← DISGRACELAND
Loading summary
Transcript11 lines
- [00:00]
A
Foreign. Double Elvis. So the new year starts, right? And I'm on this health kick. I'm taking care of myself. I'm doing all the things. And inevitably springtime comes around. Everything gets super busy. Both my kids are playing sports. One of them is in like 13 bands. There's a lot going on right now. A lot. And the schedule, the spring schedule, it's moving fast. My point, it's harder, harder for me to keep up and to do all the things, okay? It's hard. Parents, you know what I'm talking about. I don't have time for complicated wellness routines, okay? Thankfully, our friends at Groons, they simplify it for us, okay? If you're eating your Groons, you're going to get your vitamins and your minerals and your greens and your prebiotics all in one easy grab and go step, all right? I don't have to worry about making some complicated shake or some weird diet recipe that I gotta pull together on a night when I gotta go to two baseball practices and drop my son off at base practice as well. And I can just, you know, make them dinner. I can grab my daily snack pack of gummies from Groons. Super convenient. Again, this is a comprehensive formula packed into a snack pack. And you just need one a day. It's not a multivitamin, a greens gummy or a prebiotic. It's all of those things and then some at a fraction of the price as well. And, you know, bonus, it tastes great. Daily snack pack of gummies. Because you can't fit the amount of nutrients Gruins does into just one gummy. And again, this makes a great treat. All right? These are vegan, nut free, gluten free, dairy free, no artificial colors, no artificial flavors. And you know, if you're still on the fence, most generic multivitamins, they only contain about seven to nine vitamins. Gruin's has 20 plus vitamins and minerals and 60 ingredients which include nutrient dense and whole foods. All right? Include 6 grams of prebiotic fiber. I'm telling you, the taste is great and the convenience cannot be beat. GRU's ingredients are backed by over 35,000 research publications. Save up to 52% with code disgraceland@groons.com co. That's code disgraceland@g r u n s dot co. So I'm watching this new series on television. I'm not going to tell you which one it is, but it's got this super stylish dude from the 90s. And as I'm watching it, like, I gotta I gotta upgrade my wardrobe. I got, I gotta do something because I'm bored with everything in here. This guy looks so good and every single scene you're just like, oh man, come on. You know, my problem is I basically have like two looks fashion wise. You know, it's just like I can do like, you know, kind of clean cut, sort of like collegiate 1950s, 1960s guy or I can do like rock and roll greaser. Those are like my two looks. So I'm kind of limited with what I can do when I'm shopping online. Where I'm looking. However, Quince. Oh my goodness, it's so easy. So many different pieces that are versatile that you can mix and match with. That'll, that'll fit many, many, many different styles. The new piece that I got, that's just fantastic. It 100% European linen relaxed short sleeve shirt. You can dress it up, you can dress it down, you can do a ton with it. It looks good in a variety of styles. Timeless. Very timeless looking. You put this on, you might be from the 1990s, you might be from the 1950s, you might be from the right now. Also the organic stretch corduroy utility. This is awesome as well. Great for the spring. Excellent, excellent piece for the spring. Highly recommend. Quince has everyday essentials and I love the quality, super quality of lightweight cashmere sweaters, short sleeve Mongolian cashmere polos, which I've talked about their cashmere stuff before. Linen bottoms and shorts. Their tees are 100% Pima cotton in European jersey linen. Their T shirts rule. By the way, I say this all the time. It's worth mentioning again. Quince works directly with top factories and cuts out the middlemen. You're not paying for brand markup or fancy retail stores, just quality clothing right now. Go to quince.com disgraceland for free shipping and 365 day returns. That's a full year to build your wardrobe and love. And you will now available in Canada too. Don't keep settling for clothes that don't last. Go to quince.com disgraceland for free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com disgraceland Disgraceland 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 Pulled 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 Flav's 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 Schmoog MK2. I played you that clip because I can't afford the rights to a clip from Baby Don't Forget My Number by Milli Vanilli. 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 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, 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 was 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 Flavor 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. Man, this guy, Colin Flave, man. How about he act like a man and give Flav 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. 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 gonna get into it, but fuck that. Flav pulled the.380 from his pants. One more step and I'm gonna 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 PE'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 Flavor 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 an Uzi 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 Flavor 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, LL 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. 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 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 bridge, unquote. This wasn't your father's R and 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 it 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 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 S1Ws, Professor Griff, Hank, Chuck Flav, they had a collective wake the fuck up. September 1983. There was a war going on. The NYPD called it a war on graffiti, but 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 were watched and waited. And then they pounced. They forced Michael to the ground and beat him with their billy clubs. The hog tied his arms and legs behind him. A night stick 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 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 free and the NYPD made their point. People who looked like Michael Stewart could be arrested, assaulted, even killed. Carlton Rittenhour, 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 it, 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 court, but from the street, a game of life and death. It was February 1987. Yo, bum rush. The Show, Public Enemy's debut in Chuck D's own words, kicked down that motherfucking door. Not just so they could give the people what they deserved, but to free the people from their own minds. I remember a time in my life a few years back, really rough patch for me, for my family. We were going through it and it was tough and there was a loss. And a lot of us were looking for therapy. We were looking for some help. And it was hard in the moment to actually go through the machinations to get the help that we needed. So not only is it hard to find a therapist, it can be extra hard to find a therapist when you're in crisis, because let's face it, most things are hard in those periods. But then finding a therapist who actually takes your insurance, that can be difficult in and of itself as well. That's where most online therapy platforms fall short. Many don't work with insurance at all, which means you're stuck paying the full cost out of pocket, or paying for a massively expensive monthly subscription or something like that. Rula does things differently. They partner with over 100 insurance plans, making the average copay just $15 per session, and you're going to get real therapy from licensed professionals at a price that actually makes sense. So think about it. You use your insurance benefits to maintain your physical health, like going to the gym or what have you. So why wouldn't you do the same for your mental health? And Rula? They're not just affordable. The experience is tailored around you. Other online therapy platforms might match you with the first available provider, whether or not they're the right fit. That's a huge thing when you're going through the process of finding somebody to talk to is making sure that you feel like you're being heard, you're understood, and making sure that you vibe with the therapist. Rula considers your goals, your preferences, your background, and they provide you with a curated list of licensed in network therapists. Who are actually aligned with what you need. Because Rula knows that finding the right therapist can make all the difference. And they're absolutely right about that. Rula makes it easy. There's no wait list, no frustrating back and forth there. They make it easy to find a mental health provider who's accepting new patients, and appointments are available as soon as tomorrow. Plus, Rula sticks with you throughout your whole journey here, checking in to make sure that your care is helping you move forward. Thousands of people are already using Rula to get affordable, high quality therapy that's actually covered by Insurance. Visit rula.com disgraceland to get started. After you sign up, you'll be asked how you heard about them. Please support our show and let them know that we sent you. That's R U L. You deserve mental health care that works with you, not against your budget. Guys, you're music fans just like I am. You listen to a ton of music. I'm sure, like me, it's not often that you consume media, be it a book, an interview in a magazine, perhaps an article on an artist, a podcast, say that changes the way that you hear music. But that has absolutely happened to me because of this great podcast that I've discovered called you'd'll Hear It. You guys are going to love this show. It's hosted by two jazz pianists, Peter Martin and Adam Manis, who take one legendary album per episode and they show you exactly what's going on with the music on that record. Not just the stories behind it, but the actual music itself. These guys are great musicians. There's two episodes in particular that blew my mind and gave me way more insight into albums that I thought I knew. Carole King's Tapestry, for one, and Sinatra Live at the Sands, the record that he did with Count Basie. This is one of my favorite records of all time, honestly, like top five. And I realized in listening to the you'll Hear it episode on this record that I barely know about what's actually going on on this album. I had this sneaky take about this record that it was one of the heaviest albums ever made. Like on par with like a helmet record or something like that. But I couldn't really articulate why. And after listening to you'll Hear it now I can. Specifically the way the Count Basie on Sinatra at the Sands utilizes space in silence to deliberately make everything sound bigger and more full in a way that goes way beyond what was happening when the record was made in 1965. As music fans, we know that what we're listening to is Magic. This podcast goes a long way in explaining how that magic ends up on record. If you've ever picked up a guitar or sat at a piano or wanted to pick up a guitar or sit at a piano or any instrument just to mess around, this show will transform how you listen. And if you just love music deeply, like I know most of you do, like I do, it's going to give you a whole new dimension to what you're already hearing. I listened to like I said, that Carole King episode was great. The Frank Sinatra episode on Live at the Sands is also great. There's an excellent episode on Prince. There's a lot of great episodes here. I could go on and on and on. Check out. You'll hear it. You'll never hear music the same way again. You'll hear it Music Explored. Follow the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or subscribe on YouTube. Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile with a message for everyone paying Big Wireless way too much. Please, for the love of everything good and this world, stop with Mint. You can get premium wireless for just $15 a month. Of course, if you enjoy overpaying. No judgments. But that's weird. Okay, one judgment anyway, give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch upfront payment of $45 for
- [21:03]
B
3 month plan equivalent to $15 per month required intro rate first 3 months only, then full price plan options available, taxes and fees extra. See full terms@mintmobile.com.
- [21:15]
A
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, AKA Assata 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 Shakura's colleagues were dead. Assata Shakira 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 we'll blow your goddamn head off. She knew they weren't kidding. They could end her right here, right now, witnesses or not, and they'd 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 Assata Shakira was a killer. An all white jury agreed. And now Assata 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 Shakira 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. Asata Shakur opened her cell door with the assistance of three armed men there at Clinton Correctional with their.45s locked and loaded and 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 Cadillac 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 Shakira 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 Rittenhauer here, growing up in Roosevelt, Long island, heard all about Assata 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 Hofster 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 intrinsic 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 the. 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 it made Yo Bum Rush the Show sound like it was riding in the slow lane. Chuck and Hank Shockley knew they had to up PE's game. The 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'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 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 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 media 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, Assata, 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 name, but only because Chuck D is a dope mc. Who recognized that Chesimard fit his rhyme better. Shakira 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 of 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 Riker's 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 Flave, 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 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 alright. When confronted about those statements, Professor Griff dug in. He stood by them. He wasn't budging. Not for anyone. Certainly not for Flavor fucking Flav. Griffin Griff's whole vibe grated 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 boombox. And then he fractured Flay'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. Chuck. Well, Chuck had a choice to make. We'll be right back after this.
- [31:30]
B
Word. Word, Word. It's always amazing to see how quickly your child grows. And I'm not just talking about their height. From those early babbles to full on storytelling, getting to watch how their ideas, creativity and confidence residents develop over the years is honestly pretty incredible. Sometimes they surprise you with what they come up with, and LEGO bricks can be right there with them through all of those stages. It's not just a toy, it's a full creative building journey that keeps evolving as they do. Lego sets play starts as early as one and a half with Lego Duplo, the bigger bricks designed for little hands that are just starting to explore and build. Then around age 4, kids transition to the smaller LEGO bricks and suddenly you're watching real structures take shape, real ideas form, and their imagination really take off. They begin with simple stacking, but over time they grow into full on creators, building worlds, stories and things you never would have expected. That's the kind of magic of LEGO bricks. You're not buying a phase, you're starting a journey. Learn more and start building today with LEGO bricks. Testing season is right around the corner and this is when confidence really matters. When kids take time to review key concepts and strengthen their skills before assessments, it can make all the difference. IXL helps reinforce what they're learning right now. So they walk into every test feeling prepared, capable and confident. IXL is an award winning online learning platform that helps kids truly understand what they're learning, whether they're building math confidence, strengthening reading and writing skills, or reviewing science concepts. Designed for students from Pre K through 12th grade, IXL delivers personalized, interactive practice that adapts to your child's level and pace. It's an easy, effective way to support learning. As the school year heads into its final stretch. Studies show kids who use IXL score higher on tests proven in all 50 states. IXL is used in 96 of the top 100 school districts in the US make an impact on your child's learning. Get IXL now and listeners can get an exclusive 20% off IXL membership when they sign up today at ixllearning.com audio. Visit ixllearning.com audio to get the most effective learning program out there at the
- [33:52]
A
best price, close your eyes, exhale, feel your body relax. And let go of whatever you're carrying today.
- [34:01]
B
Well, I'm letting go of the worry that I wouldn't get my new contacts in time for this class. I got them delivered free from 1-800-contacts. Oh, my gosh, they're so fast.
- [34:09]
A
And breathe.
- [34:10]
B
Oh, sorry. I almost couldn't breathe when I saw the discount they gave me on my first order. Oh, sorry. Namaste. Visit 1-800-contacts.com today to save on your first order.
- [34:21]
A
1-800-contacts. 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's senior. 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 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 offend the system that works against us 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. A system that was working overtime to do just that. Especially in 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 swarmed the area. Kids hanging around West 100 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. Rude, 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. 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. 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 dragger. 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 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 wild, to use a 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 boy's parents, who were furious at their boy's lack of knowledge of the justice system. The very system that Chuck D called out when pe fire Professor Griffith have 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 they 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 Raheem's boombox as he stalked the streets of Brooklyn. Hank Shockley went cinematic with the track Sonic Palette. He wanted concrete and asphalt in your 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 recognized 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 Motherfuck 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, Mili Vanilli, Poison and Richard Marx 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 founder, at home with a message of their own. We know where you live and where 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 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, it all fell silent. Revolutions never really die. And 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 and pro human race. Please direct any further questions to Axl Rose. Axl, of course, was busy punching his way out of his own controversy over some lyrics in a Guns N Roses song. If what people were saying about Axl Rose bothered Axl Rose, it didn't show. GNR were selling a shit ton of records, so what did he care? Controversy sells. Just ask 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 91 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, always the flip side to Chuck's thing, was a straight up rebel. One who had 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, Assata Shakura'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 with a.380 semiautomatic 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. 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 Flave 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 him $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 had 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, 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 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 Disgrace. 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@gracelandpod.com if you're listening. As a description Disgraceland 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 Disgracelandpod.com Membership members can listen to every episode of Disgraceland 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 to sponsors Disgracelandpod.com membership for details. Rate and review the show and follow us on Instagram, TikTok, Twitter and Facebook Disgracelandpod and on YouTube@YouTube.com Disgracelandpod Rocka Rolla He's a bad, bad man.
- [49:18]
B
Two good and coffee creamers are made with Farm Fresh cream, real milk and contain 3 grams of sugar per serving. That's 40% less than the 5 grams per serving in leading traditional coffee creamers for a rich, delicious experience. Whether you enjoy your coffee hot, cold, bold or frothy, two good coffee creamers make every sip a good one. Two good coffee creamers Real goodness in every sip. Find them at your local Kroger in the creamer aisle.
- [49:46]
A
What if you could use your home to build more home? It's possible with a SOFI Home Equity Loan. A home equity loan allows you to leverage your home's equity at a typically lower rate than a personal loan with low fixed monthly payments and all without increasing your mortgage rate. Whether it's a new bathroom, updated kitchen deck, or more, your home could help grow itself. View your rate@sofi.com homeupgradetoday Mortgages originated by Sofi bank and a member FDIC NMLS number 696891. Terms and conditions apply. Equal Housing Lender.