See if this doesn't touch your soul in these times - Bono's fan letter to Public Enemy

[TomDaisy]

I guess it's been published for some time, but I just heard it on the U2 channel as I was coming home from shopping today and I almost had to pull over because I wanted to absorb it fully.

Public Enemy – Fight The Power

Dear Public Enemies,

When this came out it was as if Ferrari had designed a steamroller made of sound fuelled by rage.

As if slavery was finally ending in America and the truth about it being faced in furious rhyme.

As if 35 years of cultural history was being trashed, statues being pulled down, effigies burned, scales falling from people's eyes and new roads appearing to take us to the future, seemingly being built overnight. Slavery wasn’t ending though… and some things actually got worse… but just for a second we glimpsed something.

What The Sex Pistols are to punk, Public Enemy are to hip hop.

The ones to melt and rearrange your brain, bamboozle your elders and help you find your tribe.

The sheer excitement of this record. It’s exciting even to think about! It’s more rock’n’roll than rock’n’roll. Its unapologetic anger and its anarchic thirst for change, for justice, for freedom and for fun…

When they were building this magnificent machine of a track all those years ago I believe that Chuck D believed that hip hop was going to take over the world.

What a mad idea…. oh, look!

Proud to have known you,

Bono

PS Remember when there was a ban on Public Enemy playing in Los Angeles and we offered the special guest slot to you downtown at the Coliseum? We told the label, we told the management, even the cops, that everything would be OK… and it was, if you call the sight of a scaffold being erected with the KKK members’ effigy on it OK.

https://www.u2.com/news/title/60-letters-from-bono


Bono introduced it like this: "Before I was a musician, a performer.... I was a fan."

[electric_blue68]

1. Cool! Big U2 fan, didn't know this. Chuck D also...

had a weekly slot on Air America back in the day.

[Sedona]

2. I saw Public Enemy open for U2 in Miami

Actung Baby ZOOTV Outside Broadcast Oct 1992 in the stadium formally known as Joe Robbie.

I brought my 9 year old daughter. She was flabbergasted (I think, I'll have to ask if she even remembers it)

Twas only five weeks after Hurricane Andrew devastated South Florida

I'm just now putting it together, I saw U2 again in Phoenix AZ just two months after 911.

Two of the most pivotal times in my life and U2 was there for me. Weird.

[TomDaisy]

3. I kind of think of them as the soundtrack of my life from 15-30