Public Enemy’s Chuck D tries to make a break for it

That desperation and oppression is built right into its sound. The looped piano line, lifted from Isaac Hayes’ “Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymistic,” sounds strangled, a lo-fi result producer Hank Shocklee said was achieved by the sampler wire not being plugged all the way in. Isolated and reversed, it continually circles back on itself—a bit of imprisoned soul, pacing its sonic cell. Chuck D’s voice sounds hoarse and whipped, the symptom of a cold he had around the time of recording. Flavor Flav offers his usual hype man support from a distorted distance, literally phoning his lines in from the next room over. Everything about it seems buried under grime and concrete.

With those classic opening lines, Chuck D sets up a prison that’s both real and allegorical: “I got a letter from the government, the other day / I opened and read it, it said they were suckers / They wanted me for their army or whatever,” he says, scoffing, “Picture me giving a damn / I said ‘never!’” He’s thrown in jail after dodging the draft, but those bars are just window dressing. He’s already stuck in a system that demands his life and service, but treats him like nothing more than a slave. “Here is a land that never gave a damn about a brother like me,” he says, later declaring, “I’m not a citizen.” He’s a captive.

The elaborate jailbreak he goes on to plan—grabbing the “black steel” out of the holster of his C-O, sparking a riot, heading 53-prisoners-strong for the fence—builds to an increasingly violent, increasingly unlikely denouement. The video makes this even clearer: Just as Chuck D is about to be swept away in the nick of time by the S1Ws, he swings from the hangman’s noose—“An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge”-style twist revealing it’s all been just a death row dream. He can’t escape. The oppression and institutionalized racism that runs the prison system also runs the outside world, and all Chuck and his fellow captives can do is scheme to break out, and live to keep that fire alive. “A cell is hell,” he says. “I’m a rebel, so I rebel.”