You Say 'What Is This?'

Someone somewhere recently opined that they had just heard Public Enemy's Fight The Power again and that it contained the same thrill, shock of the new and sheer urgency that it did when they had first heard it in 1989, that it's power to move was undiminished by the thirty five years gap in between its release and 2024. I played it- loud-  to see if it had the same effect on me and am happy to report it has lost nothing at all since '89, it remains one of the great moments in popular music, a perfect, righteous collision of hip hop, sampling, loops, noise, funk, Black Nationalism and Spike Lee. 

Fight The Power

From the opening sample, the voice of civil rights activist Thomas TNT Todd declaring, 'Yet if our best trained, best educated best equipped, best prepared troops refuse to fight...', to the crescendo of noise and samples that follow and then Chuck D's ever- memorable, ever quotable opening lyrics- '1898/ Another summer/ Sound of the Funky Drummer/ Music hitting hard/ Cause I know you got soul', it's a powerhouse of a song. 

In 1988 Spike Lee had approached the group and told them he needed a theme song for a film he was making, a film about racial tensions in Brooklyn. He wanted something 'defiant... angry... rhythmic... anthemic' and thought of Public Enemy straight away. Chuck, Flavor Flav, Terminator X and The Bomb Squad delivered on every level. The Bomb Squad constructed the music out of a bunch of loops including Trouble Funk, Brandon Marsalis, Sly and the Family Stone, The Dramatics, James Brown, Bobby Byrd, Afrika Bambaataa plus scratching from Terminator X. Meanwhile Chuck D wrote his all time best words, the chorus of, 'Fight the power/ Fight the powers that be', matched by the verses, a up to the minute, state- of- the- nation address. In the third verse Chuck went to go full throttle and penned one of the finest lyrics ever written, one guaranteed to further enrage white rock 'n' roll purists...

'Elvis was a hero to most/ But he never meant shit to me/ You see straight out racist that sucker was simple and plain/ Motherfuck him and John Wayne'

Even if Elvis wasn't actually racist (and the jury's out with various people defending him/ accusing him), Chuck is surely covered here by the appropriation of black music by white singers and the crowning of Elvis 'King' while ignoring the work of earlier black musicians. John Wayne is less defendable- 'I believe in white supremacy until the point the blacks are educated to a point of responsibility' he said in 1971. Regardless, it's a brilliant piece of songwriting provocative, powerful, and with perfect flow and scan. He follows it, without pause, with...

'Cause I'm black and I'm proud/ I'm hyped and I'm amped/ Most of my heroes don't appear on no stamps'.

The video is a blast as well, filmed on the streets of Brooklyn, Chuck and Flavor in their absolute pomp. Flav knows what time it is- he's wearing multiple clocks.The SW1s strut and dance. The crowd jump. Malcolm X is everywhere along with Marcus Garvey, Angela Davis and Paul Robeson. 

Fight The Power came out as a single on Motown, released in summer 1989 to promote Spike Lee's incendiary film Do The Right Thing. The film's opening sequence is as memorable as the song's video, a four minute highly stylised sequence with Rosie Perez dancing and shadow boxing, a scene that took eight hours to film

One of the things about late 80s dance floors (or at least the best of them) was that for a period there was a genuine sense of anything goes as long as you can dance to it. Fight The Power could be heard alongside house music, acid house, indie guitar bands and nascent indie dance tracks- and was equally rapturously received. The walls that divided one type of music from another were briefly blown down and Fight The Power was a big part of that.