Public Enemy – Do You Wanna Go Our Way???
1999 · Directed by Jonathan Woods & Christopher Adams
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Best comments
1.“When does Prof. Griff's qi power stop in this video? TRICK QUESTION! It goes on and on and it don't stop...”
More comments
- 2.“Pretty hilarious that one of the Black Eyed Peas is in this video, and now they're the most corporate band in America, as named by the Wall Street Journal. Oh, '99...”
- 3.“DAMN, THIS TAKES ME BACK. I REMEMBER WORKING ON THAT SET, LOL. GOOD TIMES, GOOD TIMES.”
The story
In 1999 Public Enemy did something the record business thought was nuts: they sold an album on the internet before it hit stores. There's a Poison Goin' On went up as downloadable MP3s through Atomic Pop, a new online label run by former CBS Records president Al Teller, about two months before the CD landed on July 20. This song went out first, as a free MP3 for 30 days that May. The online stunt won the group a Pioneer Award at Yahoo's Internet Life Awards. The album even came out on Zip disk. Ask a Gen Xer.
The video came from the same mindset. Chuck D told MTV it was made by a couple of computer tech guys, Jonathan Woods and Christopher Adams, and that it matched the song's intensity, which he set against the expensive videos he saw coming out of R&B. The single reached number 66 in the UK and never charted in the States. Public Enemy bet on the internet years before the rest of the music business was dragged there kicking and screaming.
