Guns and hip-hop, guns and God, they are complicated, divisive subjects in America, he suggests, but that’s also the reason he’s tackling them in the new book. It is undoubtedly a must-have for serious fans of Chuck D and Public Enemy, and it can also be strongly recommended for anyone who wants to see interesting artwork from this period and through some fresh and unique eyes. As the first artist to create hip-hop entrenched with political sensibilities, his works have continued to speak out in unexpected and necessary ways, commencing with the group’s debut album, Yo! The result, STEWdio: The Naphic Grovel ARTrilogy of Chuck D, is three volumes of one-hundred-plus, one-page drawings. 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.

The Collector copies are accompanied by a numbered print that reproduces one of Chuck's drawings of Public Enemy, each hand-signed by the artist. He has been featured in more than one hundred documentaries on music, technology, politics, and race, and cocurated the Smithsonian Anthology of Hip-Hop and Rap. Legendary hip-hop artist and social activist Chuck D has used every opportunity in his groundbreaking career to stand up for civil rights.

While some people might have decided to go out to a club or the hotel bar, I turned my room into an art studio. And he interprets everything, from the raw pain of mass shootings to climate change, to the war in Ukraine to the Black Lives Matter movement. 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 Days of Red October 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. Livin’ Loud is a sufficiently loose and inclusive project that, not far away from this, D is ruminating on – and sketching – a nice bit of cityscape he found in Oslo. I was a furnace, burning hot,” he proclaims of his indefatigable determination to draw whatever his mind manifested for hours.

Though they often feel like diary entries, each installment has an overarching storyline and theme . With a foreword by Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello, Chuck D’s art debut Livin’ Loud is a visual experience of over 250 artworks, each piece reflective of the man behind the music. 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. 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. A drawing today can get the type of response that a rap record used to get 35 years ago, he adds, especially if it’s something he’s uploaded to Instagram or Facebook or X.

This is the sort of enterprise that accumulates through downtime on the road, in sketchpads and notepads; in his introduction, Rage Against the Machine’s guitarist Tom Morello, who performed with D in the rap-rock ‘supergroup’ Prophets of Rage, notes that he saw his bandmate drawing every day on tour. Featuring over 250 of his paintings, sketches and drawings, Livin' Loud includes a commentary of over 13,000 words in which Chuck D traces his musical and artistic trajectory offering unprecedented insight into his life and work. The founder of Public Enemy uses hip-hop rhymes and art to express his persuasive, in-depth opinions about the turbulent years between 2020 and 2022.