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Would Do the Right Thing have the same urgency and rising tension running through its first two acts if Spike Lee hadn't hand-picked Public Enemy to provide that core piece of the soundtrack? And would Public Enemy have risen even further from the heights of It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back to a permanent place in hip-hop's top tier if they hadn't amplified its tectonic impact with a song that proclaimed it was just the beginning of their revolution? It's hard to say, but it's even harder to think of a more mutually beneficial pairing that not only resulted in early breakthroughs for both parties, but a call to arms for both their fields.

Even without its cinematic origins, "Fight the Power" is ruthlessly vivid. The Bomb Squad's expansion of their own production capabilities over the course of the previous year is borne out in just how much sleekness they've added to their high-impact method of building beats: the James Brown DNA's a fusion of "Funky Drummer" percussion and a riff from "Hot Pants Road", ramped up just enough to match their trademark solar-plexus impact with the motivation to move. (Hence the perfection of Do the Right Thing's opening credits featuring Rosie Perez alternating between dancing and throwing hands, often simultaneously.) And a precedent to the message sneaks in through that barrage, a collage-choir of voices weaving in and out choppily through the beat: a massed "I" from the Wailers' "I Shot the Sheriff", a robotic "yeaaaaah" from Bambaataa's "Planet Rock", shouts from Sly & the Family Stone and the Dramatics and Trouble Funk—like all that Black musical expression and rebellion's been leading up to this very point.

And in Chuck D and Flavor Flav's world, it's a point of no return. The slogans you probably know already, and they're still full of contagious catharsis over the state of Black disenfranchisement in America: "Our freedom of speech is freedom or death," "Most of my heroes don't appear on no stamps," "Elvis was a hero to most but he never meant shit to me…" But P.E. were always more than just sloganeers on the mic—this is also one of Chuck's best pure exhibitions of rhyming, rolling out linguistic dexterity all day every day: just listen to him take off like the Concorde at the outset of the second verse. And Flav riffs like a powerhouse: he was never just a hypeman, but here he's like the knockout blow of a fluid combination, a party-starter in isolation but a fired-up rebel when his voice burst out in tandem with Chuck's. "Fight the Power" straddled decades when it was positioned as the climactic final track of 1990's Fear of a Black Planet, but it somehow sounds even less like the '80s as time churns on—from Radio Raheem to Eric Garner, the words still demand to be heard. —Nate Patrin



See also: Public Enemy: "Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos" / Public Enemy: "Don't Believe the Hype"