Fight the Power

Spike Lee approached the group in 1988, soon after Nation came out, wanting an anthemic theme for Do the Right Thing. He told Time he wanted it defiant, angry and very rhythmic, and thought right away of Public Enemy. He put the request to Chuck D, Hank Shocklee and Bill Stephney at a meeting in Lower Manhattan. Chuck D wrote most of the song on a flight over Italy on the group's European tour, aiming for the same theme as the Isley Brothers' Fight the Power with a modern view of what surrounded them. The track came out as a single in the summer of 1989 on Motown, under a one-off deal, and the extended version went on Fear of a Black Planet.

Only two live players appear: Branford Marsalis on saxophone, who also took a solo on the soundtrack version, and Terminator X on scratches. Everything else is looped and layered samples, among them Clyde Stubblefield's drum break from James Brown's Funky Drummer, Trouble Funk's Pump Me Up and Afrika Bambaataa's Planet Rock. The opening is a 16-second speech by the civil rights attorney Thomas TNT Todd. Chuck D said they put loops on top of loops on top of loops. Pitchfork's Craig Jenkins wrote that it crams over a dozen samples into five minutes of shockingly smooth funk.

Reception

The third verse names Elvis Presley and John Wayne. Chuck D later said his target in the Elvis line was the white culture that crowned him king without crediting the black artists before him. He remembered that it was the first time every word of a rap song was scrutinized line by line. Spike Lee directed the video in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, on 22 April 1989, staging a rally with signs of Paul Robeson, Marcus Garvey, Angela Davis and Muhammad Ali.

It reached number one on the Hot Rap Singles chart and 20 on the Hot R&B Singles chart, and The Village Voice's critics voted it the best single of 1989. Rolling Stone ranked it number two on its 2021 list of the 500 greatest songs, and VH1 put it first on its 2008 list of hip-hop songs. Chuck D has called it the most important record the group has made. They close every concert with it, and it appears in 237 of the 311 logged setlists. Time Out put it first on its 2011 list of the 100 songs that changed history, with Matthew Collin citing the radio station B92, which played it on heavy rotation in Belgrade in 1991 after being banned from broadcasting news of the protests.