WE NEEDED A NATION OF MILLIONS TO HOLD THOSE MF'S BACK

So, Pitchfork (so named for Pitchfork Magazine) Festival was pretty freaking great. Monica, Jamie, others, and I had excellent times. Here’s a little rundown. I had hoped to add video to this but everything was streamed live and is not currently available. However, I bet it will be one of these days. I hope it will be.


Friday-
My one and only reason for being there on Friday was to see Public Enemy perform “It Takes A Nation of Millions To Hold Us Back”. Monica was also happy to hear Sebadoh play “Bubble and Scrape” and, although I listened to it a few times and thought it was swell I didn’t much care. Public Enemy was what’s up. We arrived at about 6something (they went on at 8) and were able to walk right up to front and slightly (and I mean slightly) off center to chill and wait. We were able to hear Mission of Burma play some of “Vs.”, which was okay. Sebadoh sounded good, until The Bomb Squad decided to tune up during the acoustic part of the set.

Let me just say that the first note from the Bomb Squad reverberated my spleen. We all looked at each other and were like…”uh…earplugs?” We did manage to secure a pair from some security guards and covered them with some torn up medical gown or something of the like that our new friend Hilarie game us. The Bomb Squad didn’t seem to notice that Sebadoh was still playing and they started the show, they had to stop. This caused the more rude and jerky members of the audience to chant, “Sebadoh sucks” repeatedly, which is not true.

Let me just say that many of the “fans” who were there didn’t care dick about PE, they just wanted to see some Flavor Flav, which is bogus cause Chuck D is the man. There were some real fans there though. These dudes to the right of us were like, “man, I remember when this came out, I was in eighth grade and I thought, man, Black people really hate us…and they have a reason!” Monica and I burst into laughter. Another dude said, “It looks like hot topic exploded into a thrift store in here,” and I told him that was the funniest thing I had ever heard. He looked at me and Monica and didn’t reply…maybe he thought we were too thrift store.

As start time neared these same loser fans made the most horrible siren noises ever to signal the start of the album. I wanted to kill them. When the real siren noises came on I forgot about it, cause it was about to be AWESOME. It was around the beginning of the show that security guard James was replaced with Terrence, the most awesome security guard ever. Flavor forgot to come on stage for Bring The Noise, which was pretty silly. He was dealing with his family, who were a bunch of adorable kids who danced like madmen the whole show. We loved them. Then Terrence had Monica take some pictures and video on his phone, which may have been our ticket to later awesomeness. It could have also been that both our group and he were grooving like you wouldn’t believe.

The show was outstanding S1Ws were there stepping in their military gear, Professor Griff had no idea what he was doing there and couldn’t remember his verses but he was cool. Flavor called people out for booing him when he thanked the crowd for making him the #1 reality TV star of all time, “What are you a bunch of ghosts? Booo booo. Why don’t you be proud for a mother fucker?” He had a point. Then he tried to kill us and I wanted to boo his ass too. This fool had the idea to come up right on the other side of the rail to touch the fans. This means we were pressed into the rail and pushed all around. Monica and I threw elbows like crazy yelling at people to back the fuck up. After it calmed a little Monica pulled out her keys, to which Terrence replied “Come on now”. She didn’t have to use them. I was left with a bruise on my arm. Stupid Flavor Flav.

After finishing up the whole album Chuck D was like, “So we didn’t stop with that…we then did this…” and launched into Welcome to the Terrordome HELLS YEAH. He continued with other hits; Shut 'Em Down, He Got Game, 911 Is A Joke,Harder Than You Think, Can't Truss It, Yo! Bum Rush The Show, and Fight The Power to close it out. Freaking awesome. Home, to bed, and more for the next day...