Chuck D (Transcript)

Robby Incmikoski: Here we go with Chuck D interview, number 109, and personally, my favorite. Chuck, I’m honored to have you in this book, man, thank you for being so generous and taking your time.

Chuck D: Good. You say 109, you think of number nine. Mazeroski.

Robby Incmikoski: How do you know that right off the top of your head?

Chuck D: Well, when numbers hit me, I automatically think of baseball jerseys and the numbers. And Mazeroski, for years, is embedded into my psyche. Although I grew up in New York as a Mets fan, at Shea Stadium, the Pirates came to visit and are embedded into my baseball fandom. Mazeroski was number nine when I started following the Mets at eight years old. He was kind of like in his final stages of playing second base for the Pirates, and then later on, Dave Cash replaced him.

Robby Incmikoski: You know, Maz has a statue outside the ballpark for his game seven World Series winning homer over the Yankees in 1960, Chuck.

Chuck D: Yeah. It reminds me, I was watching basketball last night, and it’s the Knicks versus the Celtics. And the Celtics have been battering the Knicks most of the game, but by the end of the game, the Knicks found a way to win, even though they were losing most of the quarters and being behind sometimes by 20 and 30. So I made the analogy to one of my sports writing friends that the Knicks are like the 1960 Pirates and the Celtics are like the Yankees. The Knicks are up three games to one, but the Celtics have been mashing them. They’re scratching their heads like, “How the hell can this happen?”

In the seven-game series of the 1960 World Series, the Yankees were ripping and long-balling the Pirates to death. But the games the Pirates squeaked out and won, and all the sudden, they found themselves tied 7-7 in game seven, up in the ninth inning. Then Maz wins the World Series, and people scratched their heads like, “When did they really beat the Yankees?”

Robby Incmikoski: There were some high-scoring games in that series as well.

Chuck D: Exactly, on the Yankee side. Thing is, this all took place two months after I was born.

Robby Incmikoski: That raises an interesting point. When I say 109 and the first thing you think of is “09 Maz.” What does that say about the love you have for the game of baseball?

Chuck D: Baseball was a refuge, a thrilling field of imagination for me. The thrill about baseball is that it allows you to engage yourself in it on a slower time, or even your own time. Even after the game is over, you can go back and resonate yourself into the key moments of the game, playing them over and over again in your head. It’s a little more difficult to do that in basketball and football because those games are faster, but baseball allows you to take in the moment and really etch it into your soul and into your brain. That was very important for me as a formulative thing, growing up as a teenager and youngster that wanted to do something with their childhood other than the norm.

Robby Incmikoski: At what point in your life would you say you became a fan? I know how much you love the Mets. You remember the Orioles and the Big Red Machine. When did you develop your love for the game?

Chuck D: My dad was looked at by the Dodgers when he was young, and my grandparents on his side were big baseball fans. So that comes from being at the knee of my father. But when it really bit me really? It bit me at a couple stages. 1969, I was nine years old. We moved out to Long Island. That was the year the Mets coming from next-to-last place and moving up to winning 100 games.

I was a bigger fan in 1970. It’s always that year after the championship that really embeds you into it. We didn’t win the division, which broke into four divisions in 1969. But 1971, 1972, I went to camp in 1971 and discovered my first Baseball Digest. I became in love with the magazine.

Robby Incmikoski: How much does a publication like Baseball Digest impact baseball fandom? Because kids these days don’t know what it’s like to have that little magazine packing so much information. I LOVED Baseball Digest and could not wait for it to arrive in the mail.  We all got it as kids. 

Chuck D: That’s right. And I also enhanced myself as a cartoonist off of the puzzles in the middle of Baseball Digest, which made me want to draw baseball figures. As a kid, I drew all the baseball heroes in the same style as the portraits in the Baseball Digest, so it helped me with my artwork.

You talk about guys like Willard Mullin, who was a sports cartoonist for the New York Herald Tribune, or Bill Gallo, who did sports cartooning for the New York Daily News. It was something that said, “Okay, you draw. Why don’t you look at this to get those reps in and really sharpen your skillset?” That’s what I knew I was always going to be able to do is draw sports figures and portraits. I did that for a good three to four years. That really sharpened my skillset and talent level back when I was in seventh, eighth, ninth, and tenth grades.

Robby Incmikoski: You had told me this before when I interviewed you on television a couple of years ago at a Pirates game, how you drew stadiums. Didn’t you say you and your brother created model stadiums as well?

Chuck D: Yeah, we made stadiums out of cardboard boxes. Creating vintage stadiums was easy to emulate out of cardboard boxes, which basically deal with squares and rectangles. You make it out of boxes, cut it open, and you have something that looks more like Tiger Stadium, Briggs Stadium, Comiskey Stadium—instead of the cookie-cutter stadiums that were round when I was growing up: Three Rivers Stadium, Veterans Stadium, Riverfront in Cincinnati, Shea Stadium, which looked like Pac-Man, if that’s dating myself even more.

We made stadiums that looked damn near like the one in the movie where Robert Redford was in The Natural, which was really War Memorial Stadium in Buffalo. You could make a nice little stadium by painting the board underneath it green, putting up upper decks, and drawing fans and stuff like that. They were really nice. And we played in them too because you could actually open them up, jump in, and play with your little players that you painted to simulate what’s happening on the field.

Robby Incmikoski: Do you think a lot of your fans know your love and passion for the game of baseball? How many people that are fans of your music ask you about how much you love baseball?

Chuck D: Not a lot, because I don’t think baseball is the national pastime of this century. A lot of people don’t know, they don’t ask me, and they really don’t care. But myself and C-Doc (Dave Snyder) put together “We Wreck Stadiums,” which is the first baseball rap album ever—the only one. It was homage to the ballplayers I grew up with and the architecture I admired. A big shoutout to Ryan Gilbert, who used to be at Major League Baseball and is like the king of the baseball HipHop video. Ryan would be the grandmaster for chopping the edits together for the films that went with the records produced by C-Doc that I was able to create.

Myself and C-Doc and Ryan—I call him Ryan Express—we developed a method of supplying rap videos and songs to Major League Baseball when an incident came along. We would blend HipHop and rap music with baseball, whether it was historical—talking about people like Pete Rose or Barry Bonds not getting into the Hall of Fame—or just a song like “Hard to See My Baseball Cards Move On” based on my favorite baseball cards and the thought of some of my heroes passing away.

I’ve had my artwork covered by Major League Baseball and people like Harold Reynolds. I’ve touched baseball areas deeper than anybody’s ever touched in HipHop and rap music at the same time. Not even close. People have no idea. C-Doc’s solo project that I’m on is going to be on Def Jam, and everybody says, “Oh, this is his first solo record since X.” They completely overlook the “We Wreck Stadiums” record.

Doing different things with baseball was unimaginable because in this century, there’s been rap tied together with football, with basketball, but not too many with baseball. Baseball is a national pastime from the last century, especially because the time was right. Back then, if you worked on a farm in Iowa and you had the radio on, and you had to work the whole farm, you weren’t mad at the pace of the game because it kept you going. You didn’t want that game to leave you. So it fit that time.

Whether it’s going to fit the speed of these times, it has to adapt itself. Whether it’s going to be conducive to moving along at its own pace, and a lot of times a slower pace, you’ve got to educate more people on the beauty of the game.

Robby Incmikoski: Now, this is an amazing thing to ask you, Chuck. You told me a story about having an Ernie Banks autograph that you kept in your wallet. Are my facts straight on that?

Chuck D: Yeah, Hank Aaron’s autograph I kept in my wallet. Ernie Banks signed a picture to me. But both of them coincidentally happened years apart at Atlanta Hartsfield Airport. I saw Hank Aaron walking down the concourse. I walked one way towards him, he walked the other way and gave me his autograph. I had that in my wallet. And Ernie Banks, I saw him coming out of a Sky Club, and he gave me a picture of himself that he was used to giving to people. And that was great.

Robby Incmikoski: How old were you when you ran into Hank at the airport?

Chuck D: Maybe about 39-40. And Banks a couple years later.

Robby Incmikoski: And you kept that autograph from Hank, right?

Chuck D: Yes, sir. In one of my wallets—the wallet I haven’t opened in a long time.

Robby Incmikoski: You’ll never get rid of that. I assume it’s one of your prized possessions.

Chuck D: Yeah, I kept it with me. I didn’t take it home and put it under glass or anything like that. I spent a long time in my boyhood collecting autographs and holding onto them. But for this reason, when I got Hank Aaron’s autograph, I just kept it in my wallet.

Robby Incmikoski: That’s amazing.

Chuck D: I don’t know if it’s amazing or stupid!

Robby Incmikoski: Hey, they all mean something different to each person. Can I put you on the spot a little bit? Chuck, you could name almost the entire starting lineup of maybe four or five different teams from 50-60 years ago. Tell me about some of your favorite Mets teams and why you loved them.

Chuck D: Well, I have what they call, I guess, one of the problems that affects older people—I don’t have recent term memory. Tell you the truth, after 1994, I soured on baseball. I didn’t like the strike. I was honed into the game, and next thing that hit me, I didn’t feel like the Marlins won that championship right in 1997. They bought a lot of players, then got rid of them after that. I just thought that was a cheap way of winning a championship, especially when you have markets like the Cubs and the Red Sox.

The strike in 1994 just done the Expos in, and they were one of the most exciting teams ever. When baseball went on strike, it just never was the same. So I soured on how the game treated itself in the ‘90s.

But if I had to name lineups anywhere from 1994 on back. I wanted to train myself as a sportscaster. You name the team. The 1970s Big Red Machine with Lee May (who never hardly gets talked about), Tony Perez, Johnny Bench, Bernie Carbo. Later on, Merv Rettenmund moved on to Baltimore. You had César Gerónimo coming off the bench. You had Pete Rose playing the outfield at that time. The Big Red Machine.

With that romantic view of baseball, my outlet was just drawing the players and looking at baseball cards and collecting them. I collected baseball cards thoroughly before it became a thing, and when I turned 18, it became a thing, and I let it go because it turned into this other thing. For me, I collected baseball cards because of the romantic connection. There’s nothing more beautiful than having a bunch of cards and they all smell like bubble gum.

Robby Incmikoski: About a month ago, my buddy and I chewed some of the bubble gum from a pack from 1987, and it tastes every bit as awful as you would think it does, Chuck.

Chuck D: I can imagine, man. But what’s crazy is ‘68-’67 Topps especially, when you sometimes got that little coin that was in it? That was romantic. The bubble gum was romantic, and the bottle cap coin, that was romantic too. I remember that quite thoroughly.

Robby Incmikoski: As it relates to the Mets, do you have a favorite Mets team and why did you root for that particular team?

Chuck D: I’ve got a couple of favorites. The 1970 Mets team was the first team I followed every day. I didn’t follow the ‘69 Mets every day. The 1973 Mets, I was screaming and rooting for them in the summertime. I remember Sal Marciano, announcer on the New York sports news affiliation, coming on in August saying, “The Mets are dead. The Mets are dead.” And I’m like, “No!”

This is when Tug McGraw started the “You Gotta Believe” theme. This is the ‘73 Mets, and we had just gotten Willie Mays a year before. For some reason, the Mets came from last to first with an unbelievable finish. That Mets team was very dear to me. They beat the Big Red Machine in the NL playoffs when Buddy Harrelson had that fight against Pete Rose, and we took the Oakland A’s to seven games. I remember Wayne Garrett popping up at the end of the game, and I said, “Well, I can’t believe the season’s over after we came so far.”

Another favorite Mets team of mine was the 1985 Mets, before the ‘86 champions. That was a romantic season because just two years prior, the Mets were coming up, and they were able to look at two guys coming out of the minors: Dwight Gooden and Darryl Strawberry from the year before. The 1985 Mets was a romantic year, and we almost beat out the Cardinals.

Around 1987, my rap career started, and it took me away from the game because I had to tour. Back then, you couldn’t get connected to the team or the box scores as easily, especially when you went overseas. I couldn’t follow the games. I didn’t even know that the Mets lost against the Dodgers in the 1988 NLCS. I was already in Japan.

Robby Incmikoski: Doc Gooden was 20 in that 1985 year. He went 24 and 4, made 35 starts, which is unheard of to begin with. Nobody’s doing that again in a year. He had an ERA of 1.53. Here’s the craziest part of those numbers: He threw 276 and two-thirds innings and had 268 punch outs. It’s one of the greatest seasons in the history of Major League Baseball by a pitcher.

Chuck D: I seen it in real time. I wasn’t a kid either. I was 25. Watching Doc Gooden. That was a pleasure, when they asked me to do his Mets Hall of Fame speech presentation. That was a joy.

That year, the Mets also got Gary Carter. I just thought that team had momentum, and you said, “Man, they got it next year.” The fact that the Mets were able to pull it off in 1986 with the World Series, with the ball through Buckner’s legs, it was amazing.

1987 was my first year of touring. I thought we were going to win again. I remember being in New York for a second during the Mets’ pennant run that year, and I remember Terry Pendleton smashed a 425-foot homer that kind of derailed us. That was the last year I could hang on to day-to-day coverage of the Mets.

Like I said, back then, you couldn’t get your day-to-day fix on your team. Today is different. You can spark up a phone anywhere in the world and check out the game. Back then, overseas, you got to pick up a copy of the Herald Tribune, and that was two days late on the game. That was a big reason why I got detached more from the game.

Robby Incmikoski: Did you try to maybe look at a box score or paper? Were you able to check in on the Mets during your travels maybe once a week or month or whatever?

Chuck D: Yeah, it was hard though. If you’re in Germany, you’re probably not getting a US paper at all, or you might get the Herald Tribune, but they’re not giving you the daily box scores. You got detached from the game.

But one thing I knew I did bring HipHop, I was the first person who religiously wore baseball hats the way they were supposed to be worn.

Robby Incmikoski: You made the Pirates hat worldwide famous. There’s no argument. You’re the reason the Pirates hat is as famous as it is, the black Pirates hat with the yellow P.

Chuck D: Well, I think with that, I also made the baseball hat kind of like a HipHop mainstay.

Robby Incmikoski: Why did you wear the Pirates hat? What did you like about it that you wore it so often?

Chuck D: It was the black and gold, and the P could also stand for “Public.” Also, I was a big fan of Roberto Clemente, and the Pirates being the first all-Black starting lineup, and all those other things that went with Pittsburgh. I could slide it over, and people who weren’t baseball fans thought the P meant Public Enemy. For a while, that really was the Public Enemy look: a Pirates hat and a Raiders jersey.

Robby Incmikoski: September 1, 1971, I worked the 50th anniversary of that all-Black lineup and interviewed Gene Clines and Al Oliver when they made an appearance here in Pittsburgh. What kind of pride do you feel to cross over from sports to HipHop? Because you were the first to connect HipHop and sports. People who are 25 years old won’t know the impact. But I’m 49, and I know what you did for the music game and sports. How does it hit you when people like me ask you about how you revolutionized the baseball hat in the music world?

Chuck D: Well, I wanted to be a sportscaster, but there was no such thing as ESPN back then. I grew up as a fan of Marv Albert and all the announcers in baseball because I wanted to be one. In HipHop and rap music, we had people like Kurtis Blow, who did “Basketball.” A lot of rappers were ball fans, but I was a ball fanatic trying to be a sportscaster.

So it was easy for me to cross my style over into the fast vernacular that HipHop had to be as an emcee. I intentionally went deep into sports because this is what I studied all my life, so I could rhyme about something complex. Even came down to the baseball hat, “This is my look right here. I don’t even have to change it.” I think the same thing I wore in 1988, I could get away with wearing right now on stage, and people would get it.

This was the beginning of Starter, the beginning of New Era and all these hat companies, and now they’re just gigantic. It’s just a staple now. A lot of people aren’t even into baseball, but they’ll wear a baseball hat. When people talk about the largest influence of sports on HipHop, it has to be the baseball hat.

Robby Incmikoski: How proud are you of that?

Chuck D: Well, in HipHop, people had their hat styles. Run-DMC had their fedoras. LL Cool J had his Kangol. The Beastie Boys wore baseball hats and trucker hats, but in a sort of like parody way. Every once in a while, like later on, you would see Run-DMC wear baseball hats and Raider jackets, but Run-DMC really pushed the fedora hat to the forefront. LL Cool J damn near single-handedly made the Kangol popular.

Coming out of that same Def Jam/Rush Production camp, I said, “Well, this is going to be my hat attempt,” and it happened to be wearing a baseball hat square on top of your head like it’s supposed to be worn. People who wore hats to the side styled them in a HipHop/B-boy type of way.

Here’s a trivia fact: Before records, in 1979, the B-boy style in the Northeast area—in New York, Jersey, and Connecticut—was the three-striped hats, the pillbox hats. That was the HipHop staple hat of 1979. It didn’t last long, but cats would wear that hat and they wore them to the side. You start to think back, you’re 49, so you might remember that at that particular time, starting in 1976, a lot of teams were going back to wearing those pillbox hats with the three stripes. It came in and went out. But it was also a B-boy staple in 1979. That’s a little-known trivia fact.

I took my baseball hats more seriously by wearing them straight forward, especially when the Pirates went from the gold hats to the black hats. There wasn’t too many black hats in 1988 other than the Raiders hat. I wore a Pirates hat because of the black hat, and I’m talking about the Pirates of Barry Bonds, Andy Van Slyke, and Bobby Bonilla, who’s also Bill Stephney’s cousin, the first Black executive at Def Jam. So we have a lot of cross-correlation similarities.

Robby Incmikoski: Chuck, what is it like for you now when you step into a baseball stadium? What feeling do you get?

Chuck D: That’s probably a better feeling than I could get off of TV. Usually, I like to watch sports on TV more than being at the event, but baseball is different because I’m looking at the field, the dimensions of the stadium, I’m looking at the architecture, all the manicured areas of the baseball park.

And I’m the person to tell you, I know the difference between a ballpark and a stadium. Sometimes a stadium could be a ballpark, sometimes a ballpark can be a stadium, but they’re two separate things. I look at even the intentional quirks, like when you look at that place in Houston with quirky dimensions, or they try to quirky-up places around a dome like the former Tropicana Field.

These stadiums had quirky dimensions because they had to be put in the middle of municipalities. So they were quirky for a reason: If the wall is going to be 280 feet, that’s because there’s a train line on the other side. You can’t move the train. A lot of times, new fans don’t know the reason why certain places had crazy dimensions.

Like the Polo Grounds. It was made for polo. It’s a rectangular place, so obviously, the foul lines are going to like 260 feet, and the power alleys are going to be 400 feet, and center field’s going to be 480 or something like that. Or they built Cleveland Municipal Stadium almost like, “Okay, we can outdo Yankee Stadium,” so you got a place that holds 80,000 people with a center field that goes to 490 feet and power alleys at 425. If they ever wanted to stop steroids, all they’d have to do is extend the dimensions.

Robby Incmikoski: Camden Yards did that a few years ago—extended the left field wall.

Chuck D: How far did they extend it?

Robby Incmikoski: I think about 30 feet out, and then they moved it back in this year about 9 feet.

Chuck D: Back and forth out there. That’s always a crazy dynamic to me. If you have a whole bunch of players—and this is before steroids—and you’ve got a whole bunch of players that are 6’5” with great workout and vitamin programs, you’re damn skippy they’re gonna be blasting the ball out of a small ballpark.

Robby Incmikoski: Damn right. Hey Chuck, this is amazing. I could talk all night with you about baseball. But when your look at baseball, you found a love that not a lot of rappers have found in the game. If I remember correctly, you listened to hockey growing up too, right?

Chuck D: Yeah, because of the way Marv Albert announced hockey games. People talk about Marv Albert, and you can tell Kenny this—he knows this—but very few people could ever do hockey games like Marv Albert did hockey games. I couldn’t even explain it because his speed, his pace, his precision; Marv Albert was like rapping a hockey game. A lot of people look at how Marv Albert covered basketball, the NBA, the Knicks and all that, but Marv Albert announcing hockey games in the ‘70s is hard to explain.

Robby Incmikoski: He was like no other. What would you say to a fan who wants to see all 30 ballparks? What would your advice be to a baseball fan?

Chuck D: Travel by car, enjoy the city that you go to, keep a nice journal. Nowadays, everybody’s got a camera and a phone, so you could really document your visits a lot better than in the past. If I went to all 30 ballparks, I’d get out my sketch pads and sketch each ballpark by hand.

Robby Incmikoski: Do you still draw, Chuck?

Chuck D: Yeah, I release books, like at least twice a year. Art books. I’ve released six so far over the last couple of years. I am an illustrator, as they say.

Robby Incmikoski: I’m looking at “Living Loud” right now. How do I not know about this?

Chuck D: You can go to Chuck D and Enemy Books, and you’ll see a list of six books I’ve done. I’ve gotta finish knocking out a four-book series before June 1st, depicting Donald Trump’s 2025 march to his first 100 days. It’s all illustrated. It’s something. It’s crazy.

Robby Incmikoski: Amazing, and your love for art was found in Baseball Digest. How about that? There can’t be many fans that know this about you.

Chuck D: A lot of people don’t know anything about me [laughs], and that’s cool, because they know what they know. I tell people, “You don’t know me. You only know a slice of what has been delivered to you.” I’ve had books released on me. We have so much information out there. You can learn about a person, but I’m not going to ring a bell so you can learn about me. At the end of the day, I want to have a Da Vinci vault, as opposed to being a one-trick pony.