[Some of the greatest pop music ever made gets the respectful,
rigorous sociological treatment it deserves – thanks to this
documentary series from the Public Enemy star]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

FIGHT THE POWER: HOW HIP-HOP CHANGED THE WORLD REVIEW – CHUCK D IS
A BRILLIANT HISTORY TEACHER  
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Jack Seale
January 21, 2023
The Guardian
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_ Some of the greatest pop music ever made gets the respectful,
rigorous sociological treatment it deserves – thanks to this
documentary series from the Public Enemy star _

Chuck D … his four-parter kicks off with a detailed look at the
social and political roots of hip-hop., Photograph: Richard
Rafferty/BBC Studios/PBS

 

There’s almost no hip-hop in the first episode of BBC Two’s new
four-part documentary about the genre, a series that labours under the
vanilla title Fight the Power: How Hip Hop Changed the World
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Furious Five only drop The Message
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minutes. Instead, we are given an hour-long history lesson on New York
City in the 60s and 70s – the decades leading up to hip-hop’s
birth.

This, however, is the correct approach, and it signals that Fight the
Power will treat its subject with the respect and rigour it deserves
– not surprisingly, since Chuck D of Public Enemy is an executive
producer as well as one of the main interviewees. Any music
documentary with ambitions to inform as well as entertain is a
trade-off between sociology and musicology: the records say this and
sound like that because this is what was happening in the world at the
time. In the case of hip-hop, the scene was a more direct response to
political circumstances than any popular music before it, and those
conditions – black citizens marginalised by racist authorities –
have resonance beyond the US and beyond the 20th century.

Back we go, then, to 1960, and John F Kennedy promising to improve
black Americans’ life chances. By the end of the decade, their
leaders were assassinated or imprisoned, their political movements
infiltrated and undermined, their family members drafted into the US
army and killed in Vietnam, their protests viciously put down. Fight
the Power namechecks Say It Loud – I’m Black and I’m Proud by
James Brown, Is It Because I’m Black by Syl Johnson and Seize the
Time by future Black Panther party leader Elaine Brown as evidence of
revolutionary spirit coursing through records released in 1969.

The 1970s began with The Last Poets and Gil Scott-Heron prefacing
hip-hop by talking, not singing, about black power on records with
“revolution” in the title. Fight the Power’s fine roster of
contributors – KRS-One, Grandmaster Caz, Melle Mel, Darryl McDaniels
of Run-DMC, and indeed Abiodun Oyewole of The Last Poets – recall a
decade in which black consciousness continued to rise, boosted by
Shirley Chisholm’s run for the presidency in 1972 under the slogan
“unbought and unbossed”, and in reaction less to overt state
violence and more to administrative oppression. The documentary cites
the phrase “a period of benign neglect”, used by one of Richard
Nixon’s advisers in a January 1970 memo to the president and taken
here as summing up the period when, with social programmes
persistently underfunded and the South Bronx bisected by a new
expressway that seemed designed to hasten urban decay, richer New
Yorkers fled the city’s astronomical crime rates and left the poor
black and Hispanic folk to it.

Fight the Power’s central observation is that hip-hop comes from a
community that has been abandoned. The New York police, no longer
minded to intervene in poor neighbourhoods, happily allowed hundreds
of working-class youths to attend block parties, at which a generation
that hadn’t had the money to buy or learn to play instruments made a
new kind of music by setting up two turntables, so that a funky horn
motif from one record could be segued into a tight drum break from
another. The documentary makes the point that one of hip-hop’s most
important influences wasn’t musical: at the end of the 70s, no
effort was made to stop graffiti covering every inch of the New York
subway, so spray-painted slogans and art became an ocean of protest
and propaganda, impenetrable to some observers but vital as a form of
expression for artists and activists with no other outlet.

Graffiti was, in other words, exactly what hip-hop lyrics would soon
become, and was one of the four phenomena – along with rap,
breakdance and DJing – brought together by DJ Kool Herc, credited
here as hip-hop’s great pioneer. Then, as the 80s began, Ronald
Reagan campaigned for the presidency by visiting the Bronx – we see
him verbally jousting with angry residents in the rubble – and
promising more federal aid, before gaining power and instead beginning
the further systematic redistribution of wealth from poor to rich.
Conditions are now perfect for a fierce new genre of music to take
hold, as Chuck D explains: “Hip-hop is creativity and activity that
comes out of the black neighbourhood when everything has been stripped
away.”

And so we arrive at 1982 and The Message, with its eerily contemporary
lyrics (“Got a bum education, double-digit inflation / Can’t take
a train to the job, there’s a strike at the station”). The story
of hip-hop itself – some of the greatest American pop music ever
made – begins next week. We’re ready.

* hip-hop
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* Social Change
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* Black culture
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