Hip-hop emerged during his stormy tenure, and the burgeoning culture drew the mayor’s scorn in an outsized way. In the late ’70s and throughout the ’80s, Koch was a combative and coarse mayor on virtually every issue, but Black New Yorkers felt especially taken aback by his tendency to equivocate when asked to address the city’s ambient anti-Blackness. Lee has a canny sense of hip-hop’s tenuous relationship with everything around it, especially in the New York City of Edward Koch. That sense of belonging is what makes “Fight the Power” feel so essential to Do the Right Thing’s story. Though the neighborhood is not enthusiastic about Radio Raheem’s fascination with this one song, it accepts him. “I don’t like nothing else!” he explains. He’s smitten, a point made clear when another character asks why he exclusively plays Public Enemy. To see it or him as a threat is to not see them at all. Its volume fluctuates as Raheem comes and goes, loud when he’s in the frame and fading as he leaves. The song, like Raheem, is both a dominating force and a kind of quaint neighborhood fixture. Played by the late Bill Nunn as a living statue of a man, Radio Raheem struts around the neighborhood with a quiet but visible dignity, saying little but always blasting “Fight the Power” from a massive boombox. As Perez pops, locks, boogies, and shimmies with abandon and intensity, “Fight the Power” feels like an anthem for anyone willing to enlist. Her performance is breathtaking and slyly subversive, taking PE’s notorious machismo and channeling it through a woman’s body, forever changing it. Perez’s Tina is one of the film’s more underwritten characters, but in the title sequence, she feels like its centerpiece. Lee mines the richness of the song throughout Do the Right Thing, starting with Rosie Perez’s flawless choreography in the opening credits. Yet it’s also perfectly clarion, condensing all that chaos into a lucid missive: Fight the fucking powers that be. Blending funk, soul, and rap, the song explodes with textures, from its delirious thicket of rhythms to its manic scratches to Chuck D’s furious poise. 1 & 2),” Public Enemy built their version into a supercut of Black style and power. Inspired by the Isley Brothers’ 1975 funk number “ Fight the Power (Pt. That emphasis on presence and range ended up defining the song. “I pulled down his window, stuck his head out, and was like: ‘Yo man, you’ve got to think about this record as being something played out of these cars going by.’” “We were in Spike’s office on DeKalb Avenue in Brooklyn, by a busy intersection,” recalled Shocklee. Lee originally wanted PE leader Chuck D to participate in a rap version of “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” but according to PE producer Hank Shocklee, the group insisted that the song had to fit Brooklyn. The film starts with a rueful sax playing the Black national anthem, “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” before cutting into four action-packed minutes of a more vital theme: “Fight the Power.” Written and recorded by Public Enemy for the film, the song is Do the Right Thing’s thesis. The score is fundamental to making that provincial outlook work. That this minor, hyper-local rift swells into a neighborhood divide and eventually a death is a testament to how meticulously the film’s world is constructed. Exclusively featuring Italian-Americans like Robert DeNiro and Frank Sinatra, despite its location in a majority-Black neighborhood, the wall and Sal’s insistence that Black people have no claim to its contents drive the major events of Do the Right Thing. The film’s main conflict stems from one surface in particular, the “wall of fame” at Sal’s.
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