ARRIVING on the same weekend the odious Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor of Florida and heir apparent to Donald Trump’s throne of lies, blocked a course on African American history being taught in the state’s high-schools, Fight the Power: How Hip-Hop Changed the World (BBC2, Saturday) couldn’t be any more timely.
f you think Chuck D’s superb four-part series, showing in weekly double bills, is merely about celebrating and appreciating the music, or perhaps that the music is not really your thing, think again.
There’s virtually no rap or hip-hop in the first episode. It’s not until the closing minutes that Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s The Message, a scorching, socially conscious seven-minute epic and the first great turning point, makes an appearance.
The frontman of Public Enemy, who doubles as producer and contributor, is on a far bigger mission here.
The first two episodes aim to be nothing less than a comprehensive account of the socio-political context which birthed a genre that would reflect what was happening to Black America, in real time.
It’s an ambitious aim, but with the assistance of terrific archive footage and a stellar line-up of contributors – including Ice-T, Melle Mel, KRS-One, Grandmaster Caz, Darryl McDaniels of Run-DMC and Eminem, as well as a raft of writers, academics and activists, including Rev Al Sharpton – he succeeds brilliantly.
It opens in 2020, with live television news coverage of Killer Mike’s powerful and emotional speech during the riots in Atlanta that followed the killing by white cops of George Floyd.
Then we’re back in back in 1960, when John F Kennedy is telling an earlier TV audience about all the things he planned to do to improve life for black people.
By 1968, JFK, his brother Robert, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King had all been assassinated. Melle Mel recalled that the first time he’d ever seen his father cry was when Dr King’s murder was announced. The bullet that killed Dr King also killed the civil rights movement as it was.
The first episode covers a vast amount of ground, including the monstrous FBI boss J Edgar Hoover’s notorious counterintelligence project (Cointelpro for short), a series of illegal operations against American political organisations, including the Black Panthers.
Its aim, recorded in long-declassified documents, was to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit or otherwise neutralise” organisations and individuals. One target was the Panthers’ deputy chairman Fred Hampton, who – with the collusion of the FBI – was drugged and shot twice in the head while unconscious in bed.
Black communities in New York in the early 70s were hit by rising crime and violence, as well as a heroin epidemic. With whites fleeing the city, President Richard Nixon’s response was a policy of “benign neglect”.
In other words, let it decline. Nixon’s successor, Gerald Ford, continued in the same vein, refusing to bail out the city when it was all but bankrupt. Landlords burned down their properties for the insurance money.
In 1973, something was stirring at 1520 Sedgewick Avenue in the South Bronx, the city’s depressed borough. Pioneering Jamaican-American DJ Kool Herc was asked by his little sister to organise a party.
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Herc used the only instruments available to him, a pair of turntables, which he manipulated to make a new kind of sound that would become rap.
With venues such as Studio 54 – the ultimate symbol of white celebrity privilege – closed off to them, black people began to create their own discos. These were where breakdancing, which would also become a phenomenon, was born.
If the first episode details the circumstances in which the fuse was lit, the second charts the explosion, as the increasingly socially conscious, politicised music of Run-DMC, Public Enemy, NWA and more lashes back against the savage beating of Rodney King, the killings of Michael Stewart and Latasha Harlin, the militarising of the police, and the brutal punishment of poor black communities by Ronald Reagan under the cover of his so-called War on Drugs.
This is a series that should be shown in schools. Especially in Florida.