Fight the Power: How Hip Hop Changed the World

Man: Our distinguished leader, one of the royal outstanding people of this country-- Reverend Jesse Louis Jackson.

[Cheering and applause] Jackson: I feel victory.

That's right.

There's a transition going on from charity to parity, from slave ship to championship.

Our time has come.

[Cheering and applause] Chuck D, voice-over: I remember everybody rallying behind Jesse, whether they liked him or not.

They said, "You know what?

"This is the one that we're choosing.

He's brand-new to America, but he ain't new to us."

Jackson: I rise to declare my decision to seek the nomination of the Democratic Party for the presidency of the United States of America.

[Applause] Kaye Whitehead, voice-over: Reverend Jackson showed us a different way of thinking about the social ills and then speaking to them.

Part of our attention has been this internal quest for equity, not just jobs or loss of sheer power and not just positions.

Chuck D, voice-over: Jesse Jackson was a hope that we said, "OK. We're on the same page.

We like to see this attempted."

That was the simmering attitude-- "We're gonna break down some barriers."

Vanessa Williams winning beauty pageants, Bryant Gumbel being able to go from sports into the "Today" show, Oprah being able to start with news and go into her own show as well as the beginnings of hip-hop... maybe there was a new hope for something different, but no matter how high that you rise up financially or statuswise in this society, they, in 1980s language, is still gonna treat and look to you as a nigga.

Get it, get-- get--get--get it Get down Come on, get down Get it, get-- get--get--get it Get down Come on, get down Get it, get-- get--get--get it Get down Come on, get down Get it, get-- get--get--get it Get down Come on, get down Chuck D and Flavor Flav: Fight the power Get it, get it, get it, get it, y'all Fight the power Get it, get it, get it, get it, y'all Fight the power Get it, get it, get it, get it, y'all Fight the power Get it, get it, get it, get it, y'all Fight the power Get it, get it, get it, get it, y'all Fight the power Get it, get it, get it, get it, y'all Flavor Flav: Fight the power Get it, get it, get it, get it, y'all Chuck D and Flavor Flav: Fight the power We've got to fight the powers that be [Distant siren] [Liquid Liquid's "Cavern" playing] Darryl McDaniels, voice-over: One of the greatest periods in history is 1980s New York.

People forget.

It was punk rock.

It was hip-hop.

It was Keith Haring, Andy Warhol, Basquiat.

It was style.

It was fashion, antiestablishment.

"We're gonna dress the way we want!"

and this and that.

"We wanted to be free.

We're tired of being held down and oppressed and abused," so that was punk rock.

Now this thing called hip-hop is coming up with the same spirit.

Michael Holman, voice-over: New York at that time downtown, you had to be in a band because that's how you got laid.

Salvatore Principato: Slip in and out of phenomenon Holman: Even if you wanted to be a painter or you wanted to be a filmmaker or an artist, any kind of artist, you still had to be in a band, so that was de rigueur, right?

We went out clubbing every night.

Even though it was all about sex, drugs, and rock and roll, it was also about connecting to other artists.

That was our Internet, and that was just downtown.

Uptown, there's a whole other thing going on which would later on be called hip-hop... and it took people like myself, Fab 5 Freddy, and Henry Chalfant and Charlie Ahearn bringing these artists downtown to perform at our clubs downtown, like my club Negrill that I had with Kool Lady Blue.

We recognized each other.

We were post-punk.

We understood this is something you do yourself.

You don't ask for adults to give you a platform.

You make it happen on your own.

Nelson George, voice-over: Hip-hop was part of the tapestry of all the stuff that's going on.

It was still going through an evolution from just party records.

You have Run-DMC using rock guitars.

Then you have Whodini, a little more R&B, melodic.

Look.

All these things are happening.

They're all speaking to each other.

I just remember this sense of breadth.

There was a lot happening in the early eighties in terms of Black pop culture and its relationship to both the white American audience and the global audience.

The idea came to me from watching a group of kids in Harlem, in the South Bronx who were actually mixing all kinds of record together and talking, singing, or hollering over the top, and the whole thing there they've termed hip-hop.

[Run-DMC's "Hard Times" playing] KRS-One, voice-over: When Run-DMC exploded in 1983, we started to see a huge, white, male audience join in.

They felt something.

These were not people who wanted to be Black, as they were criticized.

These are not people who didn't understand the culture and just wanted to be cool.

The majority of white kids that I personally met, they were questioning the United States of America during that time.

Run-DMC: Hard times Run: Spreading DMC: Just Like The blue Watch out Home Boy Don't let It Catch you... McDaniels, voice-over: When I came into hip-hop, I was totally captivated by the greatness of this MC/DJ presentation thing.

Hard times McDaniels, voice-over: I always listened to the live performances of Grandmaster Flash, Cold Crush Four, Treacherous Three, Funky 4 + 1, Fantastic Five, all of them real pioneers in hip-hop, and I couldn't believe the type of messages that they had in there.

You know, Mel would do a freestyle, but he would put something socially, politically conscious in there because he saw it as a responsibility to inform, educate without losing identity.

Run-DMC: Hard times Run: Are coming to your town DMC: So stay alert Don't let them get you down... McDaniels, voice-over: Run-DMC were Black without saying, "We're Black rappers for the Black struggle."

Hip-hop removed the labels of the civil rights struggle.

Run-DMC: Hard times Run: Got our pockets all in chains DMC: I'll tell you what, homeboy... We took elements that everybody across the board could relate to and pinpointed it from our struggle without sounding like we was playing it.

Run-DMC: Because I need that dollar Every day of the week Hard times...

I felt an overwhelming sense of pride, pride of Run-DMC.

I thought, "There go my older brothers."

Before Run-DMC, there was a lot of showmanship, and lot of pomp and circumstance, the costumes, and, you know, those guys were showing up in front of Studio 54 audiences trying to convert them.

Run-DMC showed up looking like the b-boys and b-girls on the corner, right, and showing up with our fashion.

Run-DMC: Hard times Run: Can take you on a natural trip... Forte, voice-over: That was righteous.

Run-DMC: And don't you slip... To see that representation, that felt authentic.

You ain't gonna believe this place.

Word?

I'm telling you.

Come on.

You're gonna bug.

[Buzzer] Calvert DeForest: Hey, this is a rock and roll museum.

You guys don't belong in here.

Ha ha!

Ha ha!

The 1980s was a discovery of white America and the mainstream finding out that, oh, Black folks, not only are they people, too, but they damn sure are efficient doing whatever they choose to do.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Moving into the 1980s, we're seeing massive urban decay, but at the same time as you have that, you have an expanding African American middle class.

The Black middle class grows from the late 1960s through the early 1980s.

That is a reflection of the real, tangible successes and gains of the civil rights era.

Julian Bond, voice-over: We have now won access to public facilities, to the right to register to vote, to the franchise, to certain positions of political power.

Al Sharpton, voice-over: In the early eighties, you had these kinds of real signs of hope, Reverend Jackson raising our sights with his presidential run... We'll not be on the outside looking in.

We will be on the inside, and we will be heard.

We will be heard.

Run, Jesse!

Run!

Sharpton, voice-over: and he made it seem for the first time possible that we could win a nomination, let alone the presidency.

Jackson, voice-over: If we run, we may lose.

If we do not run, we're guaranteed to lose, but in running, we gain our self-respect, and in running, the masses register.

In running, our friends can no longer take us for granted.

Sharpton, voice-over: At the same time, there was a large strand of Black nationalism.

Minister Farrakhan came out of that base and began energizing a lot of people.

Woman, voice-over: They are friends-- one a candidate for President of the United States, the other Black Muslim Louis Farrakhan, leader of the Nation of Islam, a Black nationalist organization, its position taken as a reaction to what it terms white racism in American society.

There's always been this dichotomy in the African American community-- those that would fight for us to break in society and succeed and those that say, "Forget about them.

Let's build our own."

Farrakhan: You are a slave, a dressed-up, Brooks Brothers-, alligator-shoe-wearing, diamond-ring-wearing slave.

Jeffries, voice-over: After Elijah Muhammad, who was the principal head of Nation of Islam, passes away, Louis Farrakhan starts, essentially, Nation of Islam 2.0.

In rebuilding it, one of the things that he does is mass distribution of his speeches.

Just as hip-hop artists would sell mix tapes, members of the Nation of Islam are selling tapes of Farrakhan's Saviours' Day speeches and the like... and so African American youth, you pick up the latest mix tape, and you pick up the latest Saviours' Day tape, as well, and so Farrakhan's ideas very much seeps its way back into the African American community.

Man: He has a lot of guts, and that's what we need-- somebody with guts.

George, voice-over: The eighties, in a sense, to me was a time of expansion.

At the same time, there were these dark clouds in the middle of all of that.

Man, voice-over: On September 15, a young graffiti artist, 25-year-old Michael Stewart, was arrested for scrawling on the wall of a subway station at 3:00 in the morning.

Different man, voice-over: Stewart's parents and Black leaders charged the young man was killed by a brutal chokehold applied by the transit policeman who arrested him.

Lee Quinones, voice-over: Michael Stewart's death vibrated throughout the city in such a horrific way, wasn't surprising.

I had had my experience with police officers.

There are some that, out of frustration, have overstepped their power for something that's unnecessary, and Michael Stewart's death was obviously an incident that should have been avoided.

He was probably killed for signing his name like this-- R-A-S-- He only got to the S. You're supposed to get a ticket for writing graffiti.

You're not even supposed to get arrested with handcuffs.

Quinones, voice-over: It just showed over and over again that the same playbook was being followed, and there was a lot of frustration, a lot of heightened nerves at that time.

The city is still thug wild, and people perceived someone that's mysteriously writing something to be threatening.

I think we're talking more-- I think we're talking about more than police brutality.

Racism didn't end after the sixties.

The killing of Michael Stewart, for a lot of people, that marked kind of the first hip-hop killing when police brutality was brought to the forefront, and it was something that we had been speaking about.

Man: He was beaten to death the same way Arthur Miller was strangled to death; Claude Reese, 14 years old, was killed; Jay Parker, 15-year-old honors student, was killed, and guess who killed them.

Not some thugs or gangsters, but the people we pay to protect us.

Chuck D: We got all those ills coming at us, and then decisions are made behind closed doors, in the shadows.

"We're gonna strip the bottom off of y'all."

Woman, voice-over: President Reagan kicked off a new personal campaign to promote the idea of a drug-free society.

Those who smuggle and sell drugs are as dangerous to our national security as any terrorist or foreign dictatorship.

Leah Wright Rigueur, voice-over: Reagan is hard on crime.

He launches the war on drugs, and, you know, we all remember Nancy Reagan saying, "Just say no," right, sitting on Mr. T's lap, but what ultimately ends up happening is that the war on drugs means a huge infusion of capital into these drug-enforcement agencies.

Today is gives me great pleasure to sign legislation that reflects the total commitment of the American people and their government to fight the evil of drugs.

[Applause] Rigueur, voice-over: The Anti-Drug Act of 1986 removes sentencing discretion from the courts and essentially places it in the hands of the federal government and says, "This is a minimum of how you must sentence."

The effort isn't aimed at treatment, prevention, rehabilitation.

It's aimed at punishing people, and so the communities that bear the brunt of this are urban communities.

They're poor and impoverished communities, and they're communities that are disproportionately Black and Latino.

Reagan, voice-over: Despite our best efforts, illegal cocaine is coming into our country, and 4 million to 5 million people regularly use it.

Today there's a new epidemic-- smokeable cocaine, otherwise known as crack.

Fat Joe, voice-over: Crack started out freebase.

They would call it woolah, so people would take their marijuana, throw the crack cocaine in there.

Now, those guys who first got addicted to crack were the money makers who always had the fly clothes and had all the women and had all the cars.

Those guys are the first guys that got taken down by crack... because crack was, like, a fly, expensive drug at first, so you saw these guys who, where we don't have nobody in the community to look up to, these were the stars of our 'hood.

They were the first ones to start selling their clothes, their cars, and eventually themselves.

You would go outside, if you never had nothing, you'd sell crack, you made $300, $400, thousand dollars.

Thousand dollars was like a million dollars to a kid in the 'hood.

It was that easy to just walk out your door and you're gonna make money, and now you fly, and now you fly, you get the girls.

You get the power... and then, you know, with all that comes the violence, comes the prison, the destruction of family, but the reason why drugs was so appealing was, like, it was the only way.

It really was the only way to get up out the 'hood-- and not even get up out the 'hood, just to be good in the 'hood-- was to sell crack.

Rigueur, voice-over: In crack cocaine, Reagan has now found a worthy adversary, right?

This is an enemy that everyone can unite around.

It's dangerous.

It's deadly.

It will kill you.

Rigueur, voice-over: There is widespread panic.

Crack is mentioned on every single major magazine... so it becomes much easier to couch this war on drugs in both militaristic terms but also in moral terms.

Killer Mike, voice-over: The crack era gave the perfect recipe to not only villainize Black men by calling them drug dealers, but then to gift, or feed, a private prison system that was just growing.

Reagan also had the support of the Black bourgeoise in that they were just afraid and didn't know what to do.

From the minute Ronald Reagan was elected, all of a sudden, just, like, the doors had burst open.

It's cocaine, oh, everywhere now.

It's like it's snowfall, like, "Whoa!"

like, out of nowhere?

[Tone] Announcer: It's "PETV" with your anchors Sherelle Winters and Flavor Flav.

Yeah, boy!

Yo, bust a move.

Ha ha ha!

Here it is, bam!

And you say ...damn This is a dope jam But let's define the term called dope And you think it mean funky now, no Here is a true tale... Chuck D, voice-over: Public Enemy when it made "Night of the Living Baseheads," we wanted to make drugs seem dirty and ugly.

How do you make that kid go, "Ugh.

I don't want to do that"?

Sellin', smellin', sniffin', riffin' And brothers trying' to get swift An' sell to their own... Chuck D, voice-over: Maybe I learned from seeing Nana when I was 10 and 11 and we'd have to go to the Bronx with my family and see some old dude or some Vietnam War vet shooting up in their arm.

I made sure in my mind I never was gonna stick a needle in my arm after I saw this cat.

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Kick it Here we go I put this together to rock the bells Of those that boost the dose Of lack a lack and those that sell to Black Shame on a brother when he dealin' The same block where my 98 be wheelin'... Chuck D, voice-over: You could say it's not good, but when you say it's ugly and make you go, "Ugh," chances are, they ain't gonna go there no more.

Killer Mike, voice-over: Chuck was more than the MC.

Flavor Flav was more than just the guy doing dope ad libs in the back.

He was a jester to kind of pull kids in.

How-- How-- How-- How-- How-- How-- How-- How-- How low can you go?

Killer Mike, voice-over: Public Enemy affected me deeply.

"It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back," "Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos," had it not been for those records, would I have been as emboldened as I was as a child to become an organizer?

Would I have understood the importance of going to historically Black college and university?

Yo, listen Chuck D: I see it on their faces... Killer Mike, voice-over: People like Chuck D were providing an example for me for how the Black "learn."

Chuck D: Day to day, they say no other way This stuff is really bad, I'm talkin' 'bout-- Bass, b-b-bass, b-bass Ice-T, voice-over: Public Enemy made us all know you had to sing about something.

When they came out, N.W.A got a little more political.

All of us did--KRS.

All of us did because they was like, "Yeah.

It's cool to entertain, but we need to educate at the same time."

Chuck D: Ba-- Ba-- B-- B-b-bass...bass... bass...bass... Music is the first front line.

When you live in an oppressive condition-- as we do, as we have and as we do-- it's our first line of defense.

It's our first line of offense.

Jody Armour, voice-over: There was a real sense that finally there was a voice for the voiceless.

It's time for the alarm clock to go off.

Public Enemy is an alarm-clock rap group.

Man: What do you think their message is?

Life.

Yep.

Black consciousness.

Armour, voice-over: Youth who were into the music would say-- in the Black community, anyway-- that they were really emboldened and empowered by knowing they weren't alone, and through the music, they could relate to one another.

I heard a number of youth at the time say, "So often, what I've been able to hear "about bigger issues has come from the pulpit, "but now we have an alternative to the pulpit, you know.

"It's a kind of pulpit.

There's a kind of wisdom.

"There's a kind of spiritual guidance "that I'm getting from listening, "and it can be also kind of political guidance, "but it can be, above all, kind of resistance music and survival music."

This is defiance in the face of this onslaught.

Being that we don't have media control, you have to teach large amounts of people, you know, what we're about or how we act or how we talk or how we do things.

Then rap records kind of fill in that void.

Chuck D, voice-over: A rap song had the ability to get a word and a point across better than a singing song which kind of had to play with the notes.

Rap music didn't have to play with the notes.

All I had to do was, like, "Boom!"

and this was the beauty of the vocal execution of it all.

I think your line was, you don't write about anything that makes people dream or makes their penises hard.

Ha ha ha!

That's right.

What does that mean?

It's strictly reality music we're dealing with, strictly.

I'm really not into the self-glorification-- "I'm this.

I'm that."

You know, it's more "we," "our," "us."

That's basically our mode.

That's why I would say a statement like that, definitely.

We started out as what would be called conscious rappers or politically social-- socially conscious rappers.

This is why we started.

We wanted to speak a message, to say what was really going on on the streets.

Sharpton, voice-over: In New York, we had very much divided this city.

Blacks lived in certain concentrated areas, whites in other areas, Latinos in other areas, and it was almost an unwritten understanding for Blacks that you should not go in certain neighborhoods.

You had a mayor at the time, Ed Koch, who played on those divisions.

A lot of the foreigners that have come in have taken in-- have taken over, I should say, and some of the people like us who've been here for so many years resent some of the things that they want to do.

We feel that it was our neighborhood for so many years and they're kind of taking over.

[Distant siren] Sharpton, voice-over: In 1986, young man worked for me and called me in the middle of the night and said his cousin had been killed.

I assumed it was about a crack war.

He said would I go and see the mother.

When I got to the address, the mother told me, no, her son and his friend-- two friends had a car break down out in Queens, and they chased them saying, "No niggers allowed in this neighborhood."

Man, voice-over: Griffith was killed when he ran onto a highway to escape a group of white teenagers who had beat and chased him and two other young, Black men in Howard Beach, a mostly white section of Queens.

I was outraged, and I said, "No.

We need to do something about this."

Man, voice-over: It looked like Selma, Alabama, in the sixties, but it was Howard Beach, New York City today.

Man: Howard Beach, have you heard?

This is not Johannesburg Sharpton, voice-over: Minute we started marching out there, hundreds of whites came out of anywhere... and started yelling, "Niggers go home."

"What are you all doing out here?"

"This is our neighborhood"... Sharpton, voice-over: and I thought when people saw that on the news, it cleared up any ambiguity.

The world saw right in New York City this kind of rancor and hatred and hostility toward people because of the color of their skin.

Man, voice-over: The anger was clear outside a courtroom in the Borough of Queens today, where a judge threw out charges of murder and manslaughter against 3 white teenagers accused of assaulting Griffith.

Sharpton: The judge has held our very lives in contempt.

We are tired of our lives being minimized.

Whitehead, voice-over: When you think about the work of Spike Lee, up until that moment, he had tackled a number of different issues, but "Do the Right Thing" was different.

It talked about the social and cultural mores of our community.

It really got to the heart of the tension within New York.

Spike says, "Yo, I'm coming out with a movie "talking about this situation in New York, man, "this BS going down.

Yo, man, I need the anthem."

Playback.

[Public Enemy's "Fight the Power" playing] Chuck D, voice-over: Remember like yesterday-- myself, Hank Shocklee, Bill Stephney, and Spike sitting in a Soho restaurant in Lower Manhattan before I go out on an international tour with Run-DMC, and it comes together, "Fight the Power" being the theme.

We got to fight the powers that be Fight the power Yes Chuck D: Fight the power Fight the power Yes Fight the power Fight the power Yes Chuck D, voice-over: Once we had the theme, the words and the music found itself, and then Spike took a hold of it.

He took something that was solid and concrete as a sentiment, and it becomes greater than the music and greater than the lyric.

Flavor Flav: People, people Chuck D: We are the same, no, we're not the same 'Cause we don't know the game What we need is awareness, we can't get careless You say, "What is this?"

"Fight the Power" meant more than just a song.

It was actually a call to action.

If you want to change the situation, the state of Black folks in this country, then you've got to be willing to stand up and be actively involved in changing this situation, no matter what that looks like.

Fight the power Yes Fight the power Fight the power... Whitehead, voice-over: We've got to find ways to be involved in a multilayered struggle, and "Fight the Power" spoke to all of us.

It was an anthem, but it wasn't just music.

It was a call to action.

Chuck D: I'm ready and hyped plus I'm amped Most of my heroes don't appear on no stamps Sample a look back, you look and find Nothing but rednecks for 400 years if you check "Don't Worry, Be Happy" Was a number-one jam...

Fat Joe, voice-over: "Fight the Power" still amazes me.

First time I ever heard it, it was amazing.

The video was amazing.

Right on Come on Monie Love, voice-over: Look at that video, you might see a few of our faces in there holding picket signs, angry kids.

There's nowhere to go, didn't know where to project our anger at what was going on.

Get it-- Get it-- Get it, y'all Ernest Dickerson, voice-over: When he called me, he had finished shooting "Do the Right Thing."

Spike said he wanted to do really kind of a documentary style.

It was gonna be just walking through the streets.

They were gonna be singing "Fight the Power," so, well, you know, it was something I had to do.

Chuck D: Elvis was a hero to most But he never meant ... to me, you see Straight out racist, the sucker was simple... Eminem, voice-over: When Chuck was like, "Elvis was a hero to most, but he never meant [beep] to me.

Racist, the sucker was simple and plain," I was like, "He what?"

Like, I'm-- You know what I'm saying?

Because that's where I'm getting my education.

Power to the people No delay Make everybody see In order to fight the powers that be Forte, voice-over: We knew that this was somebody who's not only speaking about the conditions, but speaking about some solutions that can come, right, like, "I'm not just gonna talk about blight.

"I'm gonna talk about the source of it.

I'm gonna talk about how we got here."

No one did that up until PE came on the scene to talk about the source of your discontent.

It was so dope, but, like, the message it carried made it even doper because they're actually teaching you [beep] that you're not gonna learn in schools.

This is what we see.

This is what's going on in our neighborhoods, in our areas.

This is the frustrations I feel.

This is how maybe I want to fix it.

Chuck D, voice-over: Impossible to be apolitical when you were born inside of it and you're trying to find yourself inside it...

Flavor Flav: Yeah, boy!

and that was the eighties in a nutshell.

Crowd: Don't believe the hype Flavor Flav: Everybody.

Don't believe the hype OK. Cut, cut, cut.

Cut.

[Siren] Man: Everybody out.

KRS-One, voice-over: It wasn't so much about the music.

It was the questions that hip-hop was asking the country.

At the time, the crack cocaine epidemic was heavy on us, so the social commentary at the time was, "Stay away from crack cocaine."

Woman: When is it gonna stop?

I just don't know when it's gonna stop.

The two most profound things I've lived through were HIV and the crack era.

You know, there are still people walking around with post-traumatic stress syndrome from the fear.

Man, voice-over: Recent findings that children routinely exposed to violence exhibit the same symptoms that plague combat veterans.

Jack Lyon: You have a saturation point.

I mean, you can watch just so much of this and experience just so much of this harm.

I think probably all of us have different tolerance levels, but there come a point when you're there, and then you're shellshocked.

I seen my best friend get shot and this old man get shot.

Man: How old are you?

5.

You see this every day?

Yeah.

That's happening all over the country, this sense of fear.

That's one thing that we look back at hip-hop from the mid-eighties, is that, in a way, the best part of it is, they documented a certain kind of fear.

Whitehead, voice-over: Crack didn't just happen everywhere.

We're not talking about, you know, Idaho and Iowa.

No.

We're talking about L.A., where you have a centralized urban community.

We're talking about Harlem, New York.

You're talking about Philadelphia.

You're talking about Southeast D.C. Like, you're talking about these central, urban, Black communities and how drugs are being introduced into the community.

People are getting addicted to the drugs, and it's beginning to take the bottom out of our communities.

John Kerry: Our declaration on war against drugs seems to have produced a war of words, and not action.

We permitted narcotics-- I mean, we were complicitous as a country in narcotics traffic at the same time as we're spending countless dollars in this country to try to get rid of this problem.

It's mind-boggling.

[The Egyptian Lover's "I Need a Freak" playing] George, voice-over: Going to L.A. in the early eighties had always been a lot of fun.

There are a lot of clubs.

There's a lot of funk, more parties.

Egyptian Lover: In these times of hate and pain We need a remedy to take us from the rain George, voice-over: Now, by '88, '89, it's changing.

The gang thing happens.

I remember being at a hotel on Sunset Boulevard with my blue Yankee hat and being told, "Man, don't wear that to where we're going."

"Really?"

"No, man.

Don't wear your Yan-- Don't wear your blue cap, "and don't-- You know, if you got red, please don't wear that, either."

"You serious?"

"I'm serious.

Yeah.

Don't."

Tom Brokaw, voice-over: As in the old days, the fights are over turf... Our turf.

Brokaw, voice-over: but now the turf involves control of a drug market, and the battles are with heavy weapons to the death.

Ice-T, voice-over: Los Angeles was a gang-infested situation.

At the time, you had Crips... and you had what's called the Brims.

Crips did this.

The Brims did this.

The Crips refer to you as cuz.

The Brims refer to you as blood, and that's where the term the Bloods came from, from the word-- the way we would talk.

"Yo, what's up, cuz?"

You say, "Blood," I would know that you're from another set.

Jefferies, voice-over: The actual warfare that is happening between rival drug distribution networks-- because that's what they become-- is being exploited by the police out west in places like L.A. because they've always been trying to crack down on Black youth, so now any Black person-- whether you're living in the suburbs, like Compton, or you are an actual member of a gang-- you are being targeted by police.

You are being rounded up.

[Siren] Walking through a neighborhood, right, you are potentially a gangbanger because they're able to do it under the guise of drug intervention and gang prevention.

Soren Baker, voice-over: The Los Angeles Police Department became infamous in the streets, especially for continuing to perpetuate a lot of the negative interaction that had existed between the--quote, unquote-- "overseer class," the white man.

In Southern California, what we saw was the police being overzealous and starting to raid boatloads of people unnecessarily and using the batter ram, which is where Toddy Tee was inspired to make his song.

The LAPD had this ingenious, I guess, in their mind, idea to use a batter ram to break down walls in order to conduct these raids.

Jeffries, voice-over: What we then see in the music that is coming out of the West Coast is explicitly talking about in ways that we don't quite hear in the same way in the Northeast about a critique of power that's rooted in these interactions with the police.

Ice-T: 6:00 in the morning, police at my door Fresh Adidas squeak across the bathroom floor Out my back window, I make my escape Didn't even get a chance to grab my old-school tape Mad with no music but happy 'cause free And the streets to a player is the place to be Ice-T, voice-over: I had taken the hip-hop bug, but not as an MC.

I wanted to be a DJ, and I found I got more attention rapping, and, you know, I knew how to rap.

I knew how to say rhymes and stuff because I used to write gangbanger rhymes, and then my boy was like, "Say that [beep] that you be saying."

"On records?"

He's like, "Yeah.

Say that [beep]," so we made "6 'N the Mornin'."

Ice-T: Sean E Sean was the driver Known to give freaks hell Had a beeper goin' off like a high-school bell Looked in the mirror, what did we see?

... blue lights--LAPD... Baker, voice-over: Ice-T with "6 'N the Mornin'," he's running from the police because he doesn't think he's gonna have a good interaction with them.

He's also running from the police because he knows that Black and brown men are targets.

The police had a reputation, unfortunately, as we see later on, of treating Black men like pinatas.

Ice-T: SWAT team leader yelled, "Hit the floor" Reached in my pocket, pulled my .44... Ice-T, voice-over: The press said, "Gangster rap."

All right.

I was like, "OK, gangster rap.

Then I'm the original gangster."

Ice-T: Broke down a alley, jumped into a car Suckers didn't even see us... Baker, voice-over: Ice-T would be the one who changed what West Coast rap was going to be, and that is gangster rap.

Ice-T: Word...word...word... My whole shape of understanding from the West Coast comes out of the seed of Ice-T on what's real and what was to be.

Ice-T, voice-over: Chuck's view was more geopolitical.

It was more about the world, and I was more about the neighborhood.

Mine was more about the politics of that city block.

[Siren] George, voice-over: When I hear gangster rap records for the first time, I had a context for it that was different than maybe other people did, a lot of other writers, because I had spent some time out here and got more interactions and then realizing this is not like New York.

[Siren] Now, I've been in New York, and I've seen a lot of things in New York.

I've never seen people just in the middle of the street face down in the hot sun, and they said, "Yeah, man.

That's what they do here," so I started reading up on the history of L.A. police.

William Parker, who designed the postwar L.A. Police Department, hired ex-military and Southerners.

Armour, voice-over: We're talking about a Southern mentality in Parker.

He wants racism and authoritarianism to be wed together.

Parker: A great number of those people came from areas in the country where they were much further dislocated, much more seriously dislocated than they are here.

They came in and flooded a community that wasn't prepared to meet them, despite the fact that we got all this relief money going in there.

We didn't ask these people to come here.

From the 1950s to the 1960s, Parker is redefining the mission of policing.

Policing isn't just about solving crimes.

Now it's about solving the social problem of Black folk.

Parker said explicitly, "By 1970, half the city can be Black, "and if you don't have a militaristic police force, "one full of warrior cops "with an occupational-force mentality, "then God help you.

"The only thing standing between you and chaos is this thin, blue line"... clearly fearmongering and playing on racialized fear in particular.

Daryl Gates: Let's turn the inner city around, and I hear the same thing developing now.

"We want a stake in our community.

We want to make the decision."

Well, of course you do, and I'm all for that.

They talk in the street vernacular.

We think that's wonderful, but let's do something about 40% to 50% of our kids who drop out to do, what, to get involved in drugs and crime.

Let's do something about that.

Parker viewed Gates as a mentee and Gates Parker as a mentor... [Applause] and Daryl Gates continued the tradition of saying outrageous things as chief of police, for example, that Blacks were dying from police officer chokeholds because they had some anatomical quirk... so he carried on that Parker tradition, and he was allowed to because he was supported by much of Los Angeles, right?

We're not talking about an institution that's out there acting on its own.

We're talking about an institution that's acting in response to the democratic process that has said, "We want you to be this kind of institution.

"We want you as our violence workers "to unleash your violence disproportionately on these communities..." "and we're going to keep putting people like you in those positions," so these officers are very much just playing a kind of representative role.

All right!

Let's hit it!

Come on!

Go!

go!

Baker, voice-over: In order to fight this wrong of crack in South Central Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Police Department decided, "Let's step up our enforcement and show people that we're serious"... so when you have that type of environment, it's gonna lead to disastrous results.

Brokaw, voice-over: It is a war, cops against gangs.

As in a war, the casualties mount every week.

Maxine Waters: I submit to you that Daryl Gates is causing the kind of polarization that is dangerous, that Daryl Gates, on top of the other difficulties that our community is experiencing, is exacerbating that problem.

[Applause] Baker, voice-over: Clearly, it didn't eradicate drugs, and that's why there was this built-up frustration and this built-up rage that bled from the streets to the music.

Ice Cube: ... the police Comin' straight from the underground A young ... got it bad 'cause I'm brown And not the other color, so police think They have the authority to kill a minority... Warren G, voice-over: "[Beep] tha Police" was just a hip-hop artist speaking out against police brutality, and that was just our answer back to getting our asses kicked.

Ice Cube: ... with me 'cause I'm a teenager With a little bit of gold and a pager... Warren G, voice-over: N.W.A told how it goes down, and that's exactly how it go down, how they explained it.

You know, they were just news reporters reporting on what we were going through.

Ice Cube: Yo, Dre, I got something to say Easy-E: ... tha police, ...-- ...-- ... tha police, ...-- ...-- ... tha police, ...-- ...-- Sway Calloway, voice-over: To me, what they rapped about, what was going on in their neighborhood, it was reality.

The industry coined it gangster rap.

Everything has to be put in a column in order for it to be sold.

MC Ren: Lights start flashing behind me But they're scared of a ..., so they mace me to blind me But that ... don't work... Armour, voice-over: A song like "[Beep] tha Police"-- "Coming straight from the underground, "young nigga got it bad 'cause I'm brown, "not the other color, so police think they have the authority to kill a minority"-- how does that not at some point start to affect how you're thinking, but not about the police?

You start to recognize that there are alternative perspectives on the police.

The police maybe for you have always been a public good.

You never had a negative interaction with a police officer.

That's inviting you to adopt a new perspective, and if you're open to it, that's what great literature does.

That's what great art does.

It broadens your perspective.

Easy-E: I'm tired of the mother... jackin' Sweatin' my gang while I'm chillin' in the shack... Every single utterance out of the mouths of young, Black men, especially in rap music in the eighties and the nineties, had the tone of resistance.

Even if they wasn't saying it, it was felt.

It's like, "How could I be better?

"How can I climb up out of this?

"How am me and my homies and my girl," or, "baby mama and my kids, how do we all do well?

We trapped here for real."

Easy-E: ... tha police Man, voice-over: Police said 25-year-old Rodney King was involved in a high-speed chase, wanted as a parole violator.

The amateur cameraman said it appeared to him the suspect was attempting to cooperate when the beating with nightsticks began.

Gates was very defensive in his reaction to the Rodney King beating tape, but there were a lot of Angelenos who felt the same way he did, that they didn't see anything on that Rodney King tape that went over the line.

Calloway, voice-over: Imma say something that might sound kind of sick.

In the back of my head, I just remember feeling a little bit elated, like, "Ah!

We got 'em!"

"Nobody can go against what we're looking at right here.

They're beating him with clubs and breaking bones," and I mean, these officers were hitting him till they got tired.

"Whoo!

Hey, we got 'em.

"Look what they did to Rodney King, and that soldier, that warrior, he survived it."

Man: Not guilty of the crime of assault.

Armour: I, like many Black Americans, was dumbfounded by the acquittal because it was a jury and they were supposed to be representing the community, and so now this is the community telling us that actually this is the kind of America we should expect to live in for the rest of our lives.

George, voice-over: You know, these things were going on-- the turmoil, the tension.

The Latasha Harlins shooting, it happened after Rodney King.

Shinese Harlins-Kilgore: I grew up in South Central Los Angeles.

It was a struggle, but fortunately, my grandmother didn't allow us to see the struggle 100%.

We didn't have to worry about having the lights cut off or the gas cut off or not having no food.

She would allow us to be kids.

Latasha was one of my best friends, more of a sister than a cousin because we slept in the same bed.

We went to the same schools.

We did everything together.

Man, voice-over: This grainy security-camera videotape graphically depicts the last few moments of 15-year-old Latasha Harlins' life.

Harlins-Kilgore, voice-over: Latasha walks into the store, goes to get an orange juice, and then from there, it just escalated.

Tasha throws a punch, fair to say.

When Latasha walks out, Soon Ja Doo bring out her gun and kills Latasha instantly.

The police get there hour and a half later and walks over Latasha's body to tend to the person that killed her?

OK.

Right.

Keith Morrison, voice-over: A jury convicted Doo of voluntary manslaughter.

A presentence report recommended the maximum--16 years, but Judge Joyce Karlin, on the bench just since July, imposed probation, a $500 fine, no jail time.

Harlins-Kilgore, voice-over: The judge overruled the jury.

"Since she didn't look like a killer, we're just gonna slap this on her wrist."

I know a criminal when I see one.

When I don't, I treat that person as something other than that.

Man, voice-over: After the verdict, Harlins' family was asked if this will lead to violence.

Yes.

I damn sure hope so that there will be all the hell in the Black community...

I hope somebody would care about the death of a child.

that would stand up and see this insanity for exactly what it is-- Black people once again being unjustly treated by this idiot system.

Harlins-Kilgore, voice-over: Two different stories-- police beating Rodney King, Asian American killing Latasha-- but the same outcome, which were all 3 acquitted, let go.

"Go home.

Enjoy your life."

That's why the city mad.

[People shouting] Man: Racist [beep] pig!

You [beep] piece-of-[beep] pig!

I hope you burn in hell, you bastard!

Armour, voice-over: The anger that spilled over was what King was talking about when he said, "Riots are the language of the unheard."

[Ice Cube's "We Had to Tear This Mutha... Up" playing] Ice Cube: Not guilty, the filthy Devils tried to kill me... Gates: I'm gonna stay right here.

We're gonna see this through.

We're gonna turn the process around, and we're gonna look at the problem.

Ice Cube: Ready for Daryl, and, like Baretta would say Keep your eye on the barrel, a sparrow "Don't to the crime if you can't do the time" But I'm rollin'... Chuck D, voice-over: I could feel the rage and the heat through the TV because I actually was just in L.A. and I felt the rage and the heat already brewing.

Ice Cube: Now we ain't nothing but food for the maggots Lunch, punch, Hawaiian, lying Brothers ain't buyin' your story, bore me Tearin' stuff up with fire, shooters, looters Calloway, voice-over: Hip-hop became our political party, and the artists that spoke to the community the best are the artists we tend to follow.

Chuck D or KRS-One at that time or Ice Cube said, "Look.

We're gonna fight this thing, but let's stop burning down our own neighborhoods."

Ice Cube: 'Cause-- you know what?-- We woulda tore this dirty motha... up... Armour, voice-over: The riots harmed the Black community itself because, you know, the buildings that burned were in the Black community itself.

A lot of times, rage is blind.

That doesn't mean it's still not understandable.

Rigueur, voice-over: We see violence.

We see rebellion.

We see uprising.

We see anger.

We see Black rage, but the thing is, that had been there.

In fact, we had seen moments like that decades before over and over and over again, and we see it in the music.

Ice Cube: Didn't get stuck out In front of that store with the Nikes and Adidas... Rigueur: voice-over: We see these songs that are directly speaking about the problem of police brutality and the kind of rage that Black people and Black communities feel at this long history of torture, of abuse, of inequality.

It's all there.

Ice Cube: Hitting up police killer The super-duper brother that'll buck We had to tear this mutha... up... George, voice-over: There's a political and social context to why those records existed and why those records were popular.

Man: We have no way to vent our frustrations out because we're already at the bottom, you know?

What else can we do?

"Fight the Power: How Hip Hop Changed the World" is available on Amazon Prime Video [Scott Christian Marzullo's "Flow Control" playing]