#7, “Welcome to the Terrordome,” Public Enemy (1990)

150 Favorite Songs: #7, “Welcome to the Terrordome,” Public Enemy (1990)

When I was eighteen, I had a rough time. I had moved to Texas from Indiana, and I was watching most of my old friends go off to college and start living in that liminal space between being a kid and being an adult that comes at that age. Many of them were in exciting cities—Washington D.C., Chicago, New York—but I was jealous even of the ones who were in, like, Muncie. I was living with my parents, a freshly-minted college dropout with no sense of community and no idea of how to find one in a place I had just moved to. And one night, I got very depressed about it.

I’d experienced anxiety and depression before, but this was heavier, it felt like something pressing down on me that I could not lift. It felt like my skin was falling off. It felt like being trapped in the worst place imaginable. It was awful.

It lasted a long time. Months. When you’re in that space, if you’re not being crushed by it entirely, then you need to make sense of it somehow. I was not going to find peace in it, so I decided that wasn’t the point. I just needed to identify it. And then I found “Welcome to the Terrordome,” and suddenly I was equipped with a metaphor that made it feel manageable.

“Welcome to the Terrordome” is about the same thing I was feeling, more or less, and the song captures it perfectly. It’s almost as much a sound collage as it is a beat; it opens with dramatic, major-key horns, like the kind that you might hear, I don’t know, as the theme song to a game show—and then after two seconds, they disappear, suddenly, starkly, replaced by a sound that feels like the earth just opened up and swallowed the horn section. Then a rhythm track comes in that, in lieu of a recognizable riff, just delivers a tense, looping, droning sound. There are record scratches and samples that sound like disembodied voices. “This is a journey,” one says. Another, like an echo from the past, begs, “Would you join me please in welcoming…” and then cuts off, replaced by displaced laughter.

And then Chuck D comes in, his unmistakeable baritone the voice of authority. To start the first verse, he drops one of the iconic lines in rap history: i got so much trouble on my mind, he spits, refuse to lose.

The first part of that line comes from a song by Sir Joe Quarterman, a funk singer who had a minor hit in 1973 with a song called “Trouble On My Mind.” Chuck, who was thirteen years old that year, and a voracious music fanatic, kept it lodged in his head for most of the next two decades. The second part came from a minor James Brown single, “I Refuse to Lose,” released in 1976, which was a down part of Brown’s career. It got stuck in Chuck’s head, too.

I hadn’t heard either of those songs, but the way Chuck delivered that line got stuck in mine. Sometimes, just having someone say something you feel in simple terms makes whatever it is you’re feeling just a little bit smaller.

I’m not the only one who had that experience. “I’ve got so much trouble on my mind” is a rap refrain, referenced in songs from Tupac (“16 on Death Row”) to Kendrick Lamar (“Nosetalgia”) to A Tribe Called Quest (“Show Business”) to Common (“Book of Life”) to Pusha T (“Trouble On My Mind”) to Everlast (“Black Jesus”) to Ab-Soul (“Herbert”) to Sublime (“New Thrash”).

It’s funny; every time I’ve heard someone reference that line, I’ve felt a little bit of kinship to them. Hip hop is a responsive genre, where ideas flow from artist to artist and get reused and reframed. When I heard Pusha T drop a song called “Trouble On My Mind,” I knew that he had spent some time listening to this song, feeling something that these words helped him express.

The song continues. We are still stuck in that buzzing pseudo-riff, which sounded exactly like the noise in my head during those months. Chuck delivers frantic lines with complex internal rhymes, something he was not known to do very often. They don’t always make narrative sense—“laser anesthesia, maze ya, ways to blaze your brain and train ya” is not a clear sentiment—but they feel like racing thoughts, the sort of thing that goes through your head when you’re stuck in that sort of paranoid, tense, anxious space that, to me, “The Terrordome” has always described.

Chuck was in the Terrordome when he wrote the song, too. Its genesis is well-documented; he wrote about it in his autobiography, The Autobiography of Mistachuck. His band was in trouble, falling apart a little, and he was under intense pressure. He got off a plane in New York, got into his car, and spent the next couple hours driving west, rapping the lyrics that would become “Welcome to the Terrordome” on his way to Allentown, Pennsylvania, where he finally gave into exhaustion and took a break for the night. The next morning, he got back in the car, drove home, and finished the song.

That’s a feeling I can relate to. Chuck’s situation was messy—you can read all the detail here, if you’re interested, but it involved a member of the group saying some wildly antisemitic and homophobic shit in an interview, and Chuck firing him from the band, either because of what he said or because pressure from his label to do so, depending who you ask and when. That’s context for things that aren’t in the song, and I’m not interested in either parsing or defending any of it. I’m interested in the feeling of paranoia and anxiety that he captured in the song he wrote when he drove to a busted steel mill town to get away from his life for a few hours.

I called whatever I felt that year “The Terrordome,” and it made it feel less all-encompassing. It wasn’t the whole world, it was a place. I was in it. I could get out of it. I don’t know if that makes sense to someone who has different experiences of their mental health than I do, but sometimes just having a way to make it feel small enough that I can imagine an “after” is the only thing that makes the bad times bearable.

And so the Terrordome became a part of my internal mythology. It made other, more common metaphors, make a little more sense: “the way out is through”  is a bit of a cliche, but when I could more effectively picture what it was I was trying to get out of, it felt more precise and relevant. Depression and anxiety have a way of making you feel like they are the only things that exist. Imagining feeling those things as being in the Terrordome robbed them of that power, because if it was just a place, then there were other places.

Eventually, some time passed, and I wasn’t in the Terrordome anymore. I don’t remember what changed. I guess I just woke up one day and the feeling of being there had faded. I’ve been back since—sometimes for minutes, sometimes for days, or weeks—but it’s gotten easier to navigate. It has landmarks now. I know them. It may feel like a maze, but it’s one I’ve gotten through many times now.

I’ve had the chance to talk with Chuck D a few times in my life now. Some of those conversations have been, at least from my perspective, a little more real than your standard musician interview, but I’ve never told him about any of this. It would feel very strange to say—but also maybe superfluous. There’s plenty of evidence that I’m not the only one who’s spent time in the Terrordome. When I’ve got trouble on my mind, realizing that helps me refuse to lose. It’s like Chuck says: Move as a team. Never move alone. And welcome to the Terrordome.