Night Of The Living Baseheads (1988)

Night Of The Living Baseheads is the third single released by Public Enemy from their infamous secound album It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back.
The video was released during the 1980s crack epidemic and the perception of African Americans at the time. The video begins with a still of the band standing around a gravestone with the epitah- 'R.I.P. Baseheads'. Baseheads being slang for a user of crack cocaine the video imediately puts across their realistic view that crack abusers will most likely reach a moribid end. This is exagerated by the use of black and white, a voiceover of Malcom X talking at the initiation of the Afro-American Unity, the camera zooms out revealing the whole of the band before cutting to clips from theAudubon Ballroom where Malcom X talked and was later assasinated. It continues cutting back and forth for the first fifteen secounds of the video, the still is replaced by a video of the same shot almost unnoticabley. The opening of the music video is in my opinion the most important part, it immediately introduces the subject of Baseheads but at the same time the band make the political and culturual decision to show it through their african-american viewpoint by what could be potentially shocking footage, the change that was happening at that time, the injustice and racism that they were pressed with and makes a link between that and the unfair blame the african-america community were getting at the time for the crack epidemic.