Track Of The Day: Public Enemy - By The Time I Get To Arizona (Def Jam)

For whatever reason, this track popped into my head today and I’m struggling to shake it loose. Not that I really want to of course, because like the best that Public Enemy have made, it’s a supercharged piece of militant rap messaging which is, as ever, totally on point. The superlative grunginess of the rock/rap backing track is heavy beyond belief, aligned with Chuck D’s stream of consciousness approach to rapping, which occasionally flows into the abstract, we have a recipe for success. The theme of this track, “the black community's frustration that some US states did not recognize Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday as a national holiday” (Wikipedia), hasn’t gone away. The video itself is a 6 minute masterpiece. Cinematic in scope and banned from MTV. An absolute bomb then and now!