Power and equality and I'm out to get it
Public Enemy - 'Party For Your Right To Fight' (It Takes A Nation of Millions To Hold Us Back - 1988)
In July 1989, Public Enemy head honcho Chuck D said in an interview with the Indiana Black Expo that youths idolise rappers because they tell it like it is.
We’re almost like headline news,” he said. “Rap music is the invisible TV station that black America never had. . . . Public Enemy and rap music are dispatchers of information.
Due to the branding of CNN Headline News, over the years, this quote has evolved into “Public Enemy are Black CNN”, so let’s go with that and look at what they had to say before the top of the hour on their second LP, 1988’s It Takes A Nation of Millions To Hold Us Back.
As I’m sure was even more apparent then, the final track’s title, ‘Party For Your Right To Fight’, is a play on the fourth(!) single from The Beastie Boys’ 1986 album License to Ill. Not only does the song play on the title ‘(You Gotta) Fight For Your Right to Party’, it samples that song by slicing up the chorus, and it goes someway to aping the Beastie Boys’ gonzo rap-rock sound.
The party that Public Enemy are interested in informing us about is not the same as the one in the Beastie Boys’ video that descends into a pie fight. Instead, it is the history of the Black Panther Party our two anchors want to tell us about1.
With what the band had been rapping about for the previous 54 minutes, that much should have been obvious but just in case. Chuck D made this crystal clear in a 1988 interview with Melody Maker.
This [song] talks about the destruction of the Black Panther party by the U.S. Government. It’s the party for your right to fight.
The pair then take us on a whirlwind tour of the Nation of Islam, the doctrine of Yakub, and name checks Elijah Muhammad, leader of the Nation of Islam for over forty years, spanning the mid-Thirties to the mid-Seventies.
The name checks continue starting with the FBI’s first director, J. Edgar Hoover. Among the many activists and leaders that were seen as political enemies of the US Government, Hoover is known to have used his influence to collect intel on Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X and their supporters, as well as prominent members of The Black Panthers such as Eldridge Cleaver and founders Bobby Seale and Huey Newton via the COINTELPRO program. All five are mentioned in the second verse.
The third and final verse, as well as supplying the title of the album, lays out the Nation of Islam teaching that the first Homo Sapiens were Asiatic black men and that “white devils” and Freemasons have suppressed this knowledge for centuries.
Besides The Beastie Boys2, the music contains several recognisable samples; firstly, Bobby Byrd’s ‘I Know You Got Soul’ features prominently on Eric B. & Rakim’s 1987 hit ‘Paid In Full’ from the album of the same name. We also have vocal samples from Bob Marley and backing from perennial suppliers of breaks on turntables for the whole of the decade; Funkadelic, James Brown, Parliament, Sly and The Family Stone, as well as a cheeky sample of their work, namely ‘Bring The Noise’ and ‘Terminator X Speaks With His Hands’.
While not as hard-edged as some of the other tracks on the album, the cutting and rearranging of both popular culture riffs with both self-empowerment for African-Americans and black nationalism is still in play on this final track and is a fitting close to an album whose sonic, and lyrically progressivism still hits like an earthquake.
Interestingly, there is a sense of both Chuck D and Flavor Flav acting as announcers because they both have a channel to themselves, right and left, respectively, if you are listening on headphones or through speakers.
By 1988 the Beastie Boys were moving on from pie-throwing and spraying beer everywhere and recording Paul’s Boutique.