Original subtitles

This program me contains very strong and discriminatory language

and scenes which some viewers may find upsetting

ARCHIVE: Our distinguished leader, one of the royal, outstanding people of this country,

Rev Jesse Louis Jackson. CHEERING

I feel victory! Yes, sir.

There's a transition going on!

CROWD: Yeah!

From charity to parity.

From slave ship to championship.

Our time has come.

CHEERING

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."

ARCHIVE: I rise to declare my decision

to seek the nomination of the Democratic Party

for the Presidency of the United States of America.

The Rev Jackson showed us a different way of thinking

about the social ills and then speaking to them.

ARCHIVE: Part of our intention has been this internal quest for equity.

Not just jobs. One wants to share power,

not just positions.

Jesse Jackson was the hope that we said, OK, we're on the same page,

we'd like to see this attempted.

That was the simmering attitude.

We're going to 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 on to 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 status-wise

in this society, they, in 1980s language,

is still gon' treat and look to you as a...

MUSIC: Fight The Power by Public Enemy

# Get it, get, get, get, get it

# Get down Come on and get down

# Get it, get, get, get, get it

# Get down Come on and get down

# Get it, get, get, get, get it

# Get down Come on and get down

# Fight the power!

# Yes, yes, yes, yes, y'all

# Uh! Fight the power!

# Yes, yes, yes, yes, y'all

# Uh! Fight the power!

# Yes, yes, yes, yes, y'all

# Uh! Fight the power!

# Yes, yes, yes, yes, y'all

# Uh! Fight the power!

# Yes, yes, yes, yes, y'all

# Uh! Fight the power!

# Yes, yes, yes, yes, y'all

# Uh! Fight the power!

# Yes, yes, yes, yes, y'all

# Uh! Fight the power!

# Yes, yes

# We've got to fight the powers that be! #

MUSIC: Cavern by Liquid Liquid

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,

anti-establishment.

"We're going to dress the way we want!" and this and that.

We wanted to be free. We were 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.

New York at that time, downtown,

you had to be in a band

cos that's how you got laid.

Even if you wanted to be a painter

or you wanted to be a film-maker 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.

Ancl it took people like myself

and Fab 5 Freddy

and Henry Chalfant

and Charlie Ah earn bringing these artists downtown

to perform at our clubs downtown,

like my club and Negril that I had with Kool Lady Blue.

We recognised each other.

We were post-punk. We understood

this it something you do yourself.

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

You make it happen on your own.

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 had Run-D.M.C. using rock guitars,

then you had Whodini doing more R&B, melodic.

So all these things are happening.

They're all speaking to each other.

MUSIC CONTINUES

I just remember this sense of breadth.

There was a lot happening in the early '80s

in terms of black pop culture

and its relationship to both the white American audience

and the global audience.

ARCHIVE: The idea came to me from watching a group of kids in Harlem,

in the South Bronx, who were actually mixing all kinds of records

together and talking, singing or hollering over the top,

and the whole thing there they've termed hip-hop.

MUSIC: Hard Times by Run-D.M.C.

When Run-D.M.C. 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 criticised.

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.

# Hard times Spreading just like the flu

# Watch out, homeboy

# Don't let it catch you. #

When I came in to hip-hop, I was totally captivated

by the greatness of this emcee-deejay presentation thing.

# Hard times. #

I always listened to the live performances of Grandmaster Flash,

Cold Crush Four,

Treacherous Three,

Funky Four Plus One,

Fantastic Five,

all of the real pioneers of hip-hop,

and I couldn't believe the type of messages that they had in there.

You know, Melle 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.

# Hard times

# Are coming to your town

# So stay alert

# Don't let them get you down. #

Run-D.M.C. were black without saying,

"We're black rappers for the black struggle."

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

# Hard times

# Got our pockets all in chains

# I 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 complaining.

# Because I need that dollar every day of the week

# Hard times. #

I felt an overwhelming sense of pride.

Pride in Run-D.M.C.

I thought, "There go my older brothers."

Before Run-D.M.C.,

there was a lot of showmanship, a 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-D.M.C. showed up looking like the B-boys and B-girls

on the corner and showing up with our fashion.

# Hard times

# Can take you on a natural trip. #

That was righteous.

To see that representation,

that felt authentic.

REV RUN: You ain't gonna believe this place.

DMC: Word?

REV RUN: I'm telling you. Come on, you're going to bug.

SECURITY GUARD: Hey, this is a rock and roll museum.

You guys don't belong in here.

ECHOING: 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.

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.

ARCHIVE: We have now won access to public facilities,

to the right to register to vote, to the franchise,

to certain positions of political power.

In the early '80s,

you had these kinds of real signs of hope.

Reverend Jackson raising our sights with his presidential run.

ARCHIVE: We will not be on the outside looking in!

We will be on the inside

and we will be heard!

We will be heard.

CROWD CHANTS: Run, Jesse, run!

Run, Jesse, run!

And he made it seem, for the first time,

possible that we could win a nomination,

let alone the Presidency.

ARCHIVE: 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.

At the same time, there was a large strand of black nationalism.

Minister Farrakhan came out of that base

and began energising a lot of people.

ARCHIVE: 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 organisation,

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."

ARCHIVE: You are a slave!

A dressed up Brooks Brothers alligator-shoe-wearing,

diamond-ring-wearing slave.

After Elijah Muhammad, who was the principal head

of the 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.

ARCHIVE: He has a lot of guts,

and that's what we need,

somebody with guts.

The '80s, to me, was a time of expansion.

At the same time, there were these dark clouds

in the middle of all of that.

ARCHIVE: On September 15th, a young graffiti artist,

25-year-old Michael Stewart, was arrested

for scrawling on the wall of a subway station

at three in the morning.

Stewart's parents and black leaders charged the young man was killed

by a brutal choke hold applied by the transit policemen

who arrested him.

Michael Stewart's death vibrated throughout the city

in such a horrific way.

It wasn't surprising.

I have had my experience with police officers.

There are some that, out of frustration,

have overstepped their power for something that's unnecessary.

Ancl Michael Stewart's death

was obviously an incident that should have been avoided.

ARCHIVE: 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.

It just showed over and over again

that the same playbook was being followed.

Ancl there was a lot of frustration

and a lot of heightened nerves at that time.

The city is still buck wild.

Ancl people perceived someone that's mysteriously writing something

to be threatening.

ARCHIVE: I think we're talking more...

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

And racism didn't end after the '60s.

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.

ARCHIVE: 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 hon our student, was killed.

Ancl guess who killed them?

Not some thugs or gangsters,

but the people we pay to protect us.

You've got all those ills coming at us.

And then decisions are made behind closed doors, in the shadows,

we're going to strip the bottom off of you all.

ARCHIVE: 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.

Reagan is hard on crime.

He launches the war on drugs.

Ancl 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.

ARCHIVE: Today, it 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.

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.

Ancl so the communities that bear the brunt of this

are urban communities.

They are poor and impoverished communities

and they are communities that are disproportionately black and Latino.

Despite our best efforts,

illegal cocaine is coming into our country,

and 4 to 5 million people regularly use it.

Today, there's a new epidemic.

Smokable cocaine, otherwise known as crack.

Crack started out freebase.

They would call it woolie,

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.

I'll never forget - there was a woman that lived in my building,

she was probably the most beautiful woman I ever seen in my life.

I guess she broke up with her husband,

so she moved into the projects.

And crack caught her.

Ancl guys were doing sexual things with this woman for $2 for crack.

She eventually died from it.

So this was destroying the best of the best we had in the community.

I kept hearing about this rock,

and I remember vividly living in Brooklyn,

I'm renting in a nice little brownstone block, right,

but over here is a bodega.

And one day there's a bunch of guys who are hanging out

at the phones all the time.

And these guys were clocking.

You know, they were using the phones and beepers and all that stuff

and that was like, "Whoa!"

You would go outside,

if you never had nothing,

you'd sell crack, you made $300 to $400. $1,000.

$1,000 was like $1,000,000 to a kid in the 'hood.

It was that easy to just walk out your door

and you're going to make money.

And now you fly.

Ancl now you fly, you get the girls,

you get the power.

Ancl then, you know, with all that comes the violence,

comes the prison, the destruction to 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.

In crack cocaine, Reagan has now found a worthy adversary.

This is an enemy that everyone can unite around.

It's dangerous. It's deadly.

It will kill you.

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.

The crack era gave the perfect recipe to not only villainise

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 bourgeoisie,

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 that burst open,

it's cocaine everywhere now.

It's like it's snowfall. Like, whoa.

Like out of nowhere?

It's PETV with your anchors,

Sherelle Winters and Flavor Flav.

Yeah, boy!

Yo, bust a move.

# Here it is

# Bam! In your face.

# Goddamn, this is a dope jam

# But let's define the term called dope

# And you say gimme funky Now, no

# Here is a true tale. #

Public Enemy, when it made Night Of The Living Baseheads,

we wanted to make drugs seem dirty and ugly.

# The problem is this... #

How do you make that kid go,

"Ugh, I don't want to do that"?

# Selling, smelling, sniffing, riffing

# And brothers try to get swift and

# Sell to their own... #

Maybe I learned from the same manner when I was ten and 11

and would have to go to the Bronx with my family

and see some old dude

or some Vietnam War vet shooting up in their arms.

I made sure, in my mind,

I never was going to shoot a needle in my arm

after I saw this cat.

# Go I put this together to

# Rock the bells of those that boost a dose

# Of lack a lack and those that sell to black

# Shame on a brother when he dealing

# The same block where my 98 be wheeling... #

You could say it's not good, but when you say it's ugly

and make you go, ugh,

chances are they ain't going to go there no more.

# Yo, black, yo We are willin'

# 4, 5 '0 clock in the morning.

# Wait a minute, y'all The fiends are fiending... #

Chuck was more than an emcee, he was a teacher.

Flavor Flav was more than just a guy doing dope adlibs in the back.

He was a jester to kind of pull kids in.

The S1Ws represented power and organisation.

Terminator X was your fierce friend that silently had your back.

Ancl Professor Griff was just a zealot about it.

MUSIC: Night Of The Living Baseheads by Public Enemy

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 organiser?

Would I have understood the importance

of going to a historically black college and university?

# Yo, listen, I see it on their faces... #

People like Chuck D were providing an example for me

for how the black "learn".

# Day to day They say no other way

# This stuff is really bad

# I'm talking 'bout bass! B-b-bass b-bass. #

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."

MUSIC CONTINUES

The trick is, you got to hit this topic from angles.

I met with Minister Farrakhan.

He was basically saying that we're all spokes on a wheel

and some people ain't going to listen to him -

they might listen to me,

they might listen to Cube, they might listen to Chuck.

# Listen... #

But as long as we all end up at the same place,

which is the betterment of the world,

it's OK.

# B-b-bass Bass bass 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 defence.

It's our first line of of fence.

VIOLINS PLAY

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.

What do you think their message is?

Life. Black consciousness. Yup.

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.

Ancl 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.

ARCHIVE: Being that we don't have media control

to teach large amounts of people, you know,

how...what we're about or how we act

or how we talk or how we do things,

then rap records are kind of filling that void.

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.

Alll had to do is like, "Boom!"

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

ARCHIVE: I think your line was, you don't write about anything

that makes people dream or makes their penises hard.

CHUCKLES That's fight.

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 mould.

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.

In New York, we had very much divided the 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 into certain neighbourhoods.

You had a mayor at the time, Ed Koch,

who played on those divisions.

ARCHIVE: A lot of the foreigners that have come in have taken in...

...taken over, I should say.

Ancl 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 neighbourhood for so many years

and they're kind of taking over.

In 1986, a 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?

And when I got to the address,

the mother told me, no,

her son and his friend, two friends,

had a car breakdown out in Queens.

And they chased him, saying,

"No niggers allowed in this neighbourhood."

ARCHIVE: 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."

ARCHIVE: It looked like Selma, Alabama in the '60s,

but it was Howard Beach, New York City, today.

CHANTING: Howard Beach, haven't you heard? This is notjohannesburg.

The 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 neighbourhood."

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 rancour and hatred

and hostility toward people because of the colour of their skin.

ARCHIVE: The anger was clear outside a courtroom in the borough of Queens

today, where a judge threw out charges of murder and manslaughter

against three white teenagers accused of assaulting Griffith.

The judge has held our very lives in contempt.

We are tired of our lives being minimised.

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.

MUSIC: Fight The Power by Public Enemy

I remember it 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-D.M.C.

and it comes together,

Fight The Power being the theme.

# We got to fight the powers that be

# Fight the power

# Fight the power

# Fight the power Fight the power

# Fight the power... #

Once you 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 lyrics.

# People, people, we are the same

# No, we're not the same

# Cos 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

# Fight the power

# Fight the power

We've got to find ways to be involved in a multi-layered

struggle, and Fight The Power spoke to all of it.

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

it was a call to action.

# 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... #

Fight The Power still moves me.

The first time I ever heard it was amazing.

The video was amazing.

# Right on Come on... #

If you look at that video, you might see a few of our faces in there,

holding picket signs - angry kids, didn't know where to go, didn't know

where to project our anger at what was going on.

When he called me, we had finished shooting Do The Right Thing.

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

It was going to be just walking through the streets. They were going

to be singing Fight The Power.

Well, you know, it was something I had to do.

# Elvis was a hero to most but he never meant shit to me

# You see, straight out racist, the sucker was simple and plain... #

When Chuck was like, "Elvis was a hero to most

"but he never meant shit to me.

"Racist, the sucker was simple and plain," I was, like,

"You what?!" Like, 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... #

You knew that this is somebody who is not only

speaking about the condition,

but speaking about some solutions that can come.

Right? Like, I'm not just going to talk about blight, I'm going

to talk about the source

of it, I'm going to 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 were actually teaching you shit that you're not going to

learn in schools. This is what we see.

This is what's going on in our neighbourhoods and our areas.

This is the frustrations I feel. This is how maybe I want to fix it.

It's impossible to be apolitical when you were born inside of it

and you're trying to find yourself inside of it.

And that was the '80s in a nutshell.

# Don't believe the hype, everybody Don't believe the hype... #

OK, cut, cut, cut. Cut.

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.

When is it going to stop? I just don't know when it's going to stop.

The two most profound things I've lived through were the HIV

and the crack era.

You know, there's still people walking round with

post-traumatic stress syndrome from the fear.

ARCHIVE: Our recent findings

that children routinely exposed to violence

exhibit the same symptoms that plague combat veterans.

You have the saturation.

When you can watch just so much of this and experience just

so much of this horror,

and I think probably all of us have different tolerance levels,

but there come a point when you're there, and then you're shell shocked.

I would listen to News Radio 88, it's an all-night news station,

and my family lived in an area of Brooklyn which had

a lot of crack activity.

Ancl I would listen and I would hear stories about home invasions

and shoot-outs and stray bullets and I would always call on home to see -

how is everything going over there?

I seen my best friend get shot

and this old man get shot.

How old are you? Five.

You see this every day? Yeah.

Ancl 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-'80s,

is that, in a way,

the best part of it is they documented a certain kind of fear.

Crack. It didn't just happen everywhere. We're not talking about,

you know, Idaho and Iowa.

We're talking about LA, where you have a centralised urban community,

we're talking about in Harlem, New York,

you're talking about Philadelphia, you're talking about South East DC -

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.

I grew up in Oakland, so Oakland has a nice port.

You know, you could come through the San Francisco Bay area,

it also had a nice railroad system as well, and so

those drugs were being allowed in.

Yo, Oakland was so bad at one point, when you went outside...

I grew up on 23rd Ave,

anybody from Oakland know where that's at, and you'll walk outside

and, I swear, you could smell the crack in the air.

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.

Going to LA in the early '80s had always been a lot of fun.

A lot of clubs, there's a lot of funk...parties.

# In these times of hate and pain

# We need a remedy to take us from the rain... #

Now, by '88, '89, it's changing. The gang thing happens.

I remember being in 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 Yankee... Don't wear your blue cap

"and, if you've got red, please don't wear that either."

"You serious?" "I'm serious, yeah, don't."

As in the old clays, the fights are over turf. Our turf? KNOCKS ON FENCE

But now, the turf involves control of a drug market

and the battles are with heavy weapons, to the death.

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.

The actual warfare that is happening between

rival drug distribution networks, that what they'd become,

is being exploited by the police out west, in places like LA,

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.

Walking through a neighbourhood, right?

You are potentially a gangbanger, cos they're able to do it

under the guise of drug intervention and gang prevention.

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.

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.

# 6 in the mornin', police at my door

# Fresh Adidas squeak across the bathroom floor

# Out the back window, I make my escape

# Didn't even get a chance to grab my old-school tape

# Mad with no music but happy cos I'm free

# And the streets to a player is the place to be... #

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,

cos I used to write gangbanger rhymes.

And then, my boy was like, "Say that shit you be saying." "On records?"

"Yeah, say that shit."

So, we made 6 In The Mornin'.

# 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?

# Fucking blue lights, LAPD... #

Ice-T with 6 In The Mornin', he's running from the police because

he doesn't think he's going to 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.

# SWAT team leader yelled hit the floor

# Reached in my pocket, pulled my .44." #

The press said "gangster rap", right?

I was like, "OK, gangster rap,

"and I'm the Original Gangster."

# Broke down an alley, jumped into a car

# Suckers didn't even see us... #

Ice-T would be the one who changed what West Coast rap was going

to be, and that is gangster rap.

# 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.

Chuck's view was more geopolitical. It was more about the world

and I was more about the neighbourhood.

Mine was more about the politics of that city block.

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, cos I'd spent dome time out here

and got more interaction

and then realising, this is not like New York.

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 say, “Yeah, man, that's what they do here

So I started reading up on the history of LA police.

William Parker, who designed the post-war LA Police Department,

hired ex-military and Southerners.

We're talking about a Southern mentality in Parker.

He wants racism and authoritarianism to be wed together.

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've 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 racialised fear, in particular.

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 decisions." 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 40-50% 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.

And Daryl Gates continued the tradition of saying

outrageous things as Chief of Police -

for example that blacks were dying from police officer choke holds

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 go in!

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 going to lead to disastrous results.

It is a war - cops against gangs.

As in a war, the casualties mount every week.

I submit to you that Daryl Gates is causing

the kind of polarisation that is dangerous, that Daryl Gates,

on top of the other difficulties that our community

is experiencing, is exacerbating that problem.

APPLAUSE

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.

# Fuck the police comin' straight from the underground

# A young nigga got it bad cos I'm brown

# Ancl not the other colour so police think

# They have the authority to kill a minority... #

Fuck 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.

# Fuckin' with me cos I'm a teenager

# With a little bit of gold and a pager... #

NWA 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.

# LA, yo, Dre I got somethin' to say

# Fuck the police

# Fuck, fuck, fuck

# Fuck the police

# Fuck, fuck, fuck

# Fuck the police... #

To me, what they rapped about, what was

going on in their neighbourhoods, was reality.

The industry coined it gangsta rap -

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

# Lights start flashin' behind me

# But they're scared of a nigga so they mace me to blind me

# But that shit don't work... #

A song like Fuck Tha Police - coming straight from the underground,

a young nigga got it bad cos I'm brown, not the other colour

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?

If not about the police, you start to recognise that

there are alternative perspectives on the police.

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

You've 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 perspectives.

# I'm tired of the motherfuckin' jackin'

# Sweatin' my gang while I'm chillin' in the shack, and... #

Every single utterance out of the mouths of young black men,

especially in rap music in the '80s and the '90s,

had the tone of resistance.

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

It's like, how can I be better? How can I climb up out of this?

How me and my homies and my girl, my baby mama and my kids,

how we all do well?

We trapped here for real.

# Fuck the police! #

Police said 25-year-old Rodney King

was involved in a high-speed chase

and 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.

|'ma 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 Iem!!!

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

They're beating him with clubs and breaking bones - I mean,

these officers were hitting him till they got tired.

Woo! Hey! We got 'em!

Look what they did to Rodney King, and that soldier,

that warrior, he survived it.

Not guilty of the crime of assault.

I, like many black Americans, was dumbfounded by their 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.

You know, these things were going on - the turmoil, the tension,

the Latasha Harlins shooting had happened after Rodney King.

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 allowed 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.

This grainy security camera videotape graphically depicts

the last few moments of 15-year-old Latasha Harlins' life.

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 Du brings out her gun

and kills Latasha instantly.

The police get there an hour and a half later

and walks over Latasha's body to tend to the person that killed her?

OK.

Right.

A jury convicted Du of voluntary manslaughter.

A presentence report recommended the maximum 16 years,

butjudgejoyce Karl in, on the bench just since July,

imposed probation, a $500 fine - no jail time.

The judge overruled the jury.

Since she didn't look like a killer,

we're just going to 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.

After the verdict, Harlins' family was asked

if this will lead to violence.

Yes, I damn sure hope so,

that were would be all the hell in the black community... I hope somebody would care...

...that would stand up and see this insanity for exactly what it is.

...that you can murder a child... Black people once again

being unjustly treated by this bent system.

...and walk away and stay on the street.

Two different stories -

police beating Rodney King, Asian-American killing Latasha.

But the same outcome, which were all free, acquitted, let go,

go home, enjoy your life.

That's why the city mad.

ANGRY SHOUTING

You fucking piece-of-shit pig! I hope you burn in hell, you bent...

That anger that spilled over was what King was talking about

when he said riots are the language of the unheard.

# Not guilty, the filthy

# Devils tried to kill me... #

I'm going to stay right here.

We're going to see this through, we're going to turn

the process around and we're going to look at the problems.

# Ready for Darryl

# Ancl like Baretta would say

# Keep your eye on the barrel A sparrow

# Don't do the crime if you can't do the time

# But I'm rollin'... #

I could feel the rage and the heat through the TV because I actually

was just in LA and I felt the rage and the heat already brewing.

# Nothing but food for the maggots

# Lunch, punch, Hawaiian, lyin'

# Brothers ain't bu yin' Ya story bore me

# Tearing stuff up with fire Shooters, looters... #

Hip-hop became our political party.

Ancl the artists that spoke to the community the best

are the artists we'd tend to follow.

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

"Look, we're going to fight this thing,

"but let's stop burning down our own neighbourhoods."

# We would a to' this dirty mutha up... #

The riots harmed the black community itself

because...many of 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.

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.

Ancl we see it in the music.

# Didn't get stuck out

# In front of that store with the Nikes and Adidas... #

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.

# Hitting up police killer, the super-duper brother that'll buck

# We had to tear this mutha up... #

There's a political and social context to why

those records existed.

Ancl why those...why those records were popular.

We have no way to vent our, um, frustration out

cos we already at the bottom.

You know, what else can we do?

When this bill is law, we will have

100,000 police officers on the street.

A 20% increase.

It will be used to build prisons,

to keep 100,000 violent criminals off the streets.

# With so much drama in the L-B-C

# It's kind of hard being Snoop D-O-double-G

# But I, somehow, some way

# Keep comin' up with funky-ass hits, like, every single day

# May I...? #

West Coast hip-hop started becoming more prominent.

They were able to reach more people.

That was dope.

# Sippin' on gin and juice, laid back

# With my mind on my money and my money on my mind... #

We're going to ban the sale of this gangster, misogynist rap.

# Sippin' on gin and juice... #

There was a real fear of that black culture being

so potent that it could harm your daughter.

# See, everything is fine when you're listening to the D-O-G

# I got the cultivating music that be captivating he... #

People get bent out of shape,

and for you to take a lot of these lyrics seriously is, like,

you're a fucking idiot.

The song goes on,

"I got my brain on hype,

"tonight'll be your night,

"die, die, die, pig, die."

Catchy little number, isn't it?

# With my mind on my money and my money on my mind

# Later on that day

# My homie Dr Dre came through with a gang of Tanqueray

# And a fat ass...of some bubonic that made me choke

# This ain't no joke I had to back up off of it

# And sit my cup down, Tanqueray and, yeah, I'm tore down now

# But it ain't no stoppin', cause I'm still poppin'

# And Dre got some tricks from the city of Compton

# To serve me, not with a cherry on top

# Cos when I get through I gotsta hit the dope spot... #