The Journey of Flavor Flav: From Public Enemy to Public Buffoon

(As Flavor Flav makes his sitcom debut tonight, I cooked up a column for Floridian lamenting the slide of a brother who once stood for something. Here's the column reposted on the blog)

We were never supposed to see something like this.

When Flavor Flav burst on the scene with seminal rap group Public Enemy, he was never the main attraction. Flav brought the noise as the ultimate "hype man," a comic foil to help ease the brutally Afro-centric, often militant messages of rap's first successful group to base its image on a political stance.

While lead M.C. Chuck D. urged fans to Bring the Noise or Fight the Power, Flav provided a break from the seriousness, highlighting the slow response of emergency crews in America's ghettos with 911 Is a Joke before warning listeners on the followup album that you Can't Truss It, especially when left-wing politicians in Little Rock feed you a line.

In his prime, William Drayton was the best rap sidekick in the game. Mouth packed with gold caps and a gigantic clock wrapped around his neck, Flav helped turn the hype man into a hallowed institution in hip-hop while contributing to some of the most legendary rap hits in history.

So how did this image of excess and hedonism, originally presented as a counterweight to the austere black nationalist vibe of Public Enemy's core message, become the group's most visible surviving legacy?

Here's how: In the last few years, reality TV shows have transformed the sidekick clown into the star.

The odyssey started with Flav's debut as a housemate in the series that crammed dysfunctional celebrities in a house, The Surreal Life. It progressed to his goof of a "romance" with Brigitte Nielsen in Strange Love (she reportedly was engaged to someone else during the production) and VH1's ghetto-style version of The Bachelor, Flavor of Love. (That's three No. 1 cable series, if you're counting.)

Flavor of Love in particular has proven a ratings bonanza. The show's first-season finale drew the most viewers in VH1's then-21 years, and its second-season debut drew the channel's biggest premiere audience ever. Small wonder VH1 okayed two spinoffs and a third season.

Now 49, Flav is set to star in a half-hour sitcom, Under One Roof, debuting tonight on low-rated MyNetworkTV. He plays an ex-convict living with his straitlaced brother, and the series is so good, MyNetworkTV didn't send me a review copy (a publicist for the show insists that happened because they are editing the show down to the last minute).

A cynic might assume that fans — black and white — are giddily consuming the buffoonish black-hustler stereotype Flavor Flav offers with little regard to the social consequences.

In the process, the man who once rhymed about black folks being "Divided and sold/For liquor and the gold/Smacked in the back/For the other man to mack" is now lording over women who insult each other over their herpes bumps and one who even relieved herself on the floor. (The punch line: She wasn't eliminated from Flavor of Love for that. Really.)

By now, it's a cliche to complain about how Flav's worn playa shtick has become a license to print money for reality TV producers. It's just the latest in a long line of contradictions from an artist who can boast of skills as a classically trained pianist and arrests for carrying an unlicensed gun and crack cocaine.

Without seeing an episode, it's a safe bet that Under One Roof continues that legacy, mining stereotypes about black folks minus the godly messages you get in a Tyler Perry script.

This Public Enemy fan is left to wonder about the irony: One of rap's most militantly pro-black groups has produced one of TV's biggest black buffoons. The voice of the hype man, in the end, is the loudest left from the rap band that was socially conscious before the industry had a name for it.

Looks like someone decided that fighting the power wasn't as profitable as joining it.

And we all may be the worse for his choice.

Comments

[Kim Pearson]

Thanks for this, Eric. Men such as Drayton stand in stark and troubling contrast to black entertainers of earlier generations who demeaned themselves because no other roles were available. Bert Williams would be appalled.

[Jennifer]

Thank you, Eric, for the article and for Professor Kim Pearson (she made the first comment) for sharing.

If Flav Fav takes some of this money he makes and recycles it in the black community to help inner city kids to teach them another way of life then I can be at peace with him.

Story almost reminds me of the tragic character that Actress and Oscar Winner Hattie McDaniel had to play because of the limited roles offered to her back in the day. However, she opened doors that were shut for many.

[Paul]

I see no contradiction in Flav’s more recent incarnation and, in fact, see him perfectly aligned with the past he was a part of. With anthems of social (in)justice, the dominate message was (and still is) to do whatever it takes to enrich oneself (or “family,” in a narrow sense). Get rich or die trying. If it means acting the buffoon, so be it. Individual riches always trump social ones.

It has been a long time since the popular logic was rooted in “we” rather than “I.” Maybe there’s been no perfect past to look to in that respect. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t possible. And, despite “Under One Roof” as evidence, there’s more promise right now than there has been in some time.

[Rhone]

Dear Eric: Thank you for this post. It makes your e-mail signature from Marx even more accurate. I am even more glad I do not own a television after reading your post on Flavor Flav. I wonder what Chuck D has to say about these antics. Television is becoming more and more an opiate of the masses. Maybe integrating rap music into MTV was not the best thing, especially since the founder of MTV said that his goal was to essentially introduce viewers to "Satan." I personally don't think that ambition has left these music stations. -RF.

[Eric Deggans]

Thanks for your compliments guys. Paul, i would only note that Public Enemy never advocated success by any means necessary. And I remember asking Chuck D about 9 years ago why he didn't have a sitcom like everyother well-known black performer at the time, and he said he would never do a show for UPN, which he called the United Plantation Network...

So I don't think Flav doing whatever it takes to getahead really ibes with what PE was preaching back in the day...

[Be Mock]

Back then I thought it was a calculated ploy to involve a character like Flav to bring the lumpen demographic of the black hip hop audience to the progressive core of Public Enemy. Wu Tang Clan made good use of this character as well with ODB, for the same cause. I think time has proven that this kind of balancing act performs well -- what would Shakespeare's plays be without the jesters?

But as with ODB, Flav somewhere along the line became the act as the audience chose to focus on him and be entertained, rather than invest in PE and be educated.

So Flav is to be blamed in one respect, in that when he got the spotlight instead of shining it toward PE and the message, both of which made him possible, he decided to hog the stage. He had a choice, and he went with the money. He undercut himself in the process -- how can we credibly believe that 911 is a joke, when the source of the hook is a joke?

But the American audience is also to blame. VH1 would not have proceeded with all those spinoffs had they not gotten record ratings. VH1 isn't beholden to the black community, or any community other than its shareholders. It was the American audience that made Flavor of Love/I Love New York/et al. possible.

[LockBull]

Hate to be a devil's advocate here, but is it possible that Flav was never "all that"? I mean, first and foremost with PE and today he is in show biz, and it's possible that he was the "Hype Man" in PE because he played the role, and I mean a role, very well. If he believed what he was saying back then wouldn't he be on the list of "left wing pundits" like Chuck D. is today?

In PE he provided much needed comic relief to Chuck D., without him (and their producers, to be fair), PE would have been way too overly preachy to reach an audience other than Black Militants. Come on, do you think that 99% of the white teenagers who bought "Bring the Noise" in the late 80's and early 90's understood the part "Farrakhan's a prophet that I think you outta listen to"?

Flav brought the Hype back then, but folks, Hype's all it was.

[GlennS.]

I never quite got why an overtly political group like Public Enemy had Flavor Fave as a member anyway. To me it was akin to if The Clash had hired "Weird Al" Yankovic.

[GlennS.]

Sorry, in my haste above I mis-typed. Flavor's last name. It's of course Flav, not Fave.

[drinklime]

Well... they figure they can sell more commercials than it will cost to put Flava Flav on TV. That's all that really matters these days.

[Oscar]

I don't buy for a second that Flava Flav doesn't know exactly what he is doing. He could use his celebrity for a cause, any cause, but he would rather be a joke and make money. It is his right, but it is no less a shame.