Jake Brennan (Disgraceland Host) (3:33)
Welcome to the Disgraceland bonus episode. A little thing we like to call the After Party. This is the show after the show. The party after the party. The bridge to get you from one full episode of Disgraceland to the other, the backyard. To dig into the dirt on this bonus episode, we are talking about Prince Part 2. We're also previewing our coming Basquiat episode, Talking Slap Heard Round the World in the Hollywoodland minute, along with a Music and True Crime Trial of the Century update. And we get into your voicemails, text, DMs, emails, and as always, a whole lot of Rosie. All right, discos, let's get into it. So a big part of The Prince Part 2 episode that we released this week deals with the time the Prince was creating making music in the 1980s, specifically the mid-80s, specifically the time around the release of Prince's album signed of the Times, which I believe came out in 1987. This is Prince's social commentary on that era. Sign of the Times is thematically, Prince took a cue here from Curtis Mayfield, from Marvin Gaye, and he's addressing societal ills from that era, the 80s, crack epidemic, poverty, AIDS, and like I said, just in general, societal ills. Okay, now I found a great quote about Sign of the Times from Writer and I apologize if I'm butchering this guy's name. I couldn't find the pronunciation for it. Writer's name is Hanif Abdurraqweeb. I believe that's how you say his name. And Hanif, if I'm getting it wrong, I apologize, but I'm going to spell his last name. You guys want to look this up? A B D U R R A Q U I B okay, so this quote from Hanif says on the politics of Sign of the Times that they quote are not those of solutions but those of survival in the face of which you might not survive for much longer. The politics of survival say that we may dance in the face of a coming apocalypse. We may, in the face of a coming apocalypse, go to bed with someone or love someone we didn't know right before it started. We may play in the streets or fantasize about a new world to run into. On Sign of the Times. After laying out a terrifying landscape, Prince pushes the landscape aside, lays out all of our options for survival and tells us to take our pick again. That's Hanif Abduraqwib for MTV News. Actually on Prince's Sign of the Times, the purple one's commentary on the era that he was creating in at the time in the mid-1980s. Now this era, the era that we are in right now in 2025, needs some attention in today's after party. Survival, as you just heard in that quote, was a theme of Sign of the Times. And I can't help but be reminded of Cassi Ventura, who testified this week in this era's trial of the century in the Sean Diddy Combs case. Okay, I'm not sure what Cassie Ventura feared the most before she went to bed with Sean Combs for the first time. I'm not sure what she perceived to be her quote, unquote, coming apocalypse or if she had one at all. But if the prosecution and this trial that started this week is telling the truth, then it's being made clear to all of us right now in that courtroom that Diddy himself was Cassie's apocalypse. The details revealed in the first few days of this trial, including of course, Cassie's recounting of their relationship up there on the stand. These details are shocking. Never mind the sordid sex stuff, of which there is plenty. The more benign details about how Cassie and Diddy first got together play out like a cautionary after school special for young beautiful women trying to make it in the music business. Cassie testified on Tuesday of this week for six hours. You can hear from the prosecutors questioning the building blocks for the racketeering case that they're trying to make. And the prosecution, I think based on the legal analysis that I've read so far, did pretty well in this area. Okay. Now it remains to be seen how this is going to play out. Cassie has not yet had to stand up there and take questions from the defense. But as for the Prosecution, like I mentioned, they had a lot of questions regarding who worked for who, who did what, what their roles were, and that's that that's gonna speak to the racketeering part of this. But they also got, and this is what you're gonna read a lot about, you're gonna hear a lot about in the coming days. They also got into the freak off details. Now, it's important to note that these details were discussed in a courtroom, ok? Under the penalty of perjury. This is much, much different than sordid celebrity sexual conjecture on TikTok. Okay? This is where things get real, guys. These details are being brought out into the public by prosecutors because prosecutors that they have enough evidence to prove that these details are true and that they're going to help them win their case. Now, that is a much different paradigm than some TikTok creator blasting out whatever their cousin, stepfather's, uncle's mechanic heard at the cookout over the weekend. It doesn't mean that these details that we just heard in court this week are true. Not yet anyway. But it does mean that their veracity is a lot more likely to than anything that we've heard in public prior to the start of this trial. This is why when I did that last episode on Sean Combs, I based the entire thing on the indictments, the actual legal documents, okay? Because with so much noise out there, who the hell knows what is real and what is not? But when prosecutors approach the details, the facts, the accusations, when they approach them with legality, you know, you are erring closer to the truth than anything else. Okay? And I want to take a little victory lap here and note that a lot of the details that Cassie gave on the stand corroborate the details from our last episode on Sean Combs. Specifically, one little bit here is the bit about the color of her fingernails, that specificity that Combs made her paint her nails with before engaging in a freak off that came out in court. And there's more. There's a ton more. The details are. Honestly, Prince would blush, okay? Perhaps Prince would even gag, maybe throw open his mouth. The details are fucking disgusting. They are gnarly. And every legal analyst that I've heard from thus far who was in the courtroom has said the same thing that they were hard to hear, okay? This isn't some hardcore true crime murder with disgusting, violent details. This is all about sex. And every legal analyst that I've heard so far has said the same thing that they just wanted the testimony to stop. Masks, stripper heels, as you can guess. Lots and lots of baby oil. Even more baby oil than you can imagine. I know that sounds ridiculous, but it's true. Cassie testified about unwanted sex acts that she was forced into by Sean Combs. How he would urinate onto her, into her mouth at one point, choking her in that act. Okay. It's. There's also. There's so much more. Okay. She testified to more disgusting behavior that I'm gonna get into here. It's worse than what I just detailed. Okay. So that should tell you how bad it is. I'm not gonna get into it here. It's that bad. It's important to note, I guess this is as good a place as any, that Sean Combs denies any wrongdoing here. Okay. Maintains his innocence. But in the first few days of this trial, my. I'm just. On the one hand, I'm shocked that. I'm shocked after everything I know about this, about all the details that I already understand, I'm already well versed in. I'm shocked that I am shocked. But here I am. Now, by the time you've heard this episode, Cassie will have had another session on the standard. Who knows what other details are gonna be divulged. The defense is gonna get a shot here approving to the jury that Cassie was a willing participant in this activity. That's gonna be what their claim is, that she was just as freaky as he was. We're gonna see if they're successful in making that case or not. This trial's gonna be going on for about another eight weeks or so. The first week is proving to be explosive, and it's so explosive that I'm spending a little more time here in the afterparty on it than I thought I would. And just so you guys know, as the trial develops, I'm gonna be bringing you my point of view on the facts, on the details, on what we're getting in court, when I think it's relevant. I'm not saying we're going to be doing it every week, but who knows? Maybe that. Maybe the details will just be. You won't be able to ignore them. Maybe this will be a true trial of the century, and maybe we'll have cause to discuss every week. But like I said, when something pops off and I feel like my voice and my opinion is going to add something, I'm going to talk to you about it here in the after party. And then when this trial wraps, like I said, in about eight weeks, we will have our third and final Sean Diddy Combs episode on Disgraceland for you guys. All right. Before all of that, we have a rewind episode of Disgraceland coming your way tomorrow. Next in your feed, right after this bonus episode, we're revisiting our episodes on the grateful dead. Part one on the dead's origins, which is a ride through mid-60s Americana, weird Americana, I should say, with Ron Pigpen, McKernan. And then part two, which is more of a complete career span of the Grateful Dead. Deadheads, Dead curious, you fish heads, you jam band aficionados. These episodes are for you. They're for everybody, really, but they're really for you guys. This wasn't my world. I brought myself into your world, and I hope that I held a mirror up to it in a way that you appreciate. So check out these episodes. Incidentally, we're in the middle of planning right now a pretty incredible, super crimy episode on Fish that we're going to be bringing to you later in this year. But that's another story. All right. Following the Dead coming Tuesday, our episode on Basquiat. We cover not only Basquiat's art in this episode, but also his musicianship. Okay, so when you're listening to this episode, be thinking about what musicians, what rock stars excelled at, a second art or a second sport. It could be a visual art like Basquiat. Lots of rock stars are or were great painters. George Harrison comes to mind, Bob Dylan. But it can be anything. It can be a sport. Rod Stewart, supposedly a great soccer player. I think Lars from Metallica almost went pro as a tennis player. I know that Bruce from Iron Maiden, pretty serious fencer. So I'm interested in this because I think the same sort of tenacity that you have to bring to one medium, one art, one piece of subject matter, one area of your life that you commit yourself to. I think it's transferable in a lot of ways for a lot of people. And I'm interested to know who's done it in sort of two arenas, so to speak, which rock star was just as good at another art or sport as he or she was at music? That's going to be the question of the week next week. 617906-6638. Give me a call. Let me know. Send me a text with your answers. I'll be hanging on the telephone with you guys on the other side of this break with your voicemails and texts from last week's Question of the week.
