Written: March 2016
I thought of a good riff while listening to Lee Greenwood’s early soul music on Dot Records. I wanted to write a riff that sounded like Northern Soul, but it ended up sounding less like Northern Soul and more like a car shifting gears. At the same time, I wanted to write a song based on my new obsession at the time: the OJ Simpson Bronco chase. So, despite me recording the riff for later user, I used it later that night and wrote “Minimum Speed” in about 90 minutes.
The Bronco chase is interesting material to talk about the intricacies of the OJ Simpson murder trial because it either reveals more about OJ’s status in the community (a black man who’s effectively thought of as white because of Hertz making him look familiar to white audiences) or the state of the black man in America at the time (criminals! Rioters! Thugs! Gangsta rappers!), but it still shows the same thing: this was a man who was running away from something he caused. Why try to run all the way to Mexico on a whim? Why take out so much cash? It deconstructed the idea of OJ being framed by the LAPD as an attempt of strongarming the black community reliant on him as a means of leverage, but it seemed to fulfill it as well. OJ’s scared out of his mind in the phone calls. He has a gun pointed at his temple at all times. AC’s stressed out as Hell. Why mention Nicole Brown?
Granted that the Brown/Goldman side of the case didn’t make things better – Mark Fuhrman being okayed as a witness, the LAPD violating protocol for detective work due to sloppiness, Fred Goldman’s increasingly racist attitudes towards OJ, Christopher Darden making all the wrong choices (trying to limit use of the word “nigger” in the courtroom; having the smart idea of OJ trying on the glove) due to his inexperience – but OJ just felt like he did something wrong. If he were innocent, he’d let himself go to jail and have it all figured out. But why get chased all throughout the 405?
Simple: he was scared. He was scared of facing himself. He was scared of becoming just another black stereotype – the Zip Coon. And that’s what I wanted to talk about.