Public Enemy - Fight The Power

What this video is

Released in the summer of 1989 amid escalating racial tensions in New York City and across America — including the aftermath of the 1986 Howard Beach attack and the 1989 Central Park Five case — 'Fight the Power' and its video arrived as a genuine political intervention. The song was conceived at Spike Lee's request as the musical spine of Do the Right Thing, a film about systemic racism and police violence in…

Why it matters

A watershed artifact in hip-hop's visual history, 'Fight the Power' demonstrated that the music video format could function as political cinema. It rejected the performance-clip conventions dominant in rap videos at the time in favor of a documentary-realist mode borrowed from protest filmmaking,…

The director

Spike Lee (born March 20, 1957) is an American film director, producer, and writer. A graduate of NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, he founded 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks. Known for socially conscious films including She's Gotta Have It (1986), Do the Right…