FEATURE:
Groovelines
Public Enemy - Fight the Power
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ONE reason why…
I am putting Public Enemy’s Fight the Power in Groovelines is because Rolling Stone recently ran a feature deciding the best five-hundred tracks ever. It was a revision of a list they last published in 2004. Coming in second was the Public Enemy classic. It is, perhaps, a song that means more now than it did in 2004. In fact, one can say it is more powerful than when it was released in 1989. This is what Rolling Stone said about their silver medal selection:
“Chuck D once likened “Fight the Power” to Pete Seeger singing “We Shall Overcome.” “‘Fight the Power,'” he said, “points to the legacy of the strengths of standing up in music.” Filmmaker Spike Lee had originally asked Public Enemy to write an anthem for Do the Right Thing — a movie about confronting white supremacy — so Chuck and the group’s producers, the Bomb Squad, took inspiration from the Isley Brothers’ funky “Fight the Power” and used the title as a blueprint for a whole new war cry.
In just under five minutes of scuzzy breakbeats and clarion-call horn samples, Chuck D and his foil, Flavor Flav, present a manifesto for racial revolution and Black pride with koans like “Our freedom of speech is freedom of death,” and rallying cries to rethink the basics of American life itself in lines like “Most of my heroes don’t appear on no stamps.” The song was exactly what Lee’s movie needed, so it was played over and over again, anytime the character Radio Raheem showed up with his boombox, making it an instant classic.
“I think it was Public Enemy’s and Spike Lee’s defining moment because it had awoken the Black community to a revolution that was akin to the Sixties revolution, where you had Martin Luther King or Malcolm X,” the Bomb Squad’s Hank Shocklee once said. “It made the entire hip-hop community recognize its power. Then the real revolution began”.
As the closing track on 1990’s Fear of a Black Planet, I think Fight the Power makes a big statement and ends the album on a really provocative and moving note. It is one of the most popular and important songs in the Public Enemy catalogue. There are a few articles online that take inside the making of and background to Fight the Power. In 2019, the BBC argued as to why it is the most provocative song ever:
“Chuck always wrote from the title down and he took this one from the Isley Brothers’ 1975 hit Fight the Power, which he remembered as the first time he had ever heard the word “bullshit” in a pop song. Ron Isley’s defence of the word – “It needed to be said” – was an apt sentiment for Public Enemy. Chuck wrote most of the lyrics in Europe, where Public Enemy were opening for Run-DMC. The tough work, he said, was compression, crunching his ideas down into a tight, hard grenade of information: “the rhymes designed to fill your mind”. He wanted the righteous immediacy of black talk-radio hosts like Gary Byrd and Mark Riley, who spoke out about the kind of racist outrages that inspired Lee’s movie. “I knew I had to step up to the plate and present an anthem that answered the questions from this film,” Chuck said.
Unfolding on a single block on a single day at the height of a heatwave, Do the Right Thing climaxes with a riot that begins with an argument about the absence of black faces on the wall of the local pizzeria. Chuck ran with the idea of building a pantheon of black icons (“Most of my heroes don’t appear on no stamps”), which meant taking down some white ones. In his 1980 single Blowfly’s Rapp, the funk prankster Clarence “Blowfly” Reid had a Ku Klux Klansman provoke him by saying, “Motherfuck you and Muhammad Ali.” This led Chuck to wonder which sacred cows would have a similar effect on a white American: “Elvis was a hero to most/ But he never meant shit to me/ Straight up racist that sucker was simple and plain/ Motherfuck him and John Wayne.” Even Shocklee was taken aback when he heard those lines.
Not every message in Fight the Power was that direct. “Swinging while I’m singing” alluded to Malcolm X’s famous 1964 dismissal of We Shall Overcome (“It’s time to stop singing and start swinging”), with the implication that Public Enemy could do both at the same time. Chuck knew his history. Whether by directly quoting the Black Panther slogan “Power to the people” and James Brown’s Say It Loud – I’m Black and I’m Proud or making veiled references to Bob Marley and Frederick Douglass, he was staking Public Enemy’s place in the long tradition of black pride and dissent and steeling listeners to join the fight: “What we need is awareness, we can’t get careless.”
Even as an a cappella, Fight the Power would have been thick with meaning – but the Bomb Squad’s audacious production added another dimension to its black history lesson. Sampling was still in its Wild West phase, when you could take whatever you wanted and copyright be damned: this was the year of De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising and the Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique. While those sample collages were vibrantly playful, the Bomb Squad aimed for an intense, overwhelming ‘hailstorm’ of sound, pushing their equipment to its limits by cramming in so many samples that even they couldn’t remember them all: “loops on top of loops on top of loops,” said Chuck.
The WhoSampled online database lists 21 and counting, including speeches by civil rights activists (Jesse Jackson, Thomas ‘TNT’ Todd), classic soul (Sly Stone, Wilson Pickett), reggae, electro, R&B and even Public Enemy’s own Yo! Bum Rush the Show. The clamorous central loop alone, which Shocklee compared to war drums, was constructed from 10 different samples. Lee managed to get his beloved jazz in there via saxophonist Branford Marsalis, whom Shocklee asked to perform three solos in different styles and then surprised by weaving all three into the mix to intensify the sense of a city at boiling point. “I wanted you to feel the concrete, the people walking by, the cars that are going by and the vrroom in the system,” the producer said. “I wanted that grittiness, the mugginess, the hot, sticky, no-air vibration of the city.”
Summer seemed a long way off when Spike Lee shot the song’s video on a cold, wet spring day in Brooklyn. Holding up portraits of black heroes, the band and hundreds of volunteers staged a ‘Young Person’s March to End Racial Violence’, ending up on the Bedford-Stuyvesant block where Do the Right Thing had been filmed. By opening with footage of Martin Luther King’s 1963 March on Washington, the video, like the song and the movie, created a provocative dialogue between the past and present of the African-American experience to challenge the mainstream narrative of progress. How much had the US really changed?
When Barack Obama and Michelle Robinson chose a movie for their first date, the first thing they saw was Rosie Perez dancing to Fight the Power
When Chuck first saw a rough cut of Do the Right Thing he was stunned by how many times the song appeared. As well as opening with it, Lee had made Fight the Power the theme tune of Bill Nunn’s character Radio Raheem, who blasted it from his boombox every time he appeared (“I don’t like nothin’ else”), thus making it the heartbeat of the movie. Marsalis called the song’s placement “the greatest marketing tool in the world”. When Barack Obama and Michelle Robinson chose a movie for their first date, the first thing they saw was Rosie Perez dancing to Fight the Power.
Public Enemy were unable to savour their big moment because between the video shoot and the single’s release date, antisemitic comments by their ‘Minister of Information’ Professor Griff plunged the band into an existential crisis that almost proved fatal. Torn between loyalty to his group and a blistering media backlash, Chuck himself agonised over how to do the right thing. Accused of inciting violence, the film itself was controversial enough to merit a round-table debate in the New York Times, during which a white judge from the Bronx complained that it was too negative: “Why can’t we fight for power, rather than fight the power?”
But the song, which sold half a million copies despite being shunned by mainstream radio, took on a life of its own, from the black students in Virginia Beach who chanted the chorus at police during riots that September to Serbia’s dissident radio station B92, which turned it into an anti-Milošević anthem in 1991, playing it on repeat when banned from broadcasting news during an armed crackdown by the regime. That first summer, it could not have been more relevant. In August, New York’s racial unease came to a head with the murder of 16-year-old Yusef Hawkins, which provoked a real-life march through Brooklyn and contributed to the election of David Dinkins, the city’s first black mayor. Time magazine claimed that Fight the Power, more than any other track, proved that hip hop was “more than entertainment – more, even, than an expression of [fans’] alienation and resentments. It is a major social force”.
Maybe I should have put this up top, but I want to highlight the reception to Fight the Power. This Wikipedia article provides a snapshot of critical reaction to an incredibly influential song:
"Fight the Power" was well-received by music critics upon its release. Greg Sandow of Entertainment Weekly wrote that it is "perhaps the strongest pop single of 1989". "Fight the Power" was voted the best single of 1989 in The Village Voice's annual Pazz & Jop critics' poll. Robert Christgau, the poll's creator, ranked it as the sixth best on his own list. It was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Rap Performance at the 1990 Grammy Awards.
The lyrics disparaging Elvis Presley and John Wayne were shocking and offensive to many listeners at the time. Chuck D reflected on the controversy surrounding these lyrics by stating that "I think it was the first time that every word in a rap song was being scrutinized word for word, and line for line”.
I am not surprised Rolling Stone placed Fight the Power at number two in their list of the five-hundred finest songs ever. It was a big and powerful single back in 1989. Over three decades later, Fight the Power grows in relevance and popularity. I wonder whether any Hip-Hop artists have released a song as vital and reactionary than this! Lauded as an anthem and rally cry for millions of youths, Fight the Power is…
A towering statement.