Fight The Power

Public Enemy's most famous song, "Fight The Power" embodies their message of black pride, and along the way takes shots at the white icons Elvis Presley ("Elvis was a hero to most but he never meant s--t to me") and John Wayne. Even Bobby McFerrin couldn't escape their wrath, as Chuck D raps: "Don't Worry Be Happy" was a number one jam Damn if I say it you can slap me right here This militant and confrontational approach was designed to empower the Black community and create some controversy along the way, which helped sell a lot of albums. By this point, many of Public Enemy's fans were young white guys who liked the beats and associated with the anti-authority message. The group had also been through charges of anti-Semitism, reverse racism and homophobia, and emerged mostly unscathed (although their "Minister of Information," Professor Griff, left the group after declaring "Jews are wicked"), so declaring white people "Rednecks" in this song wasn't that much of a risk.

Public Enemy wrote "Fight The Power" for the movie Do The Right Thing at the request of Spike Lee, who directed the film. Lee's idea was to have the group record a version of the spiritual "Lift Every Voice And Sing," but PE producer Hank Shocklee nixed that idea, telling Spike it had to be the kind of song you'd hear blaring from cars in Brooklyn. Chuck D wrote the lyric based on the concept of the film, starting with the title. The song first appeared on the movie soundtrack, released in June 1989 a month before the movie hit theaters. It plays in the opening scene where Rosie Perez dances to it, and is used as the motif, playing from Radio Raheem's boombox (adorned with a Public Enemy sticker) throughout the film until a climactic scene where Sal smashes it with a baseball bat. Spike Lee recalled in Public Enemy: Inside The Terrordome: "We knew ('Fight The Power') was coming out in the summer of 1989, and in the summertime, there's always one song in New York that, if it's a hit, you can hear everywhere: on the subway, cars, coming out of people's houses. I wanted this song to be an anthem that could express what young black America was feeling at this time. Around this time, New York City under Mayor Ed Koch was racially polarized, and I wanted this song to be in the film." The track was later used in the 2005 movie Jarhead, where "Don't Worry Be Happy" also appears.

Some of the many samples on this track include "Pump Me Up" by Trouble Funk and "Funky Drummer" by James Brown, which gets a mention in the lyrics ("Sound of the Funky Drummer"). Discussing the song with Keyboard magazine in 1990, Chuck D explained: "We approach every record like it was a painting. Sometimes, on the sound sheet, we have to have a separate sheet just to list the samples for each track. We used about 150, maybe 200 samples on Fear of a Black Planet. 'Fight the Power' has, like, 17 samples in the first ten seconds. For example, there's three different drum loops that make one big drum loop: One is a standard Funkadelic thing, another is a Sly thing, and I think the third one is the Jacksons. Then we took some sounds from a beat box. The opening lick is the end of a Trouble Funk record, processed with doubling and reverb. And the chorus is music going backwards."