk, and street art into hip-hop music culture on the East Coast. At the time, Chuck D had completed his BFA in graphic design, and while his music career exploded, his passion for visual art never left his heart.

In February 2020, he turned his gaze once again to the page, and began to fill three 5 x 8 journals with his written and drawn reflections of a world beginning to unravel. STEWdio: The Naphic Grovel ARTrilogy of Chuck D recreates format of his original art, combining three full-color paperback bound books into a beautiful box set. The box set is the inaugural offering from Enemy Books, the new Akashic Books imprinted curated by Chuck D.

Spanning the onset of COVID-19 through the first year of the Joe Bye-Don administration, Chuck D lends his powerful artistic voice to one of the most tumultuous periods in American history, and puts it in a capsule. Like the neo-expressionist graffiti art of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Chuck D's energetic Naphic Grovels marry text with drawings, commenting on contemporary events with the same activist instinct that propelled Public Enemy's music-with-a-message reputation. His inventive, Amiri Baraka-esque language and accompanying art is also occasionally used as a tool for introspection, providing unparalleled insight into one of the most important cultural figures of our time.

Each journal follows a distinct period in Chuck D's (and America's) life; There's a Poison Goin On chronicles the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, from February-April 2020; 45 Daze of REaD Octobot follow the days leading up to and the aftermath of the historic 2020 election; and Datamber Mindpaper, which focuses on the early days of the Biden administration.

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.

--Selected for the In the Margins Book Awards 2024 Nonfiction Recommendation List

With his latest work of graphic nonfiction, Chuck D uses his art and hip-hop rhymes to show how the US has been held hostage by gun violence and a growing sense of hopelessness . . . A focused, fresh, urgent text filled with pictures worth 1,000 words and rhymes worth thousands more. --Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review

IN SUMMER OF HAMN, legendary hip-hop artist Chuck D takes on gun violence with rhythmic, inventive writing and passionately raw art. He has long spoken out against gun violence, including how it intersects with rap and hip-hop culture. Summer of Hamn is the bound journal Chuck D carried with him in the summer of 2022--a summer marked by a particularly high rate of gun death.

In these pages, victims are memorialized, politicians are skewered, and vehement pleas to eradicate gun violence are made. Jaw-dropping statistics (40% of all personal guns in the world are owned by US citizens; there are 100 million more guns in the US than there are citizens) intersect with poetic reflections (Another mall shooting seems normalized in Columbus / Raining outside in Ohio / Raining inside folks panic / Inside hearing shots bust), all written in Chuck's hand over vibrant, utterly original, neoexpressionist ink and watercolor art.

This book is the follow-up to STEWdio the debut trilogy on Chuck D's Enemy Books imprint, in which he invented a new medium--the naphic grovel--a bound journal brimming with his observations and reflections of current events in both art and prose. Summer of Hamn is the second release on the imprint.

'I was raised with an artist's mentality; my first 25 years were spent as somebody who wanted to live among graphics and artwork and illustration, and then for the next 30 years it was all music. Recently, I've reverted into the arts, combining all these elements in my work, still trying to change the world. This is truly what I want to do.' - Chuck D

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. From his early roots and the central figures that critically shaped him and his voice, to the formation of Public Enemy, from his Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame induction through to his time with Prophets of Rage and current day world affairs.

Chuck D has been creating musical and cultural observations that challenge public opinion since 1985 and his visual compositions continue to interpret and question the world around us. Chuck D pays homage to his musical influences and peers from James Brown and Woody Guthrie to Def Jam labelmates Run-DMC and Beastie Boys; a host of the most influential hip-hop artists from Ice Cube to Run the Jewels; his twin passions of baseball and basketball; creating a collection of landscapes on tour with Prophets of Rage, and a range of sociopolitical pieces that explore the issues continuing to shape our culture.

With a foreword by Rage Against the Machine's Tom Morello and featuring over 250 of Chuck D's paintings, sketches and drawings, Livin' Loud includes a commentary of over 13,000 words in which he offers unprecedented insight into his life and work.

A provocative exploration of the way in which reader comment sections - created to foster the free flow of ideas and opinions on the news of the day - have spiraled downward into what many journalists call cesspools of racism and bigotry. The book features reader comments amassed over years from various news sites, as well as commentary from and analysis by experts in media, journalism, law, and contemporary culture. The foreword is by Chuck D, the founder of the groundbreaking hip-hop group Public Enemy.