The Humboldt Park artist who goes by Stef Skills is a big fan of Public Enemy, the influential hip-hop group. She says she “listened to them as a teenager and they baptized me into hip-hop music and culture.”
With lyrics and themes on such topics as racism and oppression and pushing back against authority, their music helped instill in her “the spirit of activism and being able to question things that I’ve been taught,” she says. That’s “carried over to all aspects of my life, beyond hip-hop or music. I think that’s something Public Enemy gave to a lot of people.”
