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Yo! Rap Gets on the Map

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Spike Lee knew just the right thing. While shooting his racially charged movie Do the Right Thing last year, the director realized how crucial it was to find appropriate music for the song that ignites the film's climactic riot scene. "I wanted it to be defiant, I wanted it to be angry, I wanted it to be very rhythmic," says Lee. "I thought right away of Public Enemy."

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Word, Spike. Few groups pulsate with more in-your-face aggression than the four young black men known as Public Enemy, rap music's self-proclaimed "prophets of rage." For the sound track, they concocted Fight the Power, a swaggering mixture of combustive rhythms and rebellious rhymes ("Got to give us what we want/ Got to give us what we need/ Our freedom of speech is freedom or death/ We got to fight the powers that be"). 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 ghettoes. For these listeners, rap in general, and Public Enemy in particular, is more than entertainment -- more, even, than an expression of their alienation and resentments. It is a major social force.

"Rap is the rock 'n' roll of the day," says pop-music publicist Bill Adler. "Rock 'n' roll was about attitude, rebellion, a big beat, sex and, sometimes, social comment. If that's what you're looking for now, you're going to find it here." The basic sound, propelled by a slamming polyrhythmic beat, is loud and raw. The lyrics, a raucous stew of street-corner bravado and racial boosterism, are often salted with profanity, and sometimes with demeaning remarks about whites, women and gays. The fact that they are delivered by young, self-consciously arrogant black men in a society where black youths make many whites uneasy doesn't help either.

Nevertheless, rap -- hip-hop to its true fans -- has grown into the most exciting development in American pop music in more than a decade. Nearly a third of the records currently on Billboard's chart of the top 100 black albums are by rap artists. The biggest pop single of 1989 was a rap song by Tone-Loc, Wild Thing, which sold more than 2 million copies.

Not bad for a genre that got its start as renegade street music back in the mid-1970s. Turned off by the blandness of disco and the slickness of rhythm and blues, disk jockeys in black dance clubs began manipulating their turntables to blend instrumental riffs from different songs, dragging the needle across a record to create an even harsher sound. While these brash mixes played, M.C.s, or rappers, would exhort the crowd with chants: "When I die, bury me deep;/ Put two speakers at my feet,/ A mixer at my head,/ So that when you close the casket/ I can rock the dead."

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