"Fight the Power" is a song by American hip hop group Public Enemy, released as a single in the summer of 1989 on Motown Records.

"Fight the Power" incorporates various samples and allusions to African-American culture, including civil rights exhortations, black church services, and the music of James Brown.

Spike Lee also directed a music video in Brooklyn featuring a political rally of "a thousand" black youth, with appearances by Lee and the Public Enemy members (Chuck D, Flavor Flav, Terminator X), uniformed Fruit of Islam men, and signs of historic black figures such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X.

In 1988, shortly after the release of their second album It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, Public Enemy were preparing for the European leg of the Run's House tour with Run–D.M.C.

[7] He recalled his idea, "I wanted to have sorta like the same theme as the original 'Fight the Power' by the Isley Brothers and fill it in with some kind of modernist views of what our surroundings were at that particular time.

"[8] The Bomb Squad, Public Enemy's production team, constructed the music for "Fight the Power", through the looping, layering, and transfiguring of numerous samples.

[10] In contrast to Marsalis' school of thought, Bomb Squad members such as Hank Shocklee wanted to eschew melodic clarity and harmonic coherence in favor of a specific mood in the composition.

Shocklee explained that their musicianship was dependent on different tools, exercised in a different medium, and was inspired by different cultural priorities, different from the "virtuosity" valued in jazz and classical music.

[11] Regarding the production of the song, Robert Walser, an American musicologist, wrote that the solo "has been carefully reworked into something that Marsalis would never think to play, because Schocklee's goals and premises are different from his.

Author Mark Katz writes in his Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music, "Many hip-hop producers were once DJs, and skill in selecting and assembling beats is required of both. ...

[13] Katz comments in an analysis of the track, "The effect created by Public Enemy's production team is dizzying, exhilarating, and tantalizing—clearly one cannot take it all in at once".

"Fight the Power" is a complex and subtle testament to the influence and possibilities of sound recording; but at the same time, it reveals how the aesthetic, cultural, and political priorities of musicians shape how the technology is understood and used.

[9] It is followed by a brief three-measure section (0:17–0:24) that is carried by the dotted rhythm of a vocal sample repeated six times; the line "pump me up" from Trouble Funk's 1982 song of the same name played backwards indistinctly.

[14] David Stubbs of The Quietus writes that the song "shimmies and seethes with all the controlled, incendiary rage and intent of Public Enemy at their height.

[14] He also clarifies his group's platform as a musical artist: "Now that you've realized the pride's arrived / We've got to pump the stuff to make us tough / From the heart / It's a start, a work of art / To revolutionize".

[19] Vocal elements characteristic of this are various exhortations common in African-American music and church services, including the lines "Let me hear you say", "Come on and get down", and "Brothers and sisters", as well as James Brown's grunts and Afrika Bambaataa's electronically processed exclamations, taken from his 1982 song "Planet Rock".

"[20] Chuck D clarifies previous remarks in the verse's subsequent lines: "Cause I'm black and I'm proud / 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".

[14][18] Laura K. Warrell of Salon interprets the verse as an attack on embodiments of the white American ideal in Presley and Wayne, as well as its discriminative culture.

[14] On May 22, 1989, Professor Griff, the group's "Minister of Information", was interviewed by The Washington Times and made anti-Semitic comments, calling Jews "wicked" and blaming them for "the majority of wickedness that goes on across the globe", including financing the Atlantic slave trade and being responsible for South African apartheid.

[35] Public Enemy biographer Russell Myrie wrote that the video "accurately [brought] to life ... the emotion and anger of a political rally".

[37] Extras wearing T-shirts that said "Fight the Power" carried signs featuring Paul Robeson, Marcus Garvey, Angela Davis, Frederick Douglass, Muhammad Ali, and other black icons.

[42] Additionally, "Fight the Power" was also featured in the opening credits of the PBS documentary Style Wars about inner-city youth using graffiti as an artistic form of social resistance.

[43][better source needed] "Fight the Power" also appears in a season three episode of The King of Queens, while Arthur, Doug, and Deacon are walking the streets to kill time while on strike.

[45] That year, the song was also played at the African-American fraternity party Greekfest in Virginia Beach, where tensions had grown between a predominantly White police force and festival-attending African Americans.

[47] Janice C. Simpson of Time wrote in a 1990 article, "The song not only whipped the movie to a fiery pitch but sold nearly 500,000 singles and became an anthem for millions of youths, many of them black and living in inner-city ghetto's [sic].

"[14] She interprets it as a reaction to "the frustrations of the Me Decade", including the crack epidemic in the inner cities, AIDS pandemic, racism, and the effects of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush's presidencies on struggling urban communities.

[56] In September 2011 it topped Time Out's list of the 100 Songs That Changed History, with Matthew Collin, author of This Is Serbia Calling, citing its use by the rebel radio station B92 during the 1991 protests in Belgrade as the reason for its inclusion.

Named after "Fight the Power", the series explores the relationship between hip hop and American politics, with appearances from Eminem, Ice-T, Killer Mike, LL Cool J, Monie Love, Will.i.am and more.

[61] In July 2020, Public Enemy did a live performance of "Fight the Power" at the 2020 BET Awards, alongside YG, Nas, Black Thought, and Rapsody, among others.