Eleven years ago this week, our nation was on the brink of war with Iraq. As we waited to see if Iraq would pull its occupying forces out of Kuwait by the January 15 deadline established by President George Bush, Americans psychologically prepared for a possible armed conflict in the Middle East. Those opposed to a U.S. war on Iraq were also getting ready — to spread a message of peace.

Lenny Kravitz decided the time was right for a revamped version of "Give Peace a Chance," the John Lennon/ Paul McCartney composition originally recorded by John Lennon and Yoko Ono as the Plastic Ono Band. Ono and her 15-year-old son, Sean Lennon, agreed, the lyrics were revised and a number of performers were approached to help make the record, among them LL Cool J, Cyndi Lauper, Alannah Myles and Dweezil Zappa. At a session for the record in a Los Angeles studio, Kravitz said, "It looks like there's gonna be a war in a few days and I want people to really think about this and for the government to really think about this because this is it."

There was no question that Chuck D of Public Enemy was thinking about it. With the possibility of war coming and the memory of all the poor and non-collegiate black and white men who were shipped off to Vietnam, the politically outspoken rapper provided a street level assessment of the impending battle.

"I made 'Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos,' which was quite prophetic at the particular time [1988], which says, you know, I went to the joint because I refused to go to the army, and when I did that record, everybody at the time was saying, 'What kind of army, what war you talking about, what are you saying?' I'm saying a war can come up any time and they will take your ass and put you where they wanna put you, and sure enough in 1991, here we have that scenario ... The 15th is a pretty big date that everybody's dealing with and a lot of people that's 24 and under, they getting real paranoid. They don't wanna go to no dumbass war."

In non-war-related news, this week in 1991 Sting shot a video for his single "All This Time" from his about-to-be-released album, The Soul Cages. The clip featured his girlfriend Trudie Styler (who is now Mrs. Sting) and Melanie Griffith. On the set of the video in London, Sting said, "This song sounds really jolly, but the rest of the album's totally miserable. It's just a cheap way of trying to get people to buy the record. You put a single out that they'll like and they buy the record and they realize they've been duped again. Sorry."

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