And that was riveting in itself and had a lot of meaning and youth rebellion in the song."īut according to Chuck D, the song would not have been as successful had it not been featured in the film.
"And it was the first record I heard they had a curse word. When I was 14 years old, 15 years old, that record came out and it resonated with me," Chuck D said. "'Fight the Power' is very important because that's the song that influenced me. When film director Spike Lee approached Public Enemy to write a song for his upcoming movie, "Do The Right Thing," Chuck D named it after a 1974 protest song he had heard as a child - "Fight the Power" by the R&B, soul and funk group The Isley Brothers. The song was named in 2017 by Rolling Stone as the best hip-hop record of all time and has been archived by the Library of Congress. In the last verse, Melle tells a gut-wrenching story about a young man who drops out of school, ends up in jail and dies by suicide after getting repeatedly raped behind bars.
"The Message," which features only Duke Bootee and Melle Mel from the group, was the most prominent hip-hop song at the time to feature social commentary. That's the thing that blew a lot of people away was like, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five made some very danceable hip-hop music, but when that record came out, it totally changed everything."Īsked what the title of the song meant to him, Chuck D said, "It means pay attention to the words of hip-hop instead of just the beat." So the change, it came overnight," Chuck D said. "When 'The Message' came out, there was nothing like it. But the future Public Enemy emcee told ABC News that he was "stunned by it." When "The Message" by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five was released in 1982, Chuck D, who would become a hip-hop icon himself, was only a teenager. We spoke about environments that were overlooked, that didn't have a voice, you know, that didn't have a say, that didn't have pretty much anything."
"Because we spoke our own unapologetic truth. it was that voice of the streets that they didn't know what the next line is gonna be and that scared them," he told ABC News. "It was that voice that America couldn't control. In the early 1970s when hip-hop was born in the Bronx, New York, poverty and brutality plagued Black communities, but discussions on race and racism in America were considered taboo and, in the media, the Black experience was stigmatized and suppressed.ĭetroit rapper and activist Royce da 5'9'' said that amid this void, hip-hop artists in the '80s "pushed the envelope in terms of exercising their First Amendment right" and became "the voice of the streets." Decades before "Black Lives Matter" became a global hashtag touted by celebrities and leading politicians, hip-hop artists were profiled, targeted and vilified for broadcasting those same systemic injustices that plagued Black America - a reality that for decades was shut out of mainstream media.
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