Songfacts®:

• Public Enemy's most famous song, "Fight The Power" embodies their message of black pride, and along the way takes shots at the white icons Elvis Presley ("Elvis was a hero to most but he never meant s--t to me") and John Wayne. Even Bobby McFerrin couldn't escape their wrath, as Chuck D raps:
  
  "Don't Worry Be Happy" was a number one jam
  Damn if I say it you can slap me right here
  
  This militant and confrontational approach was designed to empower the Black community and create some controversy along the way, which helped sell a lot of albums. By this point, many of Public Enemy's fans were young white guys who liked the beats and associated with the anti-authority message. The group had also been through charges of anti-Semitism, reverse racism and homophobia, and emerged mostly unscathed (although their "Minister of Information," Professor Griff, left the group after declaring "Jews are wicked"), so declaring white people "Rednecks" in this song wasn't that much of a risk.
• Public Enemy wrote "Fight The Power" for the movie Do The Right Thing at the request of Spike Lee, who directed the film. Lee's idea was to have the group record a version of the spiritual "Lift Every Voice And Sing," but PE producer Hank Shocklee nixed that idea, telling Spike it had to be the kind of song you'd hear blaring from cars in Brooklyn.
  
  Chuck D wrote the lyric based on the concept of the film, starting with the title. The song first appeared on the movie soundtrack, released in June 1989 a month before the movie hit theaters. It plays in the opening scene where Rosie Perez dances to it, and is used as the motif, playing from Radio Raheem's boombox (adorned with a Public Enemy sticker) throughout the film until a climactic scene where Sal smashes it with a baseball bat.
  
  Spike Lee recalled in Public Enemy: Inside The Terrordome: "We knew ('Fight The Power') was coming out in the summer of 1989, and in the summertime, there's always one song in New York that, if it's a hit, you can hear everywhere: on the subway, cars, coming out of people's houses. I wanted this song to be an anthem that could express what young black America was feeling at this time. Around this time, New York City under Mayor Ed Koch was racially polarized, and I wanted this song to be in the film."
  
  The track was later used in the 2005 movie Jarhead, where "Don't Worry Be Happy" also appears.
• Some of the many samples on this track include "Pump Me Up" by Trouble Funk and "Funky Drummer" by James Brown, which gets a mention in the lyrics ("Sound of the Funky Drummer").
  
  Discussing the song with Keyboard magazine in 1990, Chuck D explained: "We approach every record like it was a painting. Sometimes, on the sound sheet, we have to have a separate sheet just to list the samples for each track. We used about 150, maybe 200 samples on Fear of a Black Planet. 'Fight the Power' has, like, 17 samples in the first ten seconds. For example, there's three different drum loops that make one big drum loop: One is a standard Funkadelic thing, another is a Sly thing, and I think the third one is the Jacksons. Then we took some sounds from a beat box. The opening lick is the end of a Trouble Funk record, processed with doubling and reverb. And the chorus is music going backwards."
• Most of Public Enemy's fans were too young to remember, but The Isley Brothers released a song called "Fight The Power" in 1975, which Chuck D borrowed for this song. Unlike Public Enemy, the Isleys stated that their song was not specifically about the Black experience, but about all people rising above the powers that be.
• The original version on the Do The Right Thing soundtrack runs 5:29 and opens with a saxophone solo from Branford Marsalis. Public Enemy recorded a new version for their 1990 album Fear Of A Black Planet; this version runs 4:42 and removes the saxophone. It does, however, keep the opening line "1989, the number, another summer," even though it was a year later. Some of the changes between the two versions have to do with rights issues: the Do The Right Thing soundtrack was issued on Motown Records, but Public Enemy recorded for Sony.
• Bobby McFerrin, John Wayne and Elvis all get the sharp end of Chuck D's lyrical stick in this song. He explained why in Rolling Stone.
  
  McFerrin:
  "'Don't Worry Be Happy' doesn't apply to protests. If you're not worried and you're happy, you're like, why protest? Not everybody's gonna feel like that."
  
  John Wayne:
  "John Wayne is 'Mr. Kill All the Indians and Everybody Else Who's Not Full-Blooded American.' The lyric was assassinating their iconic status so everybody doesn't feel that way."
  
  Elvis:
  "It's not that Elvis was not a talented dude and incredible in his way, but I didn't like the way that he was talked about all the time, and the pioneers [of rock & roll], especially at that time, weren't talked about at all. When people said 'rock & roll' or 'the King,' it was all 'Elvis, Elvis, Elvis, one trillion fans can't be wrong' type of s--t."
• The "chuck chuck" bit at the 12-second mark is a vocal sample from The Dramatics' 1971 hit "Whatcha See Is Whatcha Get."
• The Godfather of Soul provided not just a key sample in this song, but lyrical inspiration as well. "'Fight The Power' comes from James Brown saying it like it had to be said in the '60s," Chuck D said in the documentary Mr. Dynamite: The Rise of James Brown.
• In his post as the group's "Minister of Information," Professor Griff told The Washington Times that Jews are responsible for "The majority of wickedness that goes on across the globe." When the article was published in May 1989, the Jewish community was outraged and a firestorm of controversy followed. With Do the Right Thing set for release in July, Chuck D fired Griff and then announced that they were splitting up. This kept the film clear of the controversy, and once it was successfully released, Public Enemy resumed operations. Griff quietly came back to the fold about a year later.
• Spike Lee directed the video for this song, staging a real-life rally in Brooklyn for the shoot. He had no trouble getting folks from the area to show up - when word got out that he was shooting a PE video and everyone was invited, it became scene. Lee doing the video was recompense for the group writing the song for his movie.
  
  The full-length version of the video starts with news reel footage from the March on Washington in 1963. This part was edited out in most airings.
  
  Lee made another video for the song as well incorporating footage from Do The Right Thing.
• A memorable performance of this song took place on August 10, 1990 when Public Enemy played it at the Mid-South Coliseum in Memphis, Tennessee - an Elvis enclave and home to his Graceland mansion. The concert took place six days before the anniversary of Elvis' death, so there was a bit of controversy over whether or not the line about Elvis was appropriate. Chuck D, unfazed, bellowed the lyric with his typical gusto.
• The 1990 Fear Of A Black Planet version starts with a sample from a speech:
  
  "Yet our best-trained, best-educated, best-equipped, best-prepared troops refuse to fight. Matter of fact it's safe to say that they would rather switch than fight."
  
  This is the voice of an attorney/activist named Thomas N. Todd ("TNT"), who in 1967 was speaking about Black soldiers in Vietnam who had no interest in fighting the war.
• The Serbian dissident radio station B92 played the song on repeat during the 1991 demonstrations in Belgrade that were protesting the rule of Slobodan Miloševic. The station was prohibited from broadcasting news, so they circumvented the ban by instead playing "Fight The Power" on heavy rotation to motivate the protesters. In doing so, they transformed the tune into an anti-Miloševic anthem.
• Mike Errico, author of Music, Lyrics, and Life, cites "Fight The Power" as a definitive "mission song," one that explains exactly what an artist stands for. "It's a manifesto, a directive, and a dialectic, all in one," he said. "After listening to this song once, do you really not know what it wants you to do? Do you really not know what Public Enemy is about? I doubt it, and that's a result of strong, committed writing. If you want to be understood, be understandable."