#78, "Fight The Power," Public Enemy (1989)

150 Favorite Songs: #78, "Fight The Power," Public Enemy (1989)

I grew into hip hop slowly. I didn't try to rock a Kangol in high school, and I didn't spend hours staring into the mirror, trying to figure out how to intone the word "beeeyotch" the way that Snoop did it. As a sensitive teenager, I was turned off by the violence and misogyny in what was popular when I was in high school, preferring instead the violence and misogyny in the rock music I enjoyed at the time. (I would, after spending some time working in a record store in Chicago, learn that there was more out there than what made its way to my ears in Indiana.) So even though Public Enemy were old news by the time I found them in my teen years, it was exactly what I wanted to hear.

I came to Public Enemy via the soundtrack they did for the Spike Lee movie He Got Game, which included a song by the same title built around a sample of “For What It’s Worth” by Buffalo Springfield; it may not have been their absolute finest work, but it was a pretty easy way to dip my toes in, having been raised on Buffalo Springfield.

I fucking loved Public Enemy when I found them, in any case. Before that one magic summer went by, I didn't realize that I could connect emotionally to hip hop. That’s silly, I know—it makes me feel like Post Malone to type that—but I grew up in a lily-white Indiana suburb, the sort of place where teenagers would describe their musical tastes as “everything except rap and country” instead of just saying “I only listen to rock music,” and so I just kind of missed out on all of it until I was seventeen and got that job in the record store on the other side of the Illinois/Indiana border, where rock music didn’t sell a whole lot.

"Fight The Power" is not about anything that related directly to my own life, but I found it as my own political consciousness was developing, and so just the identification of certain feelings that were becoming important to me hit me. I knew feeling powerless, and I knew realizing that the world wasn't how it should be, and I knew how to identify the bad guys. I may have been a white kid from the suburbs, but Elvis never meant shit to me, either, and “Fight The Power” told me that maybe that could be meaningful. I found myself caught up in the paranoid percussion and the holy fire in Chuck D's voice, the urgency. Even though 1989 was a long time ago when I first heard the song, the fact that they declared the song a message to its very specific time sounded powerful. It felt like, by embracing the song, I was aligning myself with Chuck and P.E., which I definitely wanted to do.

There's something to that, I think—white kids listening to militant hip hop and feeling empowered. Maybe they're co-opting the rage in the voices of Chuck D or dead prez or Kendrick Lamar, or maybe they want to be a part of what their voices represent, but don't know how to do it yet. But I know that I felt empowered by listening to "Fight The Power," even though it wasn't speaking to many experiences I would ever have, because it made me feel like I could sign on with the people who were out there fighting the power. I don't know if that's appropriating Chuck’s rage or if it’s the first part of a journey—probably a little of both—but I wanted to join them. "Fight The Power," to me, always sounded like an anthem that said, "If you sing along, then you're on our side."

Of course it doesn't really work like that. There've been plenty of people who knew the worlds to all the old union hymns, or who shouted Killer Mike’s lyrics out of one side of their mouths while cashing checks signed by the forces they were supposed to oppose. But for me, at least, "Fight The Power" sounded like a good place to start.