“Fight the Power” was named one of the five hundred Songs That Shaped Rock and Roll by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. It was named the seventh best rap song of all time by Rolling Stone. It was named the greatest hip-hop song ever by VH1. It was named the best song of 1989 in the Village Voice’s annual Pazz & Jop critics poll. It was selected by Time as one of the one hundred most extraordinary songs of all time. It was named one of the best songs of the century by the Recording Industry Association of America. It takes samples from more than a dozen different sources. It’s been covered four times, and three of those times, one by Korn, one by Vanilla Ice, and one by the Barenaked Ladies, were, and remain to be, absolutely the worst things.
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OTHER PUBLIC ENEMY SONGS THAT ARE IMPORTANT, BUT NOT AS IMPORTANT, AS “FIGHT THE POWER”
1. “Night of the Living Baseheads”: Don’t do drugs because drugs are very bad.
2. “Welcome to the Terrordome”: Every conversation about Public Enemy that lasts longer than two minutes will eventually approach their occasionally anti-Semitic rhetoric, anti-gay rhetoric, or even their anti-women (quiet) rhetoric. This was the most famous version of low-key anti-Semitism, where Chuck howls, “Crucifixion ain’t no fiction / So-called chosen frozen / Apology made to whoever pleases / Still they got me like Jesus.” Important for a different reason than the rest, I suppose.
Fight the Power
(Thomas Todd talking about Vietnam Deserters) (0:05)
“Sound of the funky drummer . . .” (0:50)
“Our freedom of speech is freedom or death” (1:09)
“No, we’re not the same ‘cause we don’t know the game” (1:45)
“My beloved, let’s get down to business” (1:54)
“Elvis was a hero to most but he never meant shit to me” (3:02)
“Most of my heroes don’t appear on no stamps” (3:19)
“‘Don’t Worry, Be Happy’ was a number-one jam/Damn . . .” (3:24)
“Power to the people, no delay” ((3:42)
“Fight the power” (multiple times)
Declarative, Inflammatory, Introspective, Historical Reference, Proclamation, Observational, Examining
3. “911 Is a Joke”: But not if you’re white, I hear.
4. “Burn Hollywood Burn”: Chuck D, Ice Cube,9 and Big Daddy Kane all take swipes at Hollywood. The best part of the video: when they cut to clips of the three of them in a theater watching very racist old movie clips. Chuck D is the best.
5. “Pollywanacraka”: Public Enemy titled a song about black men and black women dating out of their race “Pollywanacraka.” That’s just the most amazing thing.
6. “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos”: Opening lines: “I got a letter from the government the other day / I opened and read it / It said they were suckers.” I have not received this letter but I would very much like to.
7. “By the Time I Get to Arizona”: Arizona didn’t officially recognize the MLK holiday until 1999. You gotta get your shit together, Arizona.10
8. “Rebel Without a Pause”: The Bomb Squad did a lot of amazing things while producing songs for Public Enemy, but maybe none of them were as blindingly and obviously perfect as the winding/screaming horn here.11
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MORE IMPORTANT THINGS ABOUT “FIGHT THE POWER”
Chuck D’s voice is amazing. It’s superheroic. It sounds like it’s two miles wide. It sounds like God made a mistake because nobody should have a voice like Chuck D’s rap voice. That’s important.
Spike Lee asked Public Enemy to make “Fight the Power” for his movie Do the Right Thing. If he doesn’t call them to do that, does “Fight the Power” ever get made? And if the answer is no, then is he granted lifetime immunity for all the ridiculous outfits he wears to Knicks games? Can we forgive him for Girl 6? CAN WE FORGIVE HIM FOR OLDBOY? That’s important.
What’s more: During Public Enemy’s induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Spike, the first person up introducing them, made mention of how the first song Public Enemy submitted wasn’t quite what he was looking for. “Fight the Power” was their second try. WHAT HAPPENED TO THE FIRST VERSION? THAT’S IMPORTANT.
Chuck D was a revolutionary when people were kind of looking for one, even if he didn’t want to be. That’s important.
More on that: In his book Can’t Stop Won’t Stop, Jeff Chang writes about how Spike viewed Chuck, saying that the video Spike shot for “Fight the Power,” which looked less like a rap video and more like a presidential rally, helped to “firmly establish Chuck’s cultural authority.” That’s important.
More from Chang:12 “Lee placed Chuck in the streets amidst the likenesses of Black power fighters, one new Black icon anointing another.” That’s important, too.
Semi-related to all of this: The last time I talked to Miguel was either right before or right after I graduated from college. I’d come home to visit my parents and had run into him at a store. I said hello and he said hello back, and we talked for a moment, and it was only a little bit weird. Then I asked him what he did and it got very weird, or great, depending on how you feel about prostitutes. He told me he was a pimp, and I laughed a little, and then I realized he was serious and I stopped laughing. I said something like, “Oh, that’s pretty cool,” because, I mean, what’s the right thing to say in that moment? Last I heard he’d just gotten out of prison. I still don’t know how to fight.
REBUTTAL: “WILD THING” TONE LOC
To stage a successful full-scale cultural offensive, you need at least one goofball. Actually, you usually need several: The ratio, roughly, is at least two goofballs to every one stern revolutionary. Anthony Smith, a.k.a. Tone Loc, came with a weighty past—he ran with the notorious Rollin 60s Crips, and once showed up to a studio session with a fresh bullet in his shoulder. But on record, he was a dry, witty, face-pulling libertine, and he is one of hip-hop history’s most pivotal goofballs. “Wild Thing” was written largely by Young MC, with Fab Five Freddy in mind. But the song is irretrievably Loc’s. The video, in which Loc mugs and leers at a row of alien-looking women imported from Robert Palmer’s “Addicted to Love” video, while sporting a Delicious Vinyl shirt, gave Loc, and Delicious Vinyl, a fat, crossover hit. “Wild Thing” was the first rap song, after the Fresh Prince’s “Parents Just Don’t Understand,” that I knew every word to at my elementary school lunch table. The album it came from, Loc-ed After Dark, became the first album by a black rap artist to reach number one on the Billboard pop albums chart. Pretty revolutionary.
—JAYSON GREENE
1. In “Up from the Underground,” an episode of the documentary series The History of Rock ’n’ Roll, Chuck D explained, “Most rap records at the time had a BPM of 98 BPM. Our stuff was around 109.”
2. In a survey conducted in 1987 by the New York Times, 64 percent of the people polled felt race relations between blacks and whites had either not improved or worsened since 1977.
3. Very underrated.
4. “Angry,” if you’re looking for a term.
5. Watching a lot of karate movies, it turns out, is not the same as actually learning karate.
6. Maricón is the Spanish version of the very first homophobic slur you think of.
7. The saddest thing of my whole life is that my sons will never make or receive a phone call on the house phone. Do you even know how many girls I sang R&B songs to while sitting at the kitchen table on the house phone?
8. Probably: “Um, it’s about these black guys, and one of them has some shoes, and this other guy has a radio. The guy from commercials with Michael Jordan is in it. There are some other guys who make pizza. The guy with the radio gets killed. It’s crazy.”
9. In Chuck Klosterman’s 2013 book, I Wear the Black Hat, he begins an essay about N.W.A with the following quote from Ice Cube from a long-ago interview Cube did: “Chuck D gets involved in all that black stuff. We [N.W.A] don’t. Fuck that black power shit: We don’t give a fuck.”
10. South Carolina w
as the very last state in the country to recognize MLK as a holiday. Up until 2000, residents were allowed to choose between celebrating MLK Day or one of three Confederate holidays. That’s not a joke. That’s 100 percent not a joke.
11. It’s similar to the one on “Don’t Believe the Hype” but somehow even more powerful.
12. Buy Can’t Stop Won’t Stop.
WHAT THIS SONG IS ABOUT
It’s about a man attempting to secure the company of an especially attractive woman.
WHY IT’S IMPORTANT
It showed that a rap song could be about a woman without it sounding like it was a rap song for a woman, and that transformed the template forever.
“Bonita Applebum” is the best rap love song that’s ever been. It’s also the first one that stepped away from the loverman style, and it did it without trying, and that’s the only way that this sort of monumental change happens. Here are a dozen other rap love songs that are very good but not the best:
• “I Need Love,” LL Cool J (1987): This wasn’t the first rap love song, but it was the first one where the protagonist was actively trying to be cool, which felt cosmic at the time.
• “Passin’ Me By,” The Pharcyde (1993): This is a straight-line descendant of “Bonita Applebum,” though it replaces Q-Tip’s charismatic begging with self-deprecating measures (“Damn, I wish I wasn’t such a wimp”). Each time one of the guys is rapping in the video he’s shown hanging upside down, and that’s (probably) supposed to be the literal version of the phrase “head over heels in love,” because rappers from the late ’80s and early ’90s really loved hats and they also really loved being literal.
• “Me & My Bitch,” The Notorious B.I.G. (1994): In the second line of the song Biggie says, “You look so good, huh, I’ll suck on your daddy’s dick,” and when I heard it the first time I remember rewinding it to see if I’d heard it correctly, playing it again, confirming what I’d heard, then thinking, Wow, that must really be an attractive woman.1
• “I’ll Be There for You/You’re All I Need to Get By,” Method Man, featuring Mary J. Blige2 (1995): This is the second-best rap love song. Method Man is rugged but secretly smooth, and Mary J. Blige is smooth but secretly rugged, so they play against each other with zero of the stitches showing. It ends with the line “We above all that romance crap, just show your love,” and that’s the most sophisticated, simple understanding of love that I think I’ve ever heard.
• “Renee,” Lost Boyz (1996): Here’s a line: “She told me what she was in school for / She wants to be a lawyer / In other words, shorty studies law.” I suppose rappers in the mid-’90s liked to be literal, too.
• “Brown Skin Lady,” Mos Def and Talib Kweli (1998): I need for Macklemore and Mac Miller to record a cover of this called “White Skin Lady,” if they’re really real.
• “How’s It Goin’ Down,” DMX, featuring Faith Evans (1998): This is for sure the only love song to start with a phone conversation where a man aggressively accuses his girlfriend of performing oral sex on another man. Here’s a thing I can tell you: DMX is terrifying. Were I ever to find myself in the position of suspecting my wife of having fellated him, then that’s just some shit that happened, is all that is.
• “What You Want,” Mase, featuring Total (1998): Mase was perfect.
• “You Got Me,” The Roots, featuring Erykah Badu and Eve (1999): True question: Has any artist ever been as offensively underappreciated as Erykah Badu?
• “The Light,” Common (2000): I met Common while I was covering a concert in 2008. I was supposed to talk to him about the show and the album he had coming out. But I’d watched Wanted, like, probably two weeks before that night. So instead I asked him what it was like to get shot in the head by James McAvoy, because that’s what happens to him in the movie. He looked at me, paused for a moment, then said, “It was fine. The bullets weren’t real.” He’s very charming in real life.
• “21 Questions,” 50 Cent, featuring Nate Dogg (2003): This is a song where 50 Cent asks his girlfriend a string of questions in an attempt to decipher whether she really loves him or only loves him because he is famous and rich. One of the first questions he asks is if she’d do a drive-by with him. It sounds ridiculous, but I don’t know that I can immediately think of three things a woman could do to prove that she loves me more than actively participating in a drive-by with me.
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Let me tell you quickly about the beginning of Native Tongues, because that’s important, but let me be as cursory as possible without being detrimental:
Native Tongues was a loose co-op of rap groups who shared ideas and opinions and, eventually, sounds and philosophies. It began with a New York trio called the Jungle Brothers, then from there it absorbed De La Soul, and then from there A Tribe Called Quest, and then Native Tongues was finally formed. This was in the late ’80s to early ’90s—Jungle Brothers released their first album in 1988, De La released their first in 1989, and ATCQ released their first in 1990. ATCQ became the biggest and the most influential of the three, though it’s difficult to say they’d have even been anything were it not for the first two. Native Tongues eventually reached nearly twenty members, though at no time was it more exciting or inventive than in those first three years, when Jungle, De La, and Tribe combined to counterbalance the seismic anger of N.W.A and the political charge of Public Enemy, by putting something out there for consumption that was on the opposite end of the emotion/ideology scale.
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“Bonita Applebum” was the second single from ATCQ’s People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm, and that was the first album to heavily incorporate jazz samples, which accidentally significantly altered rap’s arc. Their commercial ascension wasn’t immediate (People’s didn’t go gold until six years later, a result of retroactive buys that followed the success of their other albums), but their creative ascension was. ATCQ became pioneering rap stars who did not present themselves as rap stars, and so that’s how “Bonita Applebum” became transcendent: because it felt 100 percent natural and agendaless, like the whole rest of that album.
The first rap love song was the Sugarhill Gang’s “The Lover in You,” and that was barely even a rap song. Mostly, it was an R&B and funk disco amalgamation. It’s very strange to listen to now, and I imagine the only reason it wasn’t all the way strange when they released it in 1982 was because everything was kind of strange in 1982. Still, “The Lover in You” was noticeably different than the Sugarhill Gang’s other songs—sweeter, more lush, somehow softer—and that’s the sort of pattern loverman rap followed; rappers or rap groups had their songs and then they had the songs they made for girls. Whodini’s “One Love” was like that. Slick Rick’s “Teenage Love” was, too.
LL Cool J’s “I Need Love” appeared to attempt to sidestep the blatancy of the formula. It was sleek and (tried to be) perceptive, and also kinetic and impassioned, and that was close enough to the rest of his music that it didn’t glow neon pink like the rap love songs that had come before it. But it was still him rapping for girls and not for just all humans, and you could tell because its seams still showed. He said things like “I hear my conscience call / Telling me I need a girl who’s as sweet as a dove / For the first time in my life, I see I need love,” and the only time a guy calls a dove “a dove” is when he’s talking at a girl, not to her, or I guess also if he’s John Woo, because John Woo fucking loves doves.
Can I Quit It?
A briefly considered timeline of 18 rap groups that broke up
1989 – The Fat Boys
1991 – N.W.A
1993 – Eric B. & Rakim
1993 – EPMD
1994 – Leaders of the New School
1995 – Pete Rock & CL Smooth
1996 – Arrested Development
1997 – Junior M.A.F.I.A.
1997 – Organized Konfusion
1997 – The Fugees
1998 – A Tribe Called Quest
2000
– Salt-n-Pepa
2001 – Hot Boys
2002 – Goodie Mob
2004 – Gang Starr
2007 – The Diplomats
2011 – Bone-Thugs-N-Harmony
2012 – Mobb Deep
“Bonita Applebum” was not built like that, or at least not built with that purpose. It wasn’t an addition to the group’s persona, it was an extension of it.
In 2011, there was a documentary about ATCQ called Beats, Rhymes & Life: The Travels of A Tribe Called Quest.3 I mention it because there are two things that Jarobi White, one of the group’s original members, said that fit here.
1. While talking about the origination of the group, White said, “We were just trying to be fly. And make music. And be musicians. Be like Stevie and Marvin and Prince. Thelonious Monk and Mingus and Charlie Parker. We were trying to be those people.” Two things: First, rap had already been popular for a decade, but he didn’t mention any rappers. Even if it was a conscious decision, it’s still telling. And second, the first three names, those are all guys who had essentially mastered singing to women without placating them or appearing condescending to anyone older than fourteen years old, which is exactly one of the things “Bonita Applebum” was able to do.
2. While talking about the dissolution of the group, which was primarily what the documentary was about, White attributed a portion of it to their general music-making process becoming outmoded. He said, “The largest difference between the hip-hop game now and back then is that people make songs. They don’t do projects anymore. We did projects. Notice I didn’t even say album, we did projects.”
“Bonita Applebum” is a beautiful song. The way it saunters around in a circle, bordered in by that sitar’s “bohm-bohmbodhm-bodhm.” The way Q-Tip talk-raps across the face of it at just the right speed, pursuing Bonita in a completely likable way, the way a guy who is very handsome and very good at making bedroom eyes does.4 The way the beat falls out of the bottom of the song every so often, like when he says, “I like to tell ya things some brothers don’t” after he prefaces it with “I like to kiss ya where some brothers won’t.”5 The way the whole thing is built out like a scene from a movie. It’s beautiful. All of it. It stands tall all by itself. But it also serves a bigger purpose than itself: It fits within the construct of the album seamlessly, blended in between a track called “Public Enemy” and “Can I Kick It?” and is usually close to over before you even realize it’s playing, just like A Tribe Called Quest.
The Rap Year Book: The Most Important Rap Song from Every Year Since 1979, Discussed, Debated, and Deconstructed Page 10