By Joshua Ryan Hall

Public Enemy's Chuck D and Johnny "Juice" Rosado are intimidating men. Not because they're prolific musicians famous even in countries most people have never heard of. But because when they walk into a room, odds are they're the smartest people there.

Read that again if you need to; add a bass guitar player and it could make a good joke. (A rapper, a DJ and a bass player walk into a room…) In a world fraught with assembly line entertainment and wannabe juvi grads hungry for street credibility, rappers and DJs hover near the bottom of society's intelligence hierarchy. Just above bass guitar players. However, after more than two decades of mixing political rhetoric with offbeat samples and musical mayhem, no one laughs when this particular rapper and DJ unleash their patented brand of social activism.

Chuck and Juice don't mind open deprecation of rap and hip-hop - industry factions they are credited with popularizing. They believe original artistry continues beneath a blanket of homogenized mediocrity, and that enough criticism might be the foot that kicks back the covers. They could be right. They're smarter than the rest of us.

From hip-hopology and Bob Dylan to new Public Enemy albums and the "Digital Jesus," Chuck and Juice opined freely during the Klipsch photo shoot and interview in Indianapolis. They arrived late. An all-night recording session on Long Island delayed the day. But their sharp wits and encyclopedic minds proved resilient, spewing forth obscure historical facts and date ranges, coining words and turning grossly poetic phrases - on little or no sleep.

"I'm tired of hearing about street credibility," says Chuck. "It's far overblown and overrated. I think today's rappers have the basic skills, but promotional departments are just looking for lowest common denominator sales, and you really don't get creativity out of a situation that's forced. … When the stigma about the music makes a bigger statement than the music itself, it's time to re-evaluate…"

Without prompting, Chuck and Juice exhort open minds to think about what they are hearing, to search for real artistry. Their familiarity with all kinds of music is dizzying and captivating, and their passion for pure, sonic innovation is a tribute to the "top-of-their-game studio musicians who played together before multi-track machines made people lazy."

"You're never going to find a period like rock 'n' roll in its infant stage from '53 to '67. It's like a magical period," says Chuck. "What Nirvana and a lot of the grunge bands did in the early 90s was basically strip themselves down to the garage band style of the 60s, which was itself a stripped down version of the 50s. The British guys rebelled against the American pop sound, the psychedelics stripped down the British and added sound effects… Now we're looking at the next wave of rap and hip-hop so you at least want to have an open mind."

"Every genre has a way of cleaning itself," says Juice. "Unfortunately, hip-hop is making so much money right now that-that cleaning time period might have to wait a little while-while this supposed affluent time in hip-hop extends itself."

"Right, and that's the problem," says Chuck. "A true hip-hopologist would know records and musicians and all the contributors to a sound. But here we're looking at 22 years since hip-hop became a recorded form and people aren't tracing the timeline of samples or styles anymore. What you end up drinking is a hot cup of someone else's vomit."

With revolutionary albums such as It Takes Millions to Hold Us Back, Fear of a Black Planet, and Apocalypse 91 … The Enemy Strikes Black in their influential and controversial past, one would be hard pressed to label any Public Enemy contributor as less than supremely original. But, according to Chuck, today's hip-hop is more about "red-carpet Americana capitalism" than about powerful memorable music.

"Bob Dylan doesn't measure himself by what he has," says Juice. "He doesn't care about MTV Cribs … for him it's about telling a story and making people feel something real. Rappers are so narcissistic and self-centered that they don't care about anybody but themselves so eventually you don't care anything about them either."

It's not all doom and gloom. Both Chuck and Juice know that there are people out there making music with depth and substance. And Public Enemy is together again working on two new albums for release in 2004 - tentative titles are How Do You Sell Your Soul to the Soulless People Who Sold Their Soul, and New Whirl Odor. The group has started its 49th tour and by all accounts audiences haven't lost their hunger for the music Public Enemy serves up

"[With Public Enemy] it's a unique combination of a bigger picture," says Chuck. "We have four studios and many producers who actually direct and produce all the music making. Juice is one of those guys. I was fortunate enough to work with Juice when he was actually still a high school student. I kind of taught Juice some of the ropes. But now he is my teacher, but that's how it's supposed to be, you know? You bring somebody in, you show them a way. It's fortunate to be able to work full circle."

"Producers are supposed to guide artists to a vision," says Juice. "Great producers take the time to get to know their artists, find out what makes them tick and coach them to bring a project together that embodies what the person is. Public Enemy has always been a group that had theme-based albums. In my opinion those are the only albums that really work. Tribe Called Quest made theme-based albums; De La Soul has theme-based albums. You know, anybody that has an album based on a theme or tone and sense of tone … it works because you remember the body of work … you just don't remember a hot single."

Juice continued, describing each Public Enemy album as having an "underlying current of energy that is ready to explode." He talked about working with Chuck and the benefits of distance and e-mail. The Internet allows them to communicate without unduly influencing each other's pure reactions to what they are hearing. It keeps their approach and their perspectives fresh.

The Internet itself is irrevocably connected to Chuck D. In a 1999 landmark move, Public Enemy became the first multi-platinum selling act to distribute its album through the Internet before it was available in retail stores. He has also testified before congress in praise of the Internet's power and founded the global hip-hop community Rapstation.com, which broadcasts free original programming and downloads.

Now, five years after Chuck first began speaking out in support of digital distribution, pay-per-tune music downloads are all the rage and the major studios seem to have given up on blocking progress and vilifying Sean Fanning - but just barely.

"You gotta give Fanning the credit … [Napster] was popular," says Chuck. "Everybody's talking about Apple and Steve Jobs or whatever the hell as the Digital Jesus, but you gotta give credit to Sean Fanning and Napster for at least creating the possibility for iTunes."

"Yo, don't think we're knocking Apple, though," chimes in Juice. "Chuck and me both use a lot of Apple hardware and software or whatever. They're riding the waves of somebody else's innovation, but they doing a real good job of it."

Chuck also recounted that he covered the Grammys for Apple through a live web cast in 1996.

With war and scandal and social inequity continuing to plague humankind, the planet needs its dissenting minority voices to be loud and unmerciful. Whether right or wrong, through words or grooves, Chuck D and Johnny Juice are preparing funkified dissertations that will no doubt force all who listen to think.