The Greatest Songs Ever! Fight the Power

Although it never cracked the Top 40, Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” became the soundtrack to 1989’s summer of rage. That year, director Spike Lee released Do the Right Thing, a movie he wrote to portray the violence of the time — particularly the often fatal clashes between African-Americans and the New York Police Department.

The film came out against a backdrop of law-enforcement violence in New York’s black communities, which claimed such victims as Yvonne Smallwood, 28, who died of injuries allegedly sustained while she was in police custody, and Eleanor Bumpurs, 66, a mentally disabled woman shot when she resisted eviction.

Needing music to match his fiery subject matter, Lee turned to Public Enemy. But as PE leader Chuck D points out, the relationship was never going to be simple. “Spike wasn’t a hip-hop fan,” he says. “He came from a jazz background. A lot of them are real musicians, and they look down on hip-hop.” Lee wanted Public Enemy to reinterpret the classic spiritual “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” but the group balked.

“I had a three-hour fight with him,” recalls Hank Shocklee, who coproduced “Fight the Power.” “It was heated. I was in his office in Brooklyn saying, ‘Spike, kids don’t listen to “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” Open this window, stick your head outside and listen to the sound you hear coming out of cars and boxes.’ ”

Lee reluctantly conceded, and Chuck began writing. “I wrote most of the lyrics in flight between cities in Italy, where we were on tour,” he says. “When we finished Europe, I came back with Spike’s anthem — lyrically, at least.”

Chuck borrowed the title from a favorite 1975 Isley Brothers track, but his major lyrical inspiration was “Blowfly’s Rapp,” a pioneering 1978 song by X-rated poet-rapper Blowfly. “In one line,” Chuck says, “Blowfly acts out the role of a KKK Grand Wizard and says something like, ‘I’m the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan/Nobody mess with me/Motherfuck you and Muhammad Ali.’ That line always stuck with me, because if you talk about Muhammad Ali, you’re gonna make a black person mad. I just decided to flip the script — kind of an ironic thing.”

“Flipping the script” meant substituting white icon John Wayne for Ali. To ram the point home, Chuck took a pop at Elvis Presley: “Elvis was a hero to most, but he never meant shit to me.”

When Shocklee first heard the rap, he blanched. “I was like, ‘Whooo! You said that?’ But Chuck never worries about anything. I love his spirit. I always said, ‘I’m not sure about that one, Chuck.’ I mean, there are lots of Elvis fans out there.”

But Chuck was in no mood to compromise. Public Enemy headed to Spectrum City, their studio in Brooklyn, and got to work. Shocklee’s brother Keith, fortuitously, was putting together a track whose spirit was similar to what PE sought, but he wasn’t sure what to do with it. “It wasn’t noisier and harder, like we normally did,” Hank Shocklee says. “It was mean, but it had a defiant, aggressive, I’m not gonna take it feeling.”

Keith’s track became the basis of “Fight the Power.” “The groove at the end of the day wasn’t the groove we started out with,” Chuck says. “ ‘Fight the Power’ changed a lot as it was being completed.”

Public Enemy hadn’t seen any of Do the Right Thing when they handed Lee the finished song. “We had no idea what was going to happen with it,” Shocklee says. In the end, “Spike put the song in the movie, like, 27 times. We thought it would be in there one time, but it became the theme that held the movie together.”

That put Public Enemy, the rap group of the moment, in a curious position: Because of soundtrack rights, “Fight the Power” was released by Motown Records, not PE’s label, Def Jam — so it should have been a chart smash with Motown’s muscle behind it.

“The single went gold,” Shocklee says. “It could have done a lot better. But at that time, we weren’t played on white radio — and black radio wasn’t going to play the song either, because of the John Wayne statement. Rap music was still the new voice of the youth, and the youth were rebellious. This was a time when R&B was smoother than smooth. Black radio was scared to death of us.”

Being ignored by disc jockeys wasn’t Public Enemy’s only potential problem. The Isley Brothers recognized their song title and put their lawyers in touch with PE, intending to sue over sampling rights. “But when they checked the record, there were no samples from the Isley Brothers,” Chuck says with a laugh.

The group also hadn’t fully anticipated the outcry over the lines about Presley and Wayne. But PE rapper Professor Griff outdid even those insults by making anti-Semitic remarks to the media — one week before the release of Do the Right Thing. The group ousted Griff shortly thereafter.

“As I’ve moved forward,” Chuck says, “I’ve come to respect that record for what it meant. When you’re doing it, you don’t know what it’s going to take on, and it came to mean a lot. If somebody keeps you from being as equal as everybody else or from having the freedom to contribute what you can to the world, you have to fight those powers as much as possible.”