“‘Ball of Confusion’ by the Temptations really set the pace for rap,” says Chicago writer Scoop Jackson of the 1970 hit. “It was the structure of the song, the speed, the repetitive lyrics. They were verbalizing and rhyming at a pace that really hadn’t been done before. The politics behind the lyrics stood out. The tone of the song is a lot angrier than anything the Temptations have ever done. I mean, they’re screamin’ on the church, politics, and education.”
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“When it was time to do my thesis, I thought, ‘I need to challenge something.’ I was tired of rap music being dogged by academia,” he says over a booming KRS-One tape. “I decided to do my thesis on defending this shit.”
The book cites the passage of Martin Luther King’s birthday as a legal holiday in Arizona and the reinvigorated popularity of Malcolm X as two results of rap’s “constructive influence.” “Arizona was the last state to pass the bill for King’s holiday,” says Jackson. “It went through legislation three times and didn’t pass. Public Enemy released the video ‘By the Time I Get to Arizona’ in November ’91, and it caused a major uproar. It showed Chuck D blowing up the governor’s office. Then the NFL threatened to pull the Superbowl out [unless the state legislature passed the bill]. They passed [it] in January 1992.” KRS-One imitated the pose from a famous photo of Malcolm X on the cover of By All Means Necessary in 1988–“way before the movie or the X caps,” says Jackson. The same year, Public Enemy sampled the civil rights leader’s voice in “Bring the Noise.”
Robert “Scoop” Jackson (who is no relation to Washington senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson) got his nickname because his newspaper-reporter father considered his birth–the day after Kennedy’s assassination–bigger news than the president’s death. These days Jackson has his own ideas about the presidency: he recommends that Ice Cube run for that office, Sister Souljah for vice president, and KRS-One for secretary of education.
