"Yet our best-trained, best-educated, best-equipped, best-prepared troops refuse to fight. Matter of fact, it's safe to say that they would rather switch than fight." These are the opening words to Fight the Power by Public Enemy, spoken by Thomas Todd, a Chicago lawyer and civil rights activist known as TNT for his fiery delivery. They're delivered with real gusto, all apart from the "switch". When Todd reaches that final phrase he speaks gently, but with a definite tone of disdain. The moment for action had apparently arrived.
The four and a half minutes that follow are both among the finest of Public Enemy's recorded output, and the most powerful articulation of the political fervour abroad in hip-hop during the late 80s. "We put loops on top of loops on top of loops," said Chuck D of the recording process, in which a dozen different samples were cut, layered and stitched together to create maximum rhythmic propulsion. The intensity is matched in the rapping, building to a final verse that starts by cursing John Wayne and ends with another gauntlet being thrown down: "What we got to say/ Power to the people no delay/Make everybody see/ In order to fight the powers that be."
While Public Enemy were calling for action in the summer of 1989, KRS-One was launching the Stop the Violence Movement. Traumatised by the murder of his friend and DJ Scott La Rock, the Boogie Down Productions MC had reinvented himself from someone who had glamorised violence and feuded with rival MCs, to a self-described teacher. Appropriating both the language and the imagery of Malcolm X, his 1988 album By All Means Necessary (released alongside PE's landmark It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back) introduced bouts of moralising among the customary punchlines and disses. The message was for the black community to organise and end the violence that had killed La Rock.
The Stop the Violence movement that followed suggested activism but in reality was more like a supergroup. Corralling several celebrated east-coast MCs into the studio, KRS came up with Self Destruction, an early example of a hip-hop charity single with proceeds going to civil rights organisation the National Urban League. Public Enemy appeared on the record alongside friendlier figures such as Heavy D and the jazz-influenced Stetsasonic.
While PE mixed the rhetoric of the civil rights movement with black nationalism and KRS-One rallied his community, Stetsasonic's DJ, Prince Paul, was proving instrumental in another, distinctive brand of conscious rap. He was the producer of 3 Feet High and Rising, an album by the group De La Soul. Three schoolfriends from Amityville, Long Island, they were in possession both of an eclectic record collection and an attitude that was as distinct from Chuck D's as imaginable. Their debut album, released in March 1989, contained social commentary on tracks such as Say No Go, where Hall and Oates samples ran underneath tales of drug addiction and poverty. But elsewhere there were whimsical skits, silly voices and distinctly hippyish affectations. It all came together under the banner of the Daisy Age, which purported to stand for "da inner sound y'all" but seemed more like intimating the second coming of the Age of Aquarius.
As musically innovative as any of their peers, the band rejected many of the labels applied to them, and in many ways their more cartoonish elements were inherited from the theatrics of Marley Marl and Biz Markie. But De La Soul also made a form of rap music that was both conscious and, relatively speaking, completely unthreatening. Released through Tommy Boy, which by this time was half owned by Warner Brothers, 3 Feet High and Rising was popular worldwide and, in the UK, the trio would go on to crash the upper reaches of the pop charts. In 1990, the Face commemorated the mood with a Daisy Age cover shoot. With images of a teenager cavorting half-naked around on a beach, it was Kate Moss's first ever photo shoot.
