The song features a slower, more melodic beat in comparison to other songs from It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back but still remains highly chaotic. (However, in the video for the song, this line accompanies the image of Chuck D being hanged by the triumphant warden of the prison, suggesting that the prison riot was crushed and the final verse is nothing more than the wishful thinking of a “dead man walking.”)
The song ends with the line “53 brothers on the run, and we are gone” indicating a successful prison escape. Chuck makes a comment about prison and racism (“This is what I mean-an anti-nigger machine”), which later became the basis for another Public Enemy song, “Anti-Nigger Machine” (featured on the 1990 album, Fear of a Black Planet). They are confronted with shots and there is a state of chaos. The final verse ends with Chuck and the rest of the prisoners on their final escape. to call me a ‘copter / She tried to get away, and I popped her”), presumably dead (“I had 6 C.O.s, now it’s 5 to go”). With gun in hand, Chuck and the other prisoners escape “to the ghetto – no sell out.” Chuck then comments on how there are 6 C.O.s who he “ought to put their head out.” He does not, at first (“But I’ll give ’em a chance ’cause I’m civilized”), but after a female tries to thwart the escape she is shot, (“Got a woman C.O. Sleeping on the job/My plan is on go-ahead.”) (corrections officer) who was “fallin’ asleep.” (“But ever when I catch a C.O. By the end of the second verse, Chuck has taken a gun from a C.O. “Black Steel” is a reference to a gun, which he needs to escape. This serves to both criticize racism and the prison system (“Four of us packed in a cell like slaves”).Ĭhuck is then taken to prison, from which he attempts to escape. The main idea behind this is that the (unnamed) war is wrong, with a hint of pure indignation towards the treatment of black people by other parts of American society (“here’s a land that never gave a damn about a brother like me”). Chuck has been drafted (“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”) however, he refuses to become part of the army (“Picture me giving a damn / I said ‘never!'” and “They could not understand that I’m a black man and I could never be a veteran!”).
The lyrics deal with a fictional story of an escape from a US prison.
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