Power, Lost and Found: America At Century’s End 541acted videos, and lots of dancing. Perhaps no one took advantage of MTV
like Michael Jackson, who became the biggest sensation with his video for
“Thriller.” Soon, MTV dominated the music industry. Acts now had to try
to get videos on television more than songs played on radio, and MTV
branched out to take over the world, with channels in Brazil, Canada, China,
France, Germany, Holland, India, Italy, Japan, Korea, Poland, Romania, Russia,
Southeast Asia, and Taiwan, among other places. For performers doing protest
songs in punk or folk, MTV was a death knell. Songs of social significance
were not going to get airtime on a corporate TV station.
That did not stop young African Americans from creating the most overt-
ly radical political music form of the generation though, Hip Hop. Hip Hop,
according to Afrika Bambaataa, one of the first acts to become known, was a
combination of rapping, breakdancing, DJing, and graffiti art; rapping, a form
of poetry using fast rhythms and often-political themes, broke through, and
the music soon just came to be known as Rap. The first rap song to get into
the public consciousness was “The Message,” a story of urban decay and rac-
ism by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. The song, and video, told a
story of joblessness, despair, drugs, and police brutality. “Broken glass every-
where,” it opened, “People pissin’ on the stairs/You know they just don’t
care/I can’t take the smell/Can’t take the noise/Got no money to move out/I
guess I got no choice.” Describing the desolate state of urban American, rap-
per Melle Mel concluded, “Don’t push me/Cause I’m close to the edge/I’m
trying/Not to lose/My head/It’s like a jungle sometimes/It makes me won-
der/How I keep from goin’ under.”
Taking their cue from “The Message,” other acts emerged to create angri-
er and more political songs Ice T created huge controversy with his song “Cop
Killer,” which critics said encouraged people to shoot at police and led to
boycotts of his records. Ironically, Woody Guthrie’s “Pretty Boy Floyd” had
the same message and is considered a legendary song. No group, however,
made the political impact of Public Enemy [PE], fronted by Chuck D, who had
met the songwriter Hank Shocklee at a Black Panther summer camp when
they were kids. Together, they created the most powerful cultural attack on
Reaganism in that era. Their albums “Fear of a Black Planet” and “It Takes a
Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back,” became hits, and their songs broke
through for airplay on urban radio stations [though rarely on MTV]. Public
Enemy sang about police brutality, racism, the military, and other issues rele-