Oral Hit-Story: Public Enemy, ‘Fight the Power’

Back in 2014, I wrote a series of stories for the now-defunct men’s lifestyle website, Made Man, that my editor awesomely titled “Oral Hit-Story.” The idea was to track down as many bands from my childhood and interview them about the chrysalis of their highest-charting or most recognizable single. In all, I published more than 20 — and one of them seemed more than a little bit relevant right now. Here’s the uncut, full interview I did with Public Enemy’s Chuck D about the rap classic, “Fight the Power.” (It has been edited lightly with some clarifications.)

It’s a particularly interesting time to be talking about the re-release of Public Enemy’s two groundbreaking hip-hop records — It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (1988) and Fear of a Black Planet (1990) — given that yesterday’s midterm elections saw two historic wins by African-American candidates.* In 1988–89, was electing politicians part of your agenda?
Well, to fight the power, sometimes you’ve got to assume that role and be the power, but if you’re going to be that power, you should be accountable and responsible to the community. So all the time we do that to fight the power, you’ve got to replace the power but with accountability and responsibility. And during the time of Reagan and Bush there was not a lot of that going on. David Dinkins, he was the mayor of New York City, so a lot of that had to do with a balance of their position, and they were taking shots at him.

*I was likely referring to the historic elections of Republicans Mia Love and Will Hurd to the House in Utah and Texas, respectively. I should’ve probably said “three,” given that Republican Tim Scott was also elected to the Senate in a special election that year.

Within a matter of months, a one-two punch of Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back and N.W.A.’s Straight Outta Compton were released. Prior to that summer, do you think hip hop had gone sort of soft?
No, not at all. I think hip hop was starting to branch off into more aspects, because it was finally viewed as album-oriented music. So hip hop for the first time in ’88 and ’89, had a lot of things to say from one artist. Now before 1987, it was largely still a singles market, where you’d hear a single, and you might get an album with a whole bunch of songs that nobody’d heard yet. But Public Enemy was like the litmus test, releasing an album out of nowhere — somewhere not from the streets but above the streets…with a whole bunch of different viewpoints. That changed the game right there.

I’ve read that you saw these two records as “concept albums.” Most rock concepts don’t really have much by way of a coherent message: The Who’s Tommy or even the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band come to mind. Do you think the rap genre owns the rights to the concept album concept?
Well, with rap music, I had to deliver a large volume of words, ’cause you’re rappin’. So it was sort of like a [page] from the book of James Brown and the words of Dylan. So when you peel the words off, yeah, of course, it’s going to be a little bit of protest music. So as the chief lyricist of those albums, I had to make sure that everything didn’t repeat itself twice.

I live in Brooklyn,* which is now in the rapid process of gentrification. Do you think the memory of the Brooklyn in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing is in danger of getting bulldozed?
Maybe, but you know, I think when you’re talking about the gentrification of Brooklyn, Brooklyn’s so big that you go deep down into the middle of Brooklyn, and it hasn’t been totally gentrified at all. In order to gentrify Brooklyn entirely, you’d have a lot of turf to cover.

*I no longer live in Brooklyn; I’m now up in Troy, NY.

Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” was written for that movie. Do you remember exactly where you were when the concept and lyrics came to you?
I was on tour with Run-D.M.C., trying to finish writing the album, in the air flying over Italy. And it was conceived sitting in a SoHo restaurant with Bill Stephney, Hank Shocklee, Spike Lee, and I talking about Spike’s movie.
The song’s opening lyrics are so iconic, because you immediately shuttle the listener back to the summer of 1989. It almost strikes me as sort of the intro to a rap fairy tale: “Once upon a time in a land far, far away…”

How vivid is that summer still in your memory?
That summer is vivid in my memory for a whole lot of different reasons, but I hardly dealt with “Fight the Power” as much as I had to deal with being called “anti-semitic” by the Village Voice. [laughs] So that was more the thing in the summer that I had to deal with. So “Fight the Power” was like nothing to talk about.

Probably the most iconic — and controversial — line in the song is when you say that Elvis didn’t mean shit to you, and Flavor Flav follows it up by saying “motherfuck him and John Wayne.” I have to agree with you, because they’re of a different era and not people I would’ve looked up to back then either. Who would take those two guys’ places if you wrote “Fight the Power” in 2014?
Who? Um…well, the whole things comes [from] the movie when one of the guys says, Hey, how come there ain’t no pictures of brothers on the wall? And the whole thing is like America’s wall had pictures of Elvis and John Wayne as being his hero and totally overlooked everything that was contributed by other people. So who would replace Elvis Presley and John Wayne in America or internationally?

No, who would replace them if you wrote the song tomorrow?
[laughs] I’m not even gonna go there. I’m not even going to answer that.

Not even like Rush Limbaugh?
No, because nobody really gives a fuck about him.

“Fight the Power” strikes me as something a modern rap artist could cover well, but with some passages rewritten or updated. Of all the modern rappers out there, who do you think would own the song the best?
Brother Ali and Immortal Technique.

Public Enemy was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2013, an honor you now share with Elvis Presley. Does he still mean shit to you?
That ain’t got nothing to do with it. The whole thing is that Elvis Presley was the “King of Rock and Roll,” and America anointed him King, and nobody else counted. Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, and even Jerry Lee Lewis were obscured by the fact that [America called] Elvis “king.” Who called him king? That’s what “Fight the Power” answered. It said, “These are my heroes, too. Most of my heroes don’t appear on a stamp.”