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

Episode Date: March 6, 2026

Public Enemy were revolutionaries – both in their message and their music. In the 1980s and 1990s, they elevated hip-hop to an art form. They did this with Chuck D's booming voice, Flavor Flav's comic levity, and the auditory assault of the Bomb Squad's production. But with that revolution came scandal. Their hype man allegedly tried to shoot his neighbor while high on crack cocaine. Their so-called "Minister of Information" was so controversial that his words alone nearly derailed the group's success. They performed at a prison – after just releasing a song about a prison break. And in the summer of 1989, Public Enemy released a song that was so powerful, it put them in the middle of the cultural zeitgeist at the very moment that it seemed they were splintering apart. To see the full list of contributors, see the show notes at ⁠www.disgracelandpod.com⁠. This episode was originally published on April 23, 2024. To listen to Disgraceland ad free and get access to exclusive weekly bonus content and more, become a Disgraceland All Access member at ⁠disgracelandpod.com/membership⁠. Sign up for our newsletter and get the inside dirt on events, merch and other awesomeness - ⁠GET THE NEWSLETTER⁠ Follow Jake and DISGRACELAND: ⁠Instagram⁠ ⁠YouTube⁠ ⁠X⁠ (formerly Twitter)  ⁠Facebook Fan Group⁠ ⁠TikTok  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is exactly right. Double Elvis. Disgrace Land is a production of Double Elvis. The stories about hip-hop legends, public enemy, are insane. Their hype 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 Rikers Island immediately after releasing a track about a prison break. Their music video depicting the assassination of politicians was polled after it aired on MTV just once.

Public enemy were revolutionaries, both in their message and their music. In the 1980s and 90s, they helped elevate hip-hop to an art form. They did this with Chuck D's booming voice, Flavor Flaves comic levity, and the auditory assault of the Bomb Squad's production. Great music. Unlike that clip I played for you at the top of the show, that wasn't great music. That was a preset loop from my Melotron called Vogue Schmogue 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 Vanilly.

And why would I play you that specific slice of secretly lip-syncing cheese could I afford it? Because that was the number one song in America. 5th, 1989. And that was the day a 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, hype men, revolutionaries, assassinations, prison breaks,

auditory assaults, and public enemy. I'm Jake Brennan, and this is disgraceland. 1993. The Bronx. William Drayton, the man better known to the world as Flavor Flav, 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 Flav, where it hurt. He was seeing less and less

of her 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 Flav was fully convinced that his estranged family was locked up next door. So, Flav or Flav did what any good daddy would do 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 a smidge, and then Flav pushed the door wide open, barged right in, sweating, bugging out. Yo, man, where's my family? They were in here somewhere.

He could still hear his little girl screaming. His neighbor just kept saying they're not here, man. How about he act like a man and give Flav back his kids? How about that? The neighbor panicked. He bolted. Out of the apartment, into the hallway, straight to the stairwell door. Flav 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. But fuck that. Flav pulled the 380 from his pants. One more step that I'm going to shoot you, G. The neighbor freaked. He ran outside into traffic noise, total chaos. Then came Flavor Flav 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, Flavor Flav, 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 to free your mind, the exact opposite of what was going on with Flav here, trapped inside of his own mind. Freedom from oppression, from 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 Flav. Chuck rapped about the street, about drugs, about the United States' broken prison system.

But Flav was the streets. He was at various times a user, a dealer, another number in the New York lockup. 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, verses that came at you like in the oozy that weighed a ton. Flava Flav 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 Flavent Flav 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.L. 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 Sadler 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 Specter, 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'd take it over the bridge, 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 and Bush now. It was DJ Terminator X, scratching the ones, scratching the twos, not just to make a funky break, but to demand your attention. It was Professor Griff, public enemy's self-described minister of information, bringing back the Black Panther urgency of decades past, giving P.E. its immeasurial. The Security of the First World, aka the S-1W, standing at attention on stage with fake machine guns while air raid sirens wailed. The S-1Ws, Professor Griff, Hank, Chuck, Flav. 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. Musicians, 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 his 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 billy clubs. They hog tied his arms and legs behind him, a nightstick wrapped around Michael's throat. He gassed 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 his 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 to. went free, and the NYPD made their point. People who looked like Michael Stewart could be arrested, assaulted, even killed. Carlton Ridenauer, aka Chuck D., wasn't about to accept that. He, along with

his fellow disruptors and public enemy, were ready to fight the powers that be, 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 Marra Valber calling a game not from the court but from the street, a game of life and death. It was February 1987. Yo, bum-rushed 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, but to free the people from their own minds.

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 Chesimard. They were breaking her out. Joanne Chesimard, a.k.a. Asada Shakur, one-time Black Panther, now a member of the Black Liberation Army, step-aunt and godmother to Tupac Shakur, 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 in 1973. On that day, shots were fired on a stretch of Garden State Turnpike. A Jersey trooper and one of Shakur's colleagues were dead. Asada Shakur was sitting inside a car panicking. She'd been shot twice. Every breath was like razors in her lungs. Suddenly, the car door ripped open, a couple of stadies 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 it'll 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 Asada Shakur was a killer. A white jury agreed. And now, Asada Shakur was pacing around 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 Asada Shakur 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.

Asada Shakur 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 Shakur into a prison van. They drove into a parking lot nearby, where a blue Pontiac and a two-tone blue cattle were waiting for them. They carefully set the two hostages free. And then, the Pontiac and the Cadillac roared to life. Asada Shakur and her accomplices were gone. The next time Shakur was seen,

she was in Cuba, where she was now living under political asylum. Meanwhile, 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 Wittenauer here, growing up in Roosevelt Long Island, heard all about Asada Shakira 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 plight, 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 and Adelphi, where 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 rinks, in Elks Clubs, in hotel ballrooms, any place that would have him. 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 fad. 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 Def Jam debut was, Chuck didn't think it was enough. Just months after Yo Bum Rush the show was released, Eric B. and Rakim dropped their debut paid in full, a record so breathless and made Yo Bumrush the show sound like it was riding in the slow lane.

Chuck and Hank Shockley knew they had to up P.E.'s game. The PPMs 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's second album, it takes a nation of millions to hold us back, came in fast and hot, like Mike Tyson in his prime. Public Enemy wasn't thinking about Tyson so much as they were thinking about Marvin Gay'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 clock, Flav 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, 20 samples alone on the track Night of the Living Bassheads, from Bowie to Aretha 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 Shakur, who Chuck name checks and rebel without a pause. And yeah, he did refer to her by her given name, Joanne Chesimard, which she had long ago rejected as a slave name, but only because Chuck D is a dope MC who recognized that Chesimard fit his rhyme better. Shakur 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 the 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 was talking about. Public Enemy were booked to perform an unusual show,

this one, for inmates at Rikers Island. 20 years since Johnny Cash played Folsom Prison in San Quentin. Just like their fellow prophet and rebel from Arkansas, public enemies 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. Professor 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 offstage. Truth be told, public enemies' 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. When confronted about those statements, Professor Griff dug 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. And 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 Flay's boom bog, 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 error. 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. Chuck D was in a tight spot. The press wanted him to answer for the things Professor Griff was saying. They wanted him to denounce hatred of any kind. And though he didn't agree with 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 Sr. Since the beginning, back when Hank was DJing Elks Clubs under the name Spectrum City, back when Chuck was just a kid with some rhymes written down on paper, jumping on the 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.C. was the one being asked to step up now, just like he'd been asked to step up when PE first formed.

So he did. Chuck called a press conference and read from a prepared statement. Professor Griff was no longer a member of Public Enemy. Public 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 P.E.'s hometown, New York City. 1989. The 911 call started coming in. A wandering group of 30, maybe 40 males, young kids, harassing people in Central Park, some delivering beat downs. The NYPD was dispatched. Patrol cars swarm the area.

Kids hanging around West 100th and Central Park West. The cops surged. The kids scattered. Five unlucky ones were nabbed. All boys. All between the ages of 14 and 16. All of them black or Hispanic. Brought downtown for questioning.

Inside the park, shortly before midnight, a grisly discovery was made near a ravine. 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. Over 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. And it wasn't until 13 years later, in 2002, that DNA evidence proved what many had long known to be true, that the Central Park Five, 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 vacated, 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 confess.

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 outwilding, to use the term that was being thrown around by the press at the time, while Donald Trump took out full-page ads in all four of the city'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 at their boys' lack of knowledge of the justice system, the very system that Chuck D. called out when P.E. fired Professor Griff had been used against them. It was into this turmoil, just two months after the Central Park attack, that Spike Lee's incredible movie, Do the Right Thing, debuted in theaters. Spike's critics said he was careless for releasing this kind of movie at this particular time, a movie about racial tensions boiling over.

into violence. 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 cans smashing 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 Rahim's boombox as he stopped the streets of Brooklyn. Hank Shockley went cinematic with the track's Sonic Pallet. 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 leading 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 seas 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. In a year of Cheeseball Hot 100 hits by Paula Abdul, Millie Vanilly, Poison, and Rich, Rich, 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 and 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 callers even rang Russell Simmons, Def Jam's co-finding, at home with a message of the Rome. Your parents live. Russell added this latest bullshit to a growing list of concerns that included an imminent fallout with his 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, Spike's movie, Def Jam. And then there was Flav, his old vices beginning to 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, at all. Revolutions never really die. They 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 P.E.'s impending return, which read in part, The show must go on. Brace yourselves for 1990. We're still pro-black, pro-black culture, and 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

in a Guns and Rose's song. If what people were saying about Axel Rose bothered Axel Rose, It didn't show. G&R were selling a shit ton of record, 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 9-1-1-1-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 Flav, on the other hand, and always a flip side to Chuck's thing, was a straight-up rebel. Woodward went long ago lost the message he was supposed to be delivering. 1993. Flavor Flav hadn't slept in three days. A 72-hour stretch fueled by crack cocaine,

a stretch during which Tupac Shakur, Asada Shakur's step-nephew and Godson, was arrested for shooting two off-duty cops in Atlanta. Back in the Bronx, Flav 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 drugs talking. But no one was going to tell Flav otherwise.

He broke into 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 Flav 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. Flav 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 during an illegal search. No bullet was ever found, and no bullet hole, no witnesses, not even the neighbor whose back was to Flav when the shot was fired. The only thing Flav 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, Flavor Flav was busted in the South Bronx with, once again, an unlicensed gun in his possession, this time, along with three vials of crack. Flavor Flav'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 P.E. It worked so hard to define.

Flav 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. Not that they were giving up on that dialogue. Just two years prior to Flav's arrest, P.E. 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's 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 60s. We Shall Overcome was overdone. Chuck and his crew had a new protest song for a new era. In the video for by the time I get to Arizona, Chuck leads a group of assassins to the state where they poison, 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 music, 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 Five, and the assassination of 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 Disgraceland. Disgraceland was created by yours truly and is produced in partnership with Double Elvis. Credits for this episode can be found on the show notes page at disgracelandpod.com. If you're listening as a Disgraceland All-Axist member, Thank you for supporting the show.

We really appreciate it. And if not, you can become a member right now by going to disgracelandpod.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 Disgraceland Pod, and on YouTube at YouTube.com slash at disgraceland pod. Rockerola.