1990: The Devil Made me Do It, Paris
By Jared Ware
So Black check time and tempo // Revolution ain’t never been simple.
Follow in the path of Mao and Fanon… - Paris, “The Devil Made Me Do It”
The prestigious historians of Encyclopedia.com date the origin of drinking games back about 2,500 years ago to the days of the Sumerians, arguing they must be as old as drinking and games themselves. Dubious historical claims aside, my first memorable experience with the drinking game phenomenon came about under particularly unsavory conditions on September 20, 2001.
Folks who lived through 9/11 at an age where it left an indelible mark on their consciousness will remember the 20th as the day when President George W. Bush spoke before a joint session of Congress on national television to announce an endless war. It is perhaps easy to look back on it 22 years later and see that the “War on Terror” will never cease under its own weight. And honestly, Bush told us this himself that night: “Our war on terror begins with Al Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.” Of course at the time, the United States did not even know who had planned the 9/11 attacks; but none of that mattered when there was such a useful opportunity to crown a new global boogeyman, one that – like “communism” for most of the 20th Century – could be used as a self-evident justification for relentless militarism and imperialist aggression. As Noam Chomsky recently recalled in his book with Vijay Prashad, The Withdrawal, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and the Bush administration were more interested in figuring out how to “go massive–sweep it all up,” and get Saddam Hussein, than they were in determining who was actually responsible. This was about extending the US imperialism’s already dominant position globally.
On the morning of 9/11, my older brother had been working in Lower Manhattan, and was not able to leave his office until after the second tower fell. That day we hadn’t been able to get a hold of him for several hours. But beyond some immediate shock and stress, I recognized quickly that a couple planes flying into the World Trade Center, and another aimed at the Pentagon, constituted a more than justified response to the terror the U.S. (particularly through its military aggression and financial dominance represented by the targets on 9/11) had wreaked the Middle East with for decades, overthrowing governments, funding reactionaries and proxy wars, and generally undermining the sovereignty and self-determination of the peoples in the region, in a quest for energy supremacy and global dominance.
Drinking every time Bush uttered the words “freedom” or “terror” in this context was not only a recipe to become quickly inebriated, but the combination of drinking and the particular political implications of this moment were also a prescription for intense alienation. Seeing the lack of any strong rejection of Bush’s ideas among my peers, made me realize I was relatively alone in that space. While they were not all with him politically, there was an acceptance that retaliation must occur and while my peers might have found Bush’s Texas twang humorous, they did not strongly oppose his imperialist agenda.
I grew up in rural Southern Oregon, a very conservative place politically, where any version of anti-imperialist politics was often met with a hatred for coastal elites who “don’t understand” the dynamics of the settlers out in the countryside where “real Americans” live. Even among my closest friends, my left-leaning politics were fringe. Although Rage Against the Machine blasted out of the cars and trucks my classmates drove, I probably confused a lot of folks when my graduation speech referenced the need to defend people like Mumia Abu Jamal from political execution and encouraged all the students to get the hell out of Southern Oregon and broaden their worldviews. I was of course naïve to think mere awareness of other worlds was sufficient to change social relations.
My return to alienation – and a small close group of friends who were similarly disaffected with the broader “school culture” in one way or another – also meant a doubling down on my favorite coping mechanisms. It should be noted that while there was a little political opposition to the war on campus, it mostly took the form of electoralism, swapping in a former Navy officer (John Kerry) for Bush. Hardly an anti-imperialist solution to the War on Terror. It’s important to say that I don’t think listening to music of course is not an act of resistance – nor are the ideas in our heads – but it constituted an important escape from a social existence that was hard to manage on its own terms. Sometimes and for some people, as for me with Dead Prez’s Let’s Get Free or Rage Against The Machine’s Guerrilla Radio, an album can blow the doors off the hegemonic view, opening doors to new worlds and possibilities.
Finding music has also always been a form of archival research; Orisanmi Burton has helped me understand it as such. Burton talks about the connections between working in the archives and digging in the crates. Everyone’s journey with this is specific to their own conditions, I think. I didn’t get heavily into music until towards the end of middle school when my parents finally agreed to let me use my few dollars to alternate BMG and Columbia House subscriptions and accumulate hip hop CDs, probably around 1996. My lack of access to MTV or BET throughout my younger years due to our rural setting (no cable), and probably some level of censorship from my parents once we got satellite, put me several years behind some of my peers. I felt a strong need to play catch up.
In doing this research, one method was to listen to the audio samples from other rappers on newly released albums, examine the liner notes, and track down the songs and artists that those samples came from. Another was to read through reviews and articles in The Source or XXL (once it started to circulate in late ‘97). When I finally got access, I started studying specials on MTV or BET whenever they featured old music videos. Using my pathetic 14.4 dial-up internet connection, I located hip hop chat rooms and message boards to access archives that were more remote to my own time and place.
Along the way, I met some people who’d grown up in areas where listening to hip hop and R&B was more culturally organic and found my methodology to be perplexing. I remember I had bought a used copy of Ice Cube’s The Predator at summer camp in ‘99 or ‘00, and my friend Craig asked, confused, “You decided to get one of the classics huh?” A backhanded compliment which suggested to me that it was odd to him that I would be more interested in older music than a new release. I remember feeling a bit exposed by this revelation; perhaps Craig could see that I was trying to recover a past that he had already moved through. Years later when I lived in New York, my roommate Will, who was born and raised in the Bronx and could not reconcile my varied regional interests, said, “Most people have a favorite team, but you like the whole sport.”
I wish I remembered precisely how I was introduced to – or found – Paris’ debut album, The Devil Made Me Do It. I can recall when – either before or after I actually got a copy of the album – my college radio show co-host, DJ Doz (then Marquee or Flip depending on the year), and I found a copy of the 12” single at the WBOR station and put it on the air. I’d probably found it online beforehand through one of the file sharing services that was popular at the time. But listening to the album today, it is still easy to transport myself into that studio, or to remember listening to cuts off of it while imbibing with my fellow misfits in my Pine Street dorm room.
It is possible that I did not become aware of Paris until he released Sonic Jihad, which came out in 2003 with its album cover depicting a 747 hurtling toward the White House, a few months after the Bush administration launched its full scale invasion of Iraq. I was always frustrated that The Coup’s album cover had been changed due to the controversy around their depiction of the exploding Towers, chosen prophetically before 9/11, although I had been pleased that it got Boots on Politically Incorrect (to push back against the reactionary bullshit that Bill Maher was on, even back then). So I would’ve been drawn to Paris’ music because he was bold enough to use such an image as an album cover.
The Devil Made Me Do It
But it wasn’t the music of Sonic Jihad that made me a Paris fan. My obsession with doing archival due diligence drew me to The Devil Made Me Do It. Even though I had found it later, it’s important to talk about the album in the context of 1990. The vinyl and tape versions (the still-dominant mediums of 1990) of the album had a “Black Side” and a “Power Side.” The former starts off with ominous strings providing a backdrop to a news report about the killing of Yusef Hawkins in the Bensonhurst neighborhood of Brooklyn. A flashpoint in white supremacist violence in the era, Hawkins was the third Black teenager known to have been killed by a white mobs in New York City in the ’80’s. These incidents served as the backdrop for the Spike Lee classic, Do The Right Thing.
After the intro, much of the “Black Side” is focused on the projects of upliftment and nationhood. From the content and style, down to the production, it feels a bit like a fusion of two of the most influential rap acts of the period, Eric B & Rakim and Public Enemy. Although one can easily recognize the influence of these artists and others on this side of the album, there’s something particularly endearing about listening to a young artist trying to figure out his musical approach in a genre that was still intensely experimenting with form and formula, and would eventually evolve and sediment into new templates for the rap LP within the next couple of years. Intermittent DJ tracks and uptempo – new jack swing era – club records would soon be largely jettisoned for a focus on cohesion and narrative that began to come together with De La Soul and Prince Paul’s work on 3 Feet High & Rising in 1989, but I would argue this did not solidify as an industry standard until Dr. Dre’s The Chronic in 1992.
While the idea of a true “concept album” is often overblown, and very few albums truly live up to this lofty idea in practice (A Prince Among Thieves or Dr. Octagonecologyst still stand as impressive examples), I think it’s a general truth that matters of theme, sequence, story, and mood became threads that wove rap albums into more cohesive units through the ’90’s. Another way to say this might be that hip hop artists developed their own ways to make albums into small organic systems, where the parts might be different but at least most of them made some sense as a part of a whole.
The Devil Made Me Do It comes from what I consider an interregnum period when the trends that governed rap albums were less concrete. The album offers experimentation with non-musical samples from Black Panther Party rallies and speeches and local news clips, as well as a two-pronged attempt to address themes in separate but related concepts in Act 1 and Act 2, melding its two acts together to form the message of “Black Power.”
There are many ways that these themes were totally consistent with the era. For one, Paris was a member of Fruit of Islam, the security wing of the Nation of Islam. The Nation had a renaissance in the late ‘80’s – as expressed through Public Enemy’s aesthetic and lyrical references – through the early ‘90’s, culminating in Spike Lee’s Malcolm X and Louis Farrakhan’s Million Man March. Alongside the NOI, perhaps even more dominant within hip hop vernacular, the 5% Nation formed an ideological bedrock of rap coming out of New York City’s five boroughs and surrounding suburbs in this time period. References to Supreme Mathematics were close to obligatory for a brief time, and littered songs throughout the ’80’s and ’90’s, most notably from artists like Poor Righteous Teachers, X-Clan, Rakim, Big Daddy Kane, Brand Nubian, and the Wu-Tang Clan.
It was also an era where rap music grew in its afrocentricity, a celebration filled with red, black, and green medallions and condemnations of white supremacy. In hindsight, some of Paris’ Bay Area contemporaries critiqued the limitations of that era, as Blackalicious frontman Gift of Gab (RIP) once noted, the medallions were “all just part of a trend.” The Coup’s Boots Riley offered an analysis of the effects of these shortcomings:
“There was a backlash to it because they put this art out there that talked about problems, and made you feel like the music was the answer and there was even a dress code to part of it. We all had like the African medallions and all of that. But I think for a lot of people, how they would’ve termed is ‘we want some music that’s more ‘real.’” Boots would go on to argue that cultural movements - even if they think of themselves as radical - if they do not connect people with material practices listeners can plug into to improve their material conditions, they will lose out to cultural work that is attached to material practices, even if those practices are attached to a more “right wing movement.”
The late ’80’s further featured police efforts to prevent 2 Live Crew’s ability to retail their album, the FBI’s attempted to muzzle N.W.A.’s anti-cop message, and even attempts to disband or reorganize Public Enemy under charges of anti-semitism. There was a great deal of public debate and moral panic about the content of hip hop music, ultimately bubbling up to a congressional hearing conterminous with the enactment of the infamous Biden and Clinton-fueled crime bills.
Paris’ debut album arrived at a moment when controversy was already seen as one avenue to potentially boost sales. After all, the artists connected to the “controversies” noted above were putting out platinum albums. This is the context behind the rise of Tommy Boy Records, a joint venture with Time Warner, that greenlit an artist like Paris, despite his open antagonism of white supremacy and police.
Censorship of Paris
It’s hard to find writing that goes into detail, so it’s difficult to say exactly why Paris’ debut video was banned by MTV. In keeping with the track’s title, the song makes frequent references to “the devil” in connection with Paris’ critique of the social system of white supremacy. As Paris raps the devil had “raped and pillaged everyone on the planet,” the video shows a white man pulling a Black woman toward him against her will. The “Beware the Beast Man” sample from Planet of the Apes makes its rap song debut against a visual of a particularly demonic representation of Uncle Sam. There is also a quick reference that listeners should follow the path of Mao Tse-Tung and Frantz Fanon, two key pathfinders of the anticolonial nationalist path to sovereignty for oppressed peoples. Consistent with a theme that threads throughout the album, the video alludes to the issue of police violence/brutality, by showing a police officer slamming a Black man against the hood of a patrol car. Still it's difficult to find consistent grounds for censorship. For example, NWA’s “Express Yourself,” and Public Enemy’s “Fight The Power,” both contain similar elements.
One possible explanation for the banning is as simple as MTV’s seeking of ad-revenue, as Brad Osbourn noted, Nielson ratings played a role in MTV’s censorship decisions, as a fear that predominantly (white) viewership might change the channel during a song that made them uncomfortable could have been enough for MTV to ban the video alone. The clean version of the video that Tommy Boy has up on YouTube currently, is essentially the same as the explicit version that Paris has up on his label Guerilla Funk’s YouTube page; the only notable change ini Tommy Boy’s video being the removal of the scene where a white man assaults a Black woman.
The banning of his first video would prefigure much of how Paris’ career would proceed. When he received mainstream attention, it was often related solely to things the media deemed controversial or outrageous. Squeamishness around Paris’ song “Bush Killa” led him to be dropped by Tommy Boy/Warner. Despite distancing themselves from the controversy, Tommy Boy/Warner recognized the profitability of Paris’ message, retaining publishing rights to his second album Sleeping With The Enemy.
Warner’s reaction is noteworthy, but consistent with a long history of related behavior. When Noam Chomsky and Ed Herman tried to publish Counter-Revolutionary Violence: Bloodbaths in Fact & Propaganda, a searing critique of U.S. imperialism and propaganda, on the Warner Modular Publications imprint, Warner Publishing shutdown the entire publishing subsidiary rather than allow the book to go to print. Conversely, as Paris once pointed out, Warner was fine with promoting violence in rap music, as long as the violence was not directed at political leaders or the power structure. While he criticized many of his industry peers who he felt bore some responsibility for the messaging – or lack thereof – in their music, Paris understood that there was a superstructure financing it: “Rather than come down on them exclusively, you got to include Interscope, you got to include Warner. Interscope is Warner, it’s Time Warner once again.”
When asked about censorship within the music and entertainment sphere, Paris explained the logic of the capitalist “free market” approach to censorship astutely, “There’s no such thing as censorship, there’s only business decisions.” He rejected that there could be a true principle of freedom of speech in such an arrangement, “if you happen to get past the label, you might not get past the distributor. You get past the distributor, you might not get past the retail outlets. People might not order it for whatever reason. People might not play it on the radio. There’s so many different angles that somebody can shut you down in this, if they don’t happen to like what you’re saying for any given reason.”
Paris, however, would later describe being dropped by Tommy Boy/Warner as a “blessing in disguise” because it allowed him to develop on of the earlier independent hip hop labels, a trend that would continue to grow especially into the late ‘90’s and early ‘00’s. He signed a distribution deal with Priority in exchange for a couple of albums on their imprint, using the capital from the deal to create Guerilla Funk Recordings to launch his label for his subsequent releases as well as those of his labelmates like Conscious Daughters.
Although he stepped away from music for a few years to pursue his other profession as a stockbroker, Paris recognized in the aftermath of 9/11 that there was a very limited space for artists who expressed political dissent to operate in the mainstream. As Paris put it: “9/11 hit, and on 9/12 everybody got dropped. There were no outlets for anybody that had anything to say speaking out against the government… Any voices of dissent, any people who were discontent with our condition.” Paris invited other like-minded artists to release projects or collaborate on his label, Guerrilla Funk Recordings. Sometime around this point, when dissident artists were alienated from and excised out of the mainstream music industry, that I found Paris’ music.
The Power Side
On the “Power Side” of The Devil Made Me Do It, it was clear there was something different in Paris’ political articulations that was absent in much of the other nationalistic work of the period. While there was often a critique of “the system” – white supremacy – generally embedded in rap music, there was not necessarily an alternative political program offered. It’s not the rappers’ faults, of course. I don't think most people living in the U.S. have any idea what that actually entails, and in the early 2000s, neither did I. In Let’s Get Free, Dead Prez coaxed us away from the normative regime by exhorting listeners to “organize the wealth into a socialist economy,” nearly a decade after The Devil Made Me Do It dropped.
Certain aspects of Paris’ message resonated immediately with my own interests and beliefs. While I didn’t have clear definitions for alternative social arrangements, the notion of self-defense for oppressed people made obvious sense to me. I’d read Malcolm X’s justifications of it, and that – along with references from rappers like Common, Dead Prez, and 2pac – led me to develop an interest in political prisoners like Mumia Abu Jamal and Mutulu Shakur, and political exiles like Assata Shakur. I knew that these individuals were once members of the Black Panther Party, but I didn’t know much about the political vision of the Panthers beyond the notion of self-defense that Paris articulated, and other justifications for retaliatory or revolutionary violence (both of which were also logical to me). Back then, these were positioned primarily as challenges to my morals. I understood the U.S. as an oppressive force in the world, and to Black people within it specifically, so I supported resistance by any means to that oppression along moral grounds. I also rejected capitalism for similar reasons; the extraction of wealth and creation of a violent hierarchy. I liked the idea of socialism, but everyone I knew described it to me as inherently flawed, having “not worked” anywhere in the world. But beyond that, I didn’t have any idea of what kind of program might bring us closer to that. How does one make revolution within empire?
“Escape from Babylon” drew people back to the Black Panther Party’s actual program. After the calls for upliftment, and allegations that crack cocaine represented a genocidal affront to the Black community (six years before Gary Webb would first “break” a similar story), Paris laid out the BPP’s Ten Point Program. I don’t think I had ever encountered it previously, and certainly not against the backdrop of the thunderous drums of Southside Movement’s “Save The World,” layered with a simple synth-string progression played by Paris himself, and a powerful sample from Kwame Ture (then Stokely) off the Free Huey LP.
Not every song on the album was notable, but tracks like “Wretched” (another nod to Fanon), “Panther Power,” “Break the Grip of Shame,” and the quick shots, “The Hate That Hate Made” and “Warning,” round out an album that continues to hold up for me years later. “Brutal,” a demo released on the deluxe edition of the album, showcases young Paris vacillating between the monotone flow that drew comparisons to Rakim and an LL Cool J-influenced style, simultaneously capturing his trademark political and NOI-related content woven throughout the album. Although it did not make the final cut for the original studio release of The Devil Made Me Do It, “Brutal” in many ways reflects what I love about the album most: Paris’ experimentation with taking political substance and trying to find ways to disseminate it stylistically. The title of the track, “The Hate That Hate Made,” may be a reference to “The Hate That Hate Produced” the 1959 ABC special which painted Malcolm X and the NOI as “Black supremacist” and “racist” against whites. The special, Malcolm X’s first television appearance, did much more to bolster his reputation than harm it. ABC’s plan backfired when they brought his undeniable oratorical genius – and radical truthtelling – to a national television audience. Although Paris never achieved X’s stature, and couldn’t know how things would proceed for him after The Devil Made Me Do It, there are resonances with Paris’ own relationship to controversy, exposure, suppression, and his ability to chart his own path in an industry that wanted to profit off of him, but did not want to promote his message.
When I reflect on what it is about The Devil Made Me Do It that had so much currency for me as a college student disgusted by the U.S. empire at the height of its jingoistic and islamophobic reaction, I recognize that part of the appeal stems from how the album reflected themes that were deeply personal to me. Paris did not have everything worked out – in terms of his own belief system or politics or even his approach to music making – but things would become clarified for him later on (sometimes in directions that didn’t resonate with me quite as much). Still, he was quite clear on what he was opposed to, and rather than just leveling critique and praising icons of past struggles, he drew on revolutionary theory, anticolonial nation-building, and a political program to offer listeners a pathway to a different world.
Jared Ware is a freelance journalist primarily covering social movements and prisoner organizing. He is the co-host and producer of the podcast Millennials Are Killing Capitalism.