During election years, music artists often become involved, willingly or unwillingly, in America’s political world. Some choose to endorse candidates, while others end up defending the rights to their music from unauthorized campaign usage.
But it’s still an open question, even among artists who share political beliefs, how best to live their values, especially when it comes to concerts. Do you play in areas where local laws are repugnant and try to rally for change? Do you boycott, to punish in a small way the local economy, knowing that the political class listens to money as much as—if not more than—the populace?
In 1992, one of the world’s greatest and most socially minded hip-hop acts faced such a choice while on tour throughout the American southwest. Public Enemy’s stop at Arizona’s Sun Devil Stadium, as support on U2’s Zoo TV tour, became a case study in an artist standing up for their values while also showing up for those who likely agree with them.
Martin Luther King Day was signed into federal law in 1983, and it was celebrated nationally for the first time in 1986. But states control their own holiday calendars, and though Arizona governor Bruce Babbitt in 1986 declared the third Monday in January to be Martin Luther King Day in his state, his successor, Evan Mecham, cancelled it the very next year.
“You folks don’t need another holiday,” he was quoted as telling a group of African-American businesspeople at the time. “What you folks need are jobs.”
A pair of ballot measures to establish the holiday in 1990, after Meacham was impeached and removed from office, both failed.
The next year, Public Enemy dropped their fourth album, Apocalypse ’91 … the Enemy Strikes Black. Track seven was a song about the controversy, one a long way from “Happy Birthday,” Stevie Wonder’s hopeful plea for King’s recognition from a half-generation prior.
“By the Time I Get to Arizona” was a shot across the bow of the state’s political class, with Chuck D spitting lines like “what he need is a nosebleed” and “get a politician to honor, or else he’s a goner, by the time I get to Arizona.” If the song left anything to the imagination regarding PE’s intent, the video made it explicit: The clip depicted fictitious assassinations of top Arizona officials intercut with footage from the killing of Dr. King.
“The song took off with the video,” Chuck told Rock the Bells in 2021. “In the song I could say a lot of things that people wouldn't notice right away. But when we showed the video, [it] was immediately impactful.”
But PE’s confrontational nature didn’t stop with the explosive video. Their live performance of the song would include, at various times, the onstage hanging of someone dressed in Ku Klux Klan regalia. The message was clear: Public Enemy considered the actions of Arizona—both its government and the slim majority that voted down the holiday in 1990—to be akin to the days when Black Americans were at best second-class citizens, and the band was ready to fight as needed.
In 1992, PE would get a chance to go on the road with U2, opening the Irish juggernaut’s “Zoo TV” shows throughout the states. Along the tour’s route: a stop at Sun Devil Stadium in Tempe, Arizona, just miles away from the governor’s office.
By the early ’90s, many artist boycotts had involved international issues. Nearly everyone had refused to play in apartheid South Africa, for instance. But boycotts against individual states within America were much rarer and would only pick up speed in the years to come (a 2016 cultural boycott of North Carolina, for instance, would be a part of the impetus for that state reversing course on a bill limiting bathroom access for transgender individuals to the sex on their birth certificates.)
Stevie Wonder himself had announced he would not play Arizona until the state recognized MLK Day. How would Public Enemy react to going into the state that it had called out so fiercely both on wax and on video?
Of course, there was another consideration: Public Enemy was scheduled to perform, but this was not a Public Enemy show. It was, in the main, U2’s evening. Unsurprisingly, though, the band behind songs like “Pride” and “Bad” showed no discomfort with PE’s protest. Years earlier, according to the New York Times, U2 had donated to a recall campaign against then-Governor Meacham, the man who had rescinded the original state holiday declaration, and the band had had a statement read before a show in that same stadium decrying his actions.
Public Enemy would deliver a message, it was decided—but that was all.
“I had the blessings of Bono to do it,” Chuck D told Spin in 2011. “He just punched me in the chest and gave me a pound.”
Taking the stage first that evening, Public Enemy fired through “By the Time I Get to Arizona.” And then they left. On a tour where the band would usually perform a dozen or so songs, Public Enemy did just one—the one that resonated loudest.
“The crowd was kinda pissed off,” Chuck D told Spin. “It was a U2 crowd, but there was a large contingent that was really interested in seeing us.”
And two weeks later, feedback of a different sort: Proposition 300, the ballot initiative to establish Martin Luther King Jr. Day as a state holiday in Arizona, passed by 61 to 39 percent of the vote.
The group’s performance was not determinative of the outcome, of course: a poll cited by the Christian Science Monitor three days before the PE show had the proposition leading 53 to 40 percent, with 7 percent still undecided. But when it came to artists opposing specific policies on a state level, rather than wider issues like war or famine, Public Enemy definitely set the stage for protests to come.
