The “I Got AIDS” public service announcement featured on Salt-N-Pepa’s 1993 studio album “Very Necessary” runs the length of an average music track at 3 minutes and 19 seconds long.
On an album packed with hit singles such as “Shoop,” “None Of Your Business” and “Whatta Man” — launching the album to No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100 — the track barely makes the liner notes of cultural memory when discussing Salt-N-Pepa’s many iconic contributions to hip hop and rap.
But 30 years later, the PSA proves to be a very necessary moment on the album for the way it highlighted the HIV/AIDS epidemic of the time and framed the conversation around the virus as something that can affect everyone—not just gay men.
Cheryl James, the Salt to Sandra Denton’s Pepa and Deidra Roper’s Spinderella, introduces the masterminds behind the track as WEATOC of Boston, Massachusetts: “A group of young people who are also involved in the fight,” she says.
What follows is a dinner theater-level skit between characters Mario and Cathy, who has just found out that she has been infected with HIV.
“Hold up, wait…wait, wait… You got AIDS?,” Mario asks, thinking Cathy was initially pregnant.
Confirming, Cathy says, “I have the virus, and I don’t know what we’re gonna do.”
Mario answers, “Hold up, what we’re gonna do?” Later in the skit, he says, “I mean, you might have HIV, I guess, but not me. No, I’m sorry, I’m straight.”
And there in that brief exchange the skit captured one of the prevalent attitudes of the time—that HIV/AIDS was a problem only for the gay community.
Listen to the PSA here:
Looking back, we now know that it was this very attitude that helped perpetuate the spread of the disease, and Salt-N-Pepa knew it too, which might be why they chose to put the track on their album. After all, they were a popular group putting together their fourth hotly-anticipated album, and choosing to close with the skit definitely made a statement.
Two years earlier, the group scored a hit with a song catchily encouraging responsible sex practices, “Let’s Talk About Sex.” The AIDS crisis was in full bloom when the song was released in 1991, but the song served to a light warning compared to the dramatization of “I Got AIDS.” A few years later, the group remade “Let’s Talk About Sex” into “Let’s Talk About AIDS” for an ABC News special on the epidemic.
Although WEATOC (We’re Educators—A Touch Of Class) seems to now be defunct, and HIV is no longer the death sentence it once was, thanks to better meds, campaigns like Undetectable = Untransmittable, and prevention methods such as PreP.
However, infection rates aren’t at zero; and in some areas of the world, cases are on the rise because of lack of access to preventative treatment. In other cases, there is stigma attached to PreP being only for gay people or those with more active sex lives.
Appearing and performing “Let’s Talk About Sex” on The Arsenio Hall Show, the group talked about sex and the HIV/AIDS epidemic facing communities then, and the conversation is still relevant now as Spinderella steered the conversation to why she believed the virus was spreading so much.
Watch the interview below. The conversation about the HIV/AIDS epidemic comes around the three minute mark.
Kangol2
Loved it then, loved them then, and love how proactive and affirming they were then and now.