Interficial ARTelligence: The Moments That Met Me, by Chuck D., Akashic Books 2025. 240 pages. $24.95 paperback. https://www.akashicbooks.com/catalog/interficial-artelligence/
While Chuck D is known as a founder and front man for the rap group Public Enemy and his outspoken politics, he also has a burgeoning career as a graphic novelist. His previous graphic novels, the three-volume Stewdio: The Naphic Grovel Artrilogy and The Summer of Hamn: Hollowpointlessness Aiding Mass Nihilism, were modern history/political theory treatises. With his newest 2025 book though, he has turned overtly autobiographical, streaked through with social and political commentary, much like a Public Enemy album.
Unlike a traditional chronological autobiography, Chuck D slings together a collage of images and time slips, much like old-school rap where the cut up of words, images, feelings, all intertwine, entangling. Functionally, Interficial is a collection of two-page spreads of reminiscences, in no particular order, of people he has met. Not simply a greatest hits collection, but the subtle hints, deep cut grooves following from the big notes we all know. The grandiose to the sublime. Mixing and matching, scratching the beat, page to page to page. Vignettes of the big moments and the small, on the stage, sharing a drink in a car, changing tires. Short meetings with the famous. From the ‘80s to his New York youth to the present, and yes, looking to the future, for those he still wishes to meet.
Some of the art is scribbled and ragged. Lines show through, as he has not erased the original preliminary sketches. He uses markers and colored pencils over his pencils. It's his notebook, copied out, the colors bleeding through page to page. There is a fierce spontaneity to the work. It has a certain rough-hewed Bill Sienkiewicz circa Big Numbers feel. Or like what John Jennings is currently producing. With that rawness. More ragged. Like a live performance caught in media res. It's Sam Cooke's Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963 and not the singles that are on the radio and streaming. Throaty and raw. Each spread is a person that Chuck D has spent time with. "The moments that met me." While the art does not fall into caricature, eschewing the obvious, on the opposite spectrum, some of the sketched faces are not immediately recognizable, even while reading the text. But others are amazing in their true to life feel. Snapshots. Dick Gregory massaging Chuck D's feet. Debbie Harry in disguise, looking like Natasha from Bullwinkle. Teenage Keith Shocklee changing tires at Sears. It's the vibrancy that works so well, the immediacy. Warren Beatty working on Bulworth, the crackle of looking in from the outside into old Hollywood.
Unfortunately, some of the writing is hard to follow, falling around the margins and tumbling around the images. Circling over the drawings and enveloping them. This is particularly a product of the notebook form. Words scribbled on drawings. Rushing out in a notebook stream. A bigger issue, speaking to the production itself, is the tight paperback spine that obscures the center of each of the two-page spreads, especially as you get closer to the center of the book. The words and art sink into themselves, obscuring words and images. It's very frustrating.
Even with these faults, Interficial is compelling in short bursts. The non-linear approach lets you delve in with fits and starts. Opening at random and being surprised. Seeing the relevance to today as Chuck D's social concerns hums, lecturing with Angela Davis, lobbying in Washington DC with Anita Baker, his wish to meet Barack Obama. If it were larger format, it could easily be a coffee table book to be read over and over again. It's not perfect, but it engages. Which is what Chuck D wants. And what you expect, and want too.
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