CHAPTER 21

 

 

#80: PUBLIC ENEMY

 

"Fight The Power"

 

from the album Do The Right Thing: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack

 

Released: June 1989

 

 

You had to be in the audience at the Ritzy Cinema in Brixton in the summer of 1989, one sweaty early evening Friday, the house packed, to get it. The opening titles, with Rosie Perez dancing and shadowboxing in the tenement window. played the song LOUD. Not "loudly" because this wasn't Merchant and Ivory. But played fucking LOUD.

EVERYBODY was up out of their seat, dancing, yelling, shrieking, clapping. The track burned through accepted 1989 like the devil's razor. For the next two hours, people didn't just watch the movie. They argued with it, there were heated and imperfectly audible debates in the stalls. The dynamics generated by the film's deliberately contradictory polemics radiated into the movie theatre, and the audience's words fed back into the celluloid. In the end they depended upon each other, and those arguments, that underlying celebration, ought to have reminded us that this is how an audience should handle a piece of art. It goes back to Shakespeare at the Globe with his last-second rewrites, audience hectoring leading to improvisatory speculations and even Choose Your Own Denouement. It wasn't about sensible jerseys hovering over their inedible ice cream tubs, solemnly and patronisingly nodding.

"Fight The Power" mattered in 1989 like no other song of that year mattered, largely because it went so purposively and boldly against the fabric of what was reluctantly understood to constitute pop music. For a proper grasp of its renewed shock, you need to hear it in the context of the soundtrack album, complete with the opening Take 6 radio jingle - get ready to assemble, troops - and closing harmolodic Branford Marsalis self-duet. While Marsalis didn't intend his solo to be anything approaching harmolodics, Hank Shocklee and the Bomb Squad had other ideas; like Ornette, they wanted Public Enemy's music to be about a feeling as opposed to harmonic coherence. Like "Revolution 9" all these factors - all twenty-one records sampled, anyway - fly across the ears and land in the cortex. It doesn't' matter if they're tidy or structurally congruent.

Did it matter to Elvis, who never meant shit to Public Enemy? The point is, like awopbopaloobop or ying-tong-iddle-i-po it is just THERE, it comes at you and is fun, inspires you to get up and act. The track's factors pile up, deliberately disparate, with the consequence that you have to immerse yourself in the act of glorious revolt or take up croquet. Public Enemy were not making music to be your friends. I saw them at Hammersmith Odeon on 1 November 1987 - the concert sampled on Nation Of Millions, which means I'm technically on the record - and it was while flying over Italy en route to the European wing of the Def Jam Tour that Chuck D had the idea of updating the Isley Brothers (in 1975, their "Fight The Power" was played, in its radio-friendly edit, on Luxembourg and not at all on the BBC apart from Paul Gambaccini's American chart countdown).

The revolution is upon us and who gives a fuck if you get it, or are offended, or neither? The track's mere existence represents an insurrection in itself. How fitting it should appear on, of all labels, Motown. THAT'S what was going on in 1989. "I Shot The Sheriff" - Wailers original rather than Clapton, I think - appears as a "the fact that" punctuation mark throughout. Hey, Britain, why was there no hip hop on your corporate wall? Like Coltrane's Ascension, proceed into the church and worship. Those who don't get "Fight The Power" were never meant to do so - in any sense.