NEW YORK — As the chief sonic architect for Public Enemy, rap's visionary radicals, Hank Shocklee has made some of the angriest sounding music ever in the pop world.
The dense, tumultuous tracks that he constructs with the group mirror the tension and fury reflected in such album titles as "Fear of a Black Planet" and "Apocalypse 91 . . . the Enemy Strikes Black."
Now Shocklee has applied the same aesthetics to the film world. He has composed the score and compiled the soundtrack album for "Juice," a film in which director Ernest Dickerson lays out the hard choices for urban African-American teens.
But Shocklee isn't satisfied.
"I couldn't take this score as far as I wanted to," says the lanky, constantly moving 32-year-old with a sense of ambitious determination.
Oddly, it's not an image of stark reality that comes up when he tries to explain his vision.
"Next time I'd like to do a 'Fantasia' of rap."
The Technicolor unreality of Disney animation seems an unlikely reference point for the celebrated producer of hard-hitting rap. Still, there's a sense to it; his soundscapes are already aural "Fantasias," vivid, layered jewels that have set the genre's standards. And, in truth, his entire career in rap--which now includes running his own record company--has been something of a fantasy tale.
Shocklee never wanted to be a record producer. "I got roped into it," he says, "because nobody else was doing what I thought could be done with this music."
In 1984, while in college as a member of the R&B group Spectrum City, he watched a producer botch the music the act was recording. Deciding he could do better, he took over the sessions for the song's stripped-down B side. The next few years were spent in various roles in radio and music production, and by 1987 he was the behind-the-scenes leader of Public Enemy, rap's most acclaimed and, sometimes, controversial group.
Now, as executive producer of the "Juice" soundtrack and head of his own label, Shocklee is taking another reluctant step.
"There's a void, a need for big picture people," he explains in an office in the New York headquarters of MCA, his label's parent company. "There's no structure in the rap business, and if it ain't going to be people like me, people with a passion and understanding for it, who take it into other areas, then it's never going to happen."
Last year, soundtrack albums from "Boyz N the Hood" and "New Jack City" proved that there is a sizable audience for urban-oriented musical companions to popular films. With these successes fresh in the music industry's mind, commercial expectations are high for the "Juice" album. And since Shocklee's label, SOUL (Sound of the Urban Listener), has yet to release a major hit, there would seem to be plenty of pressure on "Juice" to deliver the kinds of sales that "New Jack" (more than 2 million) and "Boyz" (almost a million) enjoyed.
The album seems a good bet to meet those expectations. It features a lineup of proven rap stars (Eric B. & Rakim and Big Daddy Kane), new tracks by up-and-comers Naughty by Nature and Cypress Hill Crew, and new jack swing selections by Teddy Riley and Aaron Hall.
"The soundtrack encompasses a lot more music than just rap," says Shocklee, "because I don't think the teen-age audience is listening to all hip-hop and nothing else. I wanted to show that the kids are broad and are exposed to a lot more things."
In addition to compiling the soundtrack, Shocklee was given the task of composing the score for Dickerson's story of four young black men growing up in the mean streets of Harlem. Shocklee says that "Juice" has the first true contemporary African-American movie score--"African because the drums are communicating the mood, and American because we have samples in there with the drum tracks."
Conceptualizing such a project was difficult enough, but the logistics of actually recording this accompaniment proved the greatest challenge. "Film and music are both advanced in their situations," he says, "but when you put them together, you got something that's prehistoric."
The process of film scoring has not yet adapted to the elaborate machinery of rap recording, and the engineers and film editors haven't come up with a system to get these computerized beats in sync with the action on the screen, so Shocklee could only work on one scene at a time. "If we wanted to change the tempo," he says, "we had to change the whole set-up and start over."
Shocklee is used to finding new outlets for rap beats. The product of a musical, black middle-class family in Long Island (his uncle was a founding member of Kool & the Gang), he built a following in the late '70s as a deejay for disco parties and dances during high school. A neighbor named Carlton Ridenhour helped him promote his events by designing posters and fliers. Rap was just being born when the two of them began attending nearby Adelphi University.
