[2] In "Long and Whining Road", Chuck D explicitly compares himself to Dylan by referring to himself as the "spokesman for a generation" who is "livin' in the key of protest songs".
(For Dylan, the respect was mutual: Dylan had hired Chris Shaw to engineer and mix his song "Things Have Changed" in 1999 based on Shaw's pedigree of having worked on Public Enemy's early albums,[3] and he also wrote admiringly of the group in his 2004 memoir Chronicles: Volume One.
[4]) The lyrics to "Long and Whining Road" contain references to other musicians associated with the 1960s and 1970s (the song's title is a play on The Beatles' "The Long and Winding Road" and it features a prominent sample from Jimi Hendrix's 1970 recording of "Hey Baby"[5]) while also criticizing some of the rap acts that followed in Public Enemy's wake: "Damn, our interviews were better than a lot of them acts...Seen the nation reduce "Fight the Power" to "Gin and Juice".
After Petty's death in 2017, Chuck D wrote a remembrance of the musician for Billboard magazine in which he explained his intention behind that lyric: "I think the last line was sort of the last wink, like, if you don't get what we do in hip-hop, that we can throw a behind-the-back pass and it's paying homage, but it's done in a fly way".
[9] One critic noted that Chuck D sounded "wistful" while reflecting on 20 years of Public Enemy[10] while another claimed that it was "slightly surreal" to hear him reference his favorite Dylan songs.