Public Enemy: Revolution, Scandal, and a Message Louder than a Bomb

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3:09Disgrace land is a production of double Elvis. The stories about hip-hop legends public enemy are insane. Their height man allegedly tried to shoot his neighbor while high on crack cocaine. Their so-called minister of information was so controversial that he nearly destroyed the group's career. They played a show at Riker's Island immediately after releasing a track about a prison break. Their music video depicting the assassination of politicians was pulled after it aired on MTV just once. Public enemy were revolutionaries, both in their message and their music. In the 1980s and 1990s, they helped elevate hip-hop to an art form. They did this with Chuck D's booming voice, flavorflaves, comic levity, and the auditory assault of the bomb squad's production.

4:14Great music. Unlike that clip I played for you at the top of the show. That wasn't great music. That was a preset loop for my Melotron called Vogue Smog MK2. I played you that clip because I can't afford the rights to a clip from Baby Don't Forget My Number by Millie Vanille. And why would I play you that specific slice of secretly lip-sinking cheese could I afford it? Because that was the number one song in America on July 4, 1989. And that was the day public enemy released their single, Fight the Power, a song that put them in the middle of the cultural zeitgeist at the very moment they were splintering apart. On this episode, Heightmen, Revolutionaries, Assassinations, Prison Breaks, Auditory Assaults in Public Enemy. I'm Jake Brennan and this is Disgrace Land.

5:361993, The Bronx. William Dreaton, the man better known to the world as Flavor Flave, was hearing things, voices, specifically the voice of his baby girl, crying for her daddy, coming from the other side of his apartment wall. The sound of his daughter hit Flave where it hurt. He was seeing less and less of these days, seeing less of all his kids actually. Karen his ex had full custody. The only thing that helped him block out the pain, that helped him forget if only for a moment was crack cocaine. But not today. Today the crack was reminding him of what he didn't have, his kids. They were clearly in distress, being held hostage by his next door neighbor. Karen was there too. Why? Didn't matter. All that mattered was that Flave was fully convinced that his estranged family was locked up next door. So, Flave or Flave did what any good daddy would

6:39do in this situation. He grabbed his 380 semi-automatic, stuck it into his pants and went to the rescue, out into the hallway and knocked on his neighbor's door. The guy opened it just to smidge and then Flave pushed the door wide open, burged right in, sweating, bugging out. Yo man, where's my family? They were in here somewhere. He can still hear his little girl screaming. His neighbor just kept saying they're not here, man. Man, he'll fuck this guy. Colin Flave, man? How about he act like a man and give Flave back his kids? How about that? The neighbor panicked, and then he bolted. Out of the apartment, into the hallway, straight to the stairwell door. Flave gave chase. 23 flights down, all the way to the lobby. He was panting now, sweating profusely. His neighbor stopped and spun around, took a step forward like he was going to get into it.

7:40But fuck that. Flave pulled the 380 from his pants. One more step, and I'm going to shoot you, G. The neighbor freaked. He ran outside into traffic, noise, total chaos. Then came Flave a Flave still just one step behind. Outside onto that same street, ready to be strong, to be a good daddy, to do the one thing he believed he had to do. Just a few years after his group, Public Enemy changed the rap game. Flave a Flave high on crack, paranoid, armed, was committing the kinds of transgressive acts that ran counter to P.E.'s message. A message that was delivered by the group's MC, Chuck D. A guy who famously didn't do drugs, didn't drink. A guy who viewed hip-hop music, all music, as a way to raise the dialogue. Chuck aimed a freer mind, the exact opposite of what was going on with Flave here. Trapped inside of his own mind. Freedom from oppression,

8:43from the propaganda of the ruling class. Freedom from complacency and a shared loss of history and culture. In the mid-80s, when Public Enemy blew up, that culture was still resting too hard on the laurels of the civil rights movement some two decades prior. Or at least, that was the case in Chuck D's eyes. For Chuck, the movement, it didn't simply happen. Saying it happened, implied that it was in the past. But it wasn't over. It was still beginning. Chuck, of course, was the polar opposite of Flave. Chuck wrapped about the street, about drugs, about the United States' broken prison system. But Flave was the streets. He was at various times a user, a dealer, another member in the New York locker. Now, however, he was a foil. He existed to soften Chuck. The Bobby Bird to Chuck D's James Brown. The comic relief to Chuck's hard-hitting broadcast news crawl. He gave Chuck room to breathe in the verses. Versus the came at you like an oozy

9:44that weighed a ton. Flave a Flave also made Public Enemy's message more palatable to suburban America, to the white kids buying their records. White kids like me. And we bought them. We really did. Couldn't wait, actually. By the time Flave and Flave was chasing his neighbor out of an apartment building with a loaded gun, Public Enemy had four stone-cold classic albums under their belt. Albums that sold millions. Years earlier, L.O. Cool J had declared he was hard as hell, but these four PE albums were hard as a motherfucker. Hank Shockley and his brother Keith, Eric Vietnam's Sabler and Chuck D, a production team known collectively as the bomb squad, brought a wall of sound to hip-hop that was unlike anything before or after. Hank Shockley was rap's Phil Spector, layering sample upon sample, dissonant and forceful. The resulting hypnotic sound was, as Chuck D put it, quote, repetitive repetition, relentless no escape. James Brown took it to the bridge. We take it over the

10:46bridge. Unquote. This wasn't your father's R&B. This wasn't rhythm and blues. This was the 80s going on the 90s. R&B was Reagan in Bush now. It was DJ Terminator X scratching the ones, scratching the twos, not just make it funky break, but the man dear attention. It was Professor Griff, Public Enemy Self-Described Minister of Information, bringing back the Black Panther urgency of decades past. Giving PE its image, the security of the first world, aka the S1W, standing at attention on stage with fake machine guns while air raid sirens wailed. The S1W's Professor Griff, Hank, Shock, Flave, they had a collective message. Wake the fuck up. September 1983. There was a war going on. The NYPD called it a war on graffiti, but it was really a war on hip-hop. In 83, hip-hop in the eyes of the law was not art, but vandalism.

11:47Musicians, artists, they had to make their own space. Like Michael Stewart standing at the first avenue and 14th Street subway station with a marker in his hand. It was late, past midnight. Michael did this thing and made the wall of the subway station a little cooler than he found it. The transit cops watched and waited, and then they pounced. They forced Michael to the ground and beat him with their billi-clubs. The hog tied his arms and legs behind him. A nightstick wrapped around Michael's throat. He gasped for air. An hour later, Michael Stewart went into a coma. The case went to trial. The defendants, the judge, the jury, the attorneys, the court officers, all of them. White. The one person of color was unable to tell a side of the story, because less than two weeks after the incident, Michael Stewart was dead. All because he tagged the wall of a subway station. The six officers went free, and the NYPD made their point.

12:49People who looked like Michael Stewart could be arrested, assaulted, even killed. Carlton, written an hour, aka Chuck D, wasn't about to accept that. He, along with his fellow disruptors in public enemy, were ready to fight the powers of B, ready to revitalize the movement. As Chuck saw, that movement had gotten a little soft in the nearly 20 years since Malcolm and Martin. It was a movement that never got what it wanted. Not really, anyway. Not what it deserved. Four years after the death of Michael Stewart, New York had a new public enemy to contend with. This one rode the bomb squad's relentless grooves, led by Chuck D's deep baritone, like Marv Albert calling a game not from the corporate, but from the street, a game of life and death. It was February 1987. Yo, bum rush the show, public enemy's debut, and Chuck D's own words kicked down that motherfucking door. Not just so they could give the people what they deserve,

13:50but to free the people from their own minds. The Bleacher Report app is your destination for sports. Right now, the NBA is heating up, March Bandis is here, and MLB is almost back. Every day there's a new headline, a new highlight, a new moment you've got to see for yourself. That's why I stay locked in with the Bleacher Report app. For me, it's about staying connected to my sports. I could follow the teams I care about, get real-time scores, breaking news, and highlights all in one place. Download the Bleacher Report app today so you never miss a moment. It is not hard to destroy a college. Last season, the podcast Campus Files brought you stories of fraternity drug rings, stolen body parts,

14:53campus colts, and more. And now, Campus Files is back for another season. There's a guy screaming into his phone, he's like, I just saw Charlie Kirk guess assinated right in front of me. Every week is a new episode and a new story. It's okay, I like, it's almost like a university on a siege. Listen to and follow Campus Files, available now wherever you get your podcasts. 1979 New Jersey The three men walking into the Clinton Correctional Facility for Women pulled out pistols and aimed them at the two security guards. They demanded to be taken to Joanne Chesemard. They were breaking her out. Joanne Chesemard, aka Assadah Shakir, one-time Black Panther, now a member of the Black Liberation Army, stepped on and Godmother to Tupac Shakir, serving a life sentence for her role in the murder of a state trooper. A murder she said she didn't commit. A murder that took place six years prior

15:55in 1973. On that day, shots were fired on a stretch of garden-state turnpike. A Jersey trooper and one of Shakir's colleagues were dead. Assadah Shakir was sitting inside a car panicking. She been shot twice. Every breath was like razors in her lungs. Suddenly, the car door ripped open, a couple of stateies dragging her onto the pavement. Those fucking pigs squealing at her now. Which way did they fucking go? You better open your goddamn mouth or a blow your goddamn head off. She knew they weren't kidding. They could end her right here, right now. Witnesses are not, and they fucking get away with it too, because they could. She nodded in a direction to indicate where her crew was at. Honestly, though, she had no clue. She was losing blood and she could barely see straight. The law, on the other hand, said it could see very clearly, clear enough to know that Assadah Shakir was a killer. And all white jury agreed. And now, Assadah Shakir was pacing

17:00around her cell, feeling nothing but contempt. Contempt for the systemic racism running rampant in the so-called land of the free. Contempt for the system of justice under which she'd been tried. A system that wouldn't allow Assadah Shakir to get what she wanted, which was actual justice. She wasn't going to wait around for someone to give that to her, especially not the United States government. It was like the godfather said, open up the door. I'll get it myself. Assadah Shakir opened her cell door with the assistance of three armed men there at Clinton Correctional. With their 45s locked and loaded in the two guards as hostages, the men ushered Shakir into a prison van. They drove her to a parking lot nearby where a blue Pontiac in a two-tone blue Cadillac were waiting for them. They carefully set the two hostages free. And then the Pontiac and the Cadillac roared to life. The Assadah Shakir and her accomplices were gone. The next time Shakir was seen, she was in Cuba, where she was now living under political asylum.

18:08Meanwhile, back home, the FBI made her the first woman ever to be added to their most wanted terrorist list. A 19-year-old Chuck D. Young Carlton ridden her here, growing up in Roosevelt Long Island, heard all about Assadah Shakir when this all went down in the 70s. But he did not hear that she was a terrorist. Instead, Chuck heard about how she'd been framed, persecuted, wrongfully convicted, simply for standing up and fighting for what she thought was right. Her plate, her cause, her story. It was one of many stories about cops, juries, judges, prison guards, the nation of millions that wanted to hold them back. Stories told in the Roosevelt community theater that Chuck's mom ran. In the summer programs at Hoster, the Delphi were Chuck learned from black panthers and black Muslims, their sociopolitical discourse igniting a passion within his mind and his heart. That passion was there in the lyrics he was now writing. The potent DJ sets that his friend Hank was performing in roller ricks, in elks clubs,

19:11in hotel ballrooms, any place that would happen. Chuck's deep interest in the budding genre that was hip-hop was validated by the professors at these higher institutions. Hip-hop was not a fat, hip-hop was part of the fabric of American culture. It was another story that was being told. Chuck, Hank, Flav, they had their own story. A story about broken promises and failed revolutions. The revolution was in the sound of public enemy, their new group, and public enemy's goal was to put that sound in people's ears. Disciplined, controlled, confident, strong. But as strong as their deaf jam debut was, Chuck didn't think it was enough. Just months after Yo-Bum rush the show was released, Eric B. and Rock Kim dropped their debut paid in full. A record so breathless, and made Yo-Bum rush the show sound like it was riding in the slow lane. Chuck and Hank Shockley knew they had an up P.E.'s game.

20:12The BPMs became faster. The layers of samples grew more dense. Drones, feedback, squeals. The bomb squad was coming at you with an auditory explosion. Public enemy second album. It takes a nation of millions to hold us back. Came in fast, in hot, like Mike Tyson in his prime. Public enemy wasn't thinking about Tyson so much as they were thinking about Marvin Gaye's what's going on. A record that equated music as art, as social commentary, as the means necessary to get the message across. This is what was going on now. Like that big clockflave wore on a chain around his neck. The time was here, and time was ticking. The effect that it takes a nation of millions had, not just on the public's perception of hip-hop, but on the scope of what the music was capable of, cannot be overstated. Public enemy created a whole new lane, and they did it with Chuck's voice, with Flav's humor, with Hank Shockley's wall of sound. 150 samples spread across 16 songs,

21:1820 samples alone on the track night at a living basehead. From Bowie to Orita to Run DMC, even sampling Chuck's voice from another song on the same album. Bring the noise, don't believe the hype, louder than a bomb. These songs are just as urgent and relevant today, as they were 36 years ago. Chuck D had a lot on his mind. The crack epidemic, conscientious objectors, prophets, Farrakhan, the Panthers, Asada Shakir, who Chuck name checks and revel without a pause. And yeah, he did refer to her by her given name Joanne Chesemard, which she had long ago rejected as a slave name, but only because Chuck D is a dope MC who recognized that Chesemard fit his rhyme better. Shakir might have also been on Chuck's mind when he wrote Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos, a track about a daring jailbreak. Chuck saw that track like he saw most of his music, the start of a dialogue, but not everyone saw things Chuck D's way. August 1988, two months after the release of it takes a nation of millions, a record that everyone

22:25was talking about. Public Enemy were booked to perform an unusual show, this one for inmates at Rikers Island. Twenty years since Johnny Cash played full some prison in San Quinn, just like their fellow prophet and rebel from Arkansas, Public Enemy saw their Rikers gig as an opportunity. First, to address the fact that the number of Black men behind bars in America was skyrocketing, but also to bring a little light to the darkness inside those walls. That is, until someone called Rikers to say, hey, do you guys know that the rap group you've invited to perform in your prison has a song on their brand new record about breaking out of prison? The Warden flipped out. Public Enemy had a promise not to play Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos, so that the show could go on. 250 prisoners packed inside Rikers Auditorium, add to that two guards per inmate, and another couple dozen guards standing outside the auditorium, and the place was a sauna. Hot, sweaty, loud, Chuck, Flav, Terminator X, they brought the noise.

23:31Professor Griff, meanwhile, brought the rhetoric, pride in oneself, pride in Black nationalism, fuck the man, whether it was here at Rikers or out there on the outside, simply being a Black man in America, a prison was a prison was a prison. Griff's rap was uncompromising, not just the things he said on stage at Rikers and around the world, but what he was now saying off stage. Truth be told, public enemy's minister of information was starting to get fucking weird. His rap of self-empowerment was skewing homophobic and anti-Semitic. There's no place for gays he told the UK press. He also said, quote, if the Palestinians took up arms, went into Israel and killed all the Jews, it'd be all right, unquote. One confronted about those statements, Professor Griff, dog in, he stood by them, he wasn't budging, not for anyone, certainly not for Flav or fucking Flav. Griff's whole vibe graded against Flav and the feeling was mutual.

24:37And when Flav came to the studio high on crack and weed, like one of those living bass heads, Chuck so urgently spoke out against on record, Professor Griff took it personally. He broke Flav's boom box and then he fractured Flav's ribs and shin, real tough love. Chuck found himself caught in the middle, trying to explain what was coming out of Griff's mouth, trying to understand why Flav kept doing the things he did, trying to keep the peace. But Flav had a different kind of peace in mind. He started showing up to the studio with a gun in his pocket, safety off, finger on the trigger, ready to react to Griff's bullshit at a moment's notice. Close range, no errors. Flav wasn't bluffing. Griff couldn't chill. And Chuck, well, Chuck had a choice to make. We'll be right back after this word, word, word.

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26:42Chuck D was in a tight spot. The press wanted him to answer for the thing's professor Griff was saying. They wanted him to denounce hatred of any kind. And though he didn't agree he was professor Griff's increasingly problematic point of view, Chuck D also didn't feel right acting as public enemy's leader and spokesperson, despite being the group's frontman. Hank Shockley was two years Chuck's senior. Since the beginning, back when Hank was DJing Elk's clubs under the name Spectrum City, back when Chuck was just a kid with some rhymes written down on paper jumping on a mic, Hank had been the de facto leader, at least to Chuck's eyes anyway. So Chuck wanted to defer to his more mature musical partner. Maybe he just wanted to hide behind him. At any rate, Chuck D was the one being us to step up now, just like he been asked to step up in PE first form. So he did. Chuck called the press conference and read from a prepared statement. Professor Griff was no longer a member of public enemy.

27:44Public enemy had a code, a policy. And that policy wasn't to offend any individual or group as Chuck explained. Instead, it was a policy intended to quote, offend the system that works against us 24 hours a day 365 days a year, unquote. A system that was working overtime to do just that, especially a PE's hometown, New York City. April 1989, the 911 calls started coming in. A wandering group of 30, maybe 40 males, young kids, harassing people in Central Park, some delivering beatdowns. The NYPD was dispatched. Patrol cars swarm the area. Kids hanging around west 100th in Central Park West. The cops surged. The kids scattered. Five unlucky ones were napped. All boys, all between the ages of 14 and 16, all of them black or Hispanic, brought downtown for questioning.

28:46Inside the park, shortly before midnight, a grisly discovery was made near a repeat. A 28 year old investment banker, out for her regular job, brutally beaten, raped, and left for dead, covered in blood, barely alive, her cheekbone crushed, her left eye socket crushed, skull fractures, lacerations. The cops down at the 20th precinct turned up the heat on the five boys they now had in custody. Told one kid that his friend was ratting him out, told another they had evidence to put them all at the scene. The boys had no way of knowing they were being played. Individually, they were interrogated over and over for hours at a time. They were disoriented, scared, not allowed to see their parents, and they just wanted it all to end, to leave the precinct, go home, and get in bed. They'd do anything, even confess. So they did.

29:48Over 24 hours after the interrogations began, the cops finally turned on the cameras. All but one of the five kids allowed the NYPD to videotape their confession to that unspeakable crime in Central Park. It wasn't until 13 years later, in 2002, the DNA evidence proved what many had long known to be true. That the Central Park 5, as the boys came to be called, were innocent. In fact, a serial rapist had been the sole attacker of the Central Park jogger. The boys' convictions, thus, were evacated, but not before they'd done between seven and 13 years in prison. Back in the spring and summer of 1989, when the young boys delivered their coerced confessions and were charged with, among other things, attempted murder, New York City was ready to split apart. On the one hand, Mayor Koch expressed disbelief that anyone would support these teenagers who'd been out wilding to use the term that was being thrown around by the press at the time. While Donald Trump took out full-page ads and all four of the

30:50city's major newspapers to call for the reinstatement of the death penalty. On the other hand, Reverend Al Sharpton took to the streets, calling for justice. As did the boys' parents, who were furious that their boys lack of knowledge of the justice system. The very system that Chuck D called out when PE Fire Professor Griff had been used against them. It was into this curm oil just two months after the Central Park attack that Spike Lee's incredible movie, Do the Right Thing, debuted in theaters. Spike's critic said he was careless for releasing this kind of movie at this particular time. A movie about racial tensions boiling over devilence. There was real panic and fear. Fear that people would be pushed over the edge, that they'd mimic what had happened in the film. Trash can't smash and pizzeria windows, buildings on fire, riots. That was not Spike Lee's intent, nor was it the intent of public enemy, who Spike tapped to come up with a new track that would thunder out of Radio Raheem's

31:52boombox as he stopped the streets of Brooklyn. Hank Shockley went cinematic with the track's sonic palette. He wanted concrete and asphalt near eardrums. He wanted it to sound like New York felt. The resulting track, Fight the Power, wasn't an invitation to riot as some Americans loudly feared, but rather, to revolution. A revolution that Chuck D had been meeting since day one. Free the people, first from their own minds, recognize that there was work to do, work that hip-hop could facilitate. Hip-hop was art, it was power, the seize of any great revolution. PE had an arsenal of weapons at their disposal, not the least of which were Chuck's rhymes, which intended to assassinate the long-accepted hierarchy of cultural icons, like Elvis Presley and Mother Fuck John Wayne. The King and the Duke were dead. Rock and roll was dead. Public enemy, hip-hop, Chuck D's revolution. They were very much alive.

32:55In a year of Cheeseball Hot 100 hits by Paula Abduel, Millie Vanilly, Poison, Richard Marks, Fight the Power was louder than a bomb, and realer than anything else on the air. It sold nearly half a million singles and went straight to number one on the Billboard Hot Rap singles chart. But a hit single in a renewed sense of purpose couldn't make the still fresh Professor Griff controversy go away. Demonstrators disrupted do the right things opening weekend, chanting, we hate public enemy. Anonymous collars even rang Russell Simmons, Def Jam's co-founder, at home, with a message of their own. Russell added this latest bullshit to a growing list of concerns that included an imminent fallout with this business partner Rick Rubin in a lawsuit filed by the Beastie Boys over unpaid royalties. At the moment of public enemy's greatest creative and commercial triumph, Chuck D felt the weight of it all. Griff spikes movie, Def Jam, and then it was Flav. His old vices beginning

34:01to get the best of him again. Chuck needed a break. He had Russell Simmons break the news to the masses. Public enemy would be disbanding for an indefinite amount of time. Just like that, the music, the revolution, the dialogue, the noise, it all fell silent. Revolutions never really die. It neither did public enemy. They just needed a few weeks to collect their thoughts and catch their breath. Do the right thing was still playing in theaters when Chuck D released a new statement declaring PE's impending return, which read in part, the show must go on. Brace yourselves for 1990. We're still pro-black, pro-black culture,

35:04and pro-human race. Please direct any further questions to Axel Rose. Axel, of course, was busy punching his way out of his own controversy over some lyrics and guns and roses song. If what people were saying about Axel Rose bothered Axel Rose, it didn't show. G&R were selling a shit ton of records, so what did he care? Controversy sells. Just as public enemy, their next album to be released following their own controversy, fear of a black planet, became their highest charting record to date with the hit singles 9-1-1 as a joke and welcome to the terror dome. The album after that went even higher. By the early 1990s, Chuck D was the undisputed rebel without a pause. Flavor Flave, on the other hand, always a flip side to Chuck's thing was a straight up rebel. What a long ago lost the message he was supposed to be delivering. 1993. Flavor Flave hadn't slept in three days. A 72-hour stretch

36:07fueled by crack cocaine, a stretch during which Tupac Shakur, Asada Shakur, is stepped in a few in gods' sun with arrested for shooting two off-duty cops in Atlanta. Back in the Bronx, Flave was paranoid, delusional, distraught over losing custody of his kids. The kids he was convinced were now being held inside his neighbor's apartment along with his ex-wife. It was the drug's talking, but no one was going to tell Flave otherwise. He'd broken to that apartment, chased his neighbor down 23 flights of stairs from a 380 semi-automatic gun in his hand, out into the street, where a single gunshot rang out. The next thing Flave remembered, he was sitting in his apartment. The cops were there, and they had his gun, unlicensed, missing one bullet from his five-round clip. Flave was charged with attempted murder and locked up for 90 days, but the judge ruled that the gun could not be used as evidence because the cops confiscated it

37:09during an illegal search. No bullet was ever found, no bullet hole, no witnesses, not even a neighbor whose back was to flave when the shot was fired. The only thing Flave was found guilty of was gun possession. Other incidents followed, other charges, domestic violence, cocaine, marijuana. In 1995, still on probation for the ordeal with his neighbor, Flave was busted in the South Bronx with, once again, an unlicensed gun in his possession, this time, along with three vials of crack. Flave's routine run-ins with the law, his crippling addictions, addictions that at one point were allegedly costing of $2,600 a day. He knew that these things were letting public enemy down, that his own troubled image was now undermining the image PE, it worked so hard to define. Flave was the antithesis to chuck by design, yes, but now he was the personification of a broken promise, a failed revolution, effectively closing off the dialogue the public enemy was trying to raise with their music.

38:14Not that they were giving up on that dialogue. Just two years prior to Flave's arrest, PE released their fourth studio album, Apocalypse 91, The Enemy Strikes Black, which featured the powerful song by the time I get to Arizona. This was at a time when Arizona's governor refused to acknowledge Martin Luther King Jr. Day as a holiday. It was put to a ballot but voters struck it down. For six years in a row, Arizona citizens have been taking to the streets to voice their frustration, to get MLK Day on the calendar. They marched and sang old protest songs. But this wasn't the sixties, we shall overcome was overdone. Chuck and his crew had a new protest song for a new era. In the video for about the time I get to Arizona, Chuck leads a group of assassins to the state where they poisoned, shoot, and blow up politicians. To Chuck and public enemy, the shock of it was the point. After all, that's what they made. Wake the fuck up

39:18music. Music whose purpose was to start a dialogue. The video aired once on MTV and then it was pulled. The governor of Arizona called it racist. An Arizona pastor said that it perpetuated a stereotype. The same stereotype that led to the murder of graffiti artist Michael Stewart, the incarceration of the Central Park 5 and the assassination Malcolm X. Back on, it takes a nation of millions. Public enemy opened the song, bring the noise with the sound of Malcolm's voice. Too black, too strong. Now the band was being accused of being just that. But to Chuck D, that was impossible. There was no such thing as too black, too strong. To be anything less, would be a disgrace. I'm Jake Brennan, and this is disgrace land.

40:27The disgrace land was created by yours truly and has produced and partnership with Double Elvis. Credits for this episode can be found on the show notes page at disgracelampod.com. If you're listening as a disgrace land, all access member. Thank you for supporting the show. We really appreciate it. And if not, you can become a member right now by going to disgracelampod.com slash membership. Members can listen to every episode of disgrace land ad free. Plus you'll get one brand new, exclusive episode every month, weekly, unscripted bonus episodes, special audio collections, and early access to merchandise and events. Visit disgracelampod.com slash membership for details. Rate and review the show and follow us on Instagram, TikTok, Twitter and Facebook at disgracelampod. And on youtube at youtube.com slash at disgracelampod. Rock a roll.

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