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Hip hop legend Chuck D paints Swiss city of Basel

A key figure in the history of rap music, Public Enemy front man Chuck D is also a talented artist.

Published: 11 July 2018 12:07 CEST
Hip hop legend Chuck D paints Swiss city of Basel
Rapper Chuck D of Public Enemy in Las Vegas in 2015. Photo: Getty Images North America/AFP

The 57-year-old who all but invented political hip hop is currently on tour in Europe with the supergroup Prophets of Rage which also includes members of Rage Against the Machine and Cypress Hill. 

The band are due to play on Thursday at the massive Gurtenfestival in Bern. 

Read also: Seven great summer music festivals in Switzerland

But instead of tearing up hotel rooms in the time-honoured tradition of big-name stars, Chuck D, whose real name is Carlon Douglas Ridenhour, prefers to take out a brush and paint the places he performs. 

A painting dated last Saturday and posted on Twitter shows a Basel tram from what appears to be outside the Hotel Les Trois Rois, according to Swiss news portal 20 Minuten. 

An earlier painting from May shows a view of the Rhine from the same hotel. 

He has also recently painted scenes in other European cities including Barcelona, Milan and Bergen in Norway.

Ridenhour has a Bachelor of Fine Arts from New York's Adelphi University and now holds an honorary doctorate from the instituion. 

The rapper's first art show was held in California this year. It featured watercolour and ink illustrations of life on tour priced from $550 to $1,500 dollars. 

Read also: How Zurich finally made peace with its very own Banksy

CULTURE

New songs mark sixth anniversary of French star Johnny Hallyday’s death

Fans of the late Johnny Hallyday, "the French Elvis Presley", will be able to commemorate the sixth anniversary of his death with two songs never released before.

Published: 17 November 2023 09:05 CET
New songs mark sixth anniversary of French star Johnny Hallyday's death

Hallyday, blessed with a powerful husky voice and seemingly boundless energy, died in December 2017, aged 74, of lung cancer after a long music and acting career.

After an estimated 110 million records sold during his lifetime – making him one of the world’s best-selling singers -Hallyday’s success has continued unabated beyond his death.

Almost half of his current listeners on Spotify are under the age of 35, according to the streaming service, and a posthumous greatest hits collection of “France’s favourite rock’n’roller”, whose real name was Jean-Philippe Leo
Smet, sold more than half a million copies.

The two new songs, Un cri (A cry) and Grave-moi le coeur (Engrave my heart), are featured on two albums published by different labels which also contain already-known hits in remastered or symphonic versions.

Un cri was written in 2017 by guitarist and producer Maxim Nucci – better known as Yodelice – who worked with Hallyday during the singer’s final years.

At the time Hallyday had just learned that his cancer had returned, and he “felt the need to make music outside the framework of an album,” Yodelice told reporters this week.

Hallyday recorded a demo version of the song, accompanied only by an acoustic blues guitar, but never brought it to full production.

Sensing the fans’ unbroken love for Hallyday, Yodelice decided to finish the job.

He separated the voice track from the guitar which he felt was too tame, and arranged a rockier, full-band accompaniment.

“It felt like I was playing with my buddy,” he said.

The second song, Grave-moi le coeur, is to be published in December under the artistic responsibility of another of the singer’s close collaborators, the arranger Yvan Cassar.

Hallyday recorded the song – a French version of Elvis’s Love Me Tender – with a view to performing it at a 1996 show in Las Vegas.

But in the end he did not play it live, opting instead for the original English-language version, and did not include it in any album.

“This may sound crazy, but the song was on a rehearsal tape that had never been digitalised,” Cassar told AFP.

The new songs are unlikely to be the last of new Hallyday tunes to delight fans, a source with knowledge of his work said. “There’s still a huge mass of recordings out there spanning his whole career,” the source said.

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