PHOTO ESSAY

Rebel Yells

A protest music mixtape

By Matthew McKinnon

August 12, 2005

911 Is a Joke, Public Enemy

(Fear of a Black Planet, 1990)

Though it’s hard to believe now (see: Lloyd Banks, the Game, etc.), protest language used to dominate hip-hop lyricism. Rap’s first crossover hit, Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five’s The Message (1982), described a litany of social maladies affecting inner cities. Six years later, Boogie Down Productions implored listeners to Stop the Violence. A year after that, NWA urged their audience to F--- tha Police.

No one, though, talked tougher than Public Enemy. PE’s Fight the Power (1989) remains hip hop’s greatest call to action. By the Time I Get to Arizona (1991) threatened violence against the state government of Arizona, which had a long history of failing to commemorate Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.

In 911 Is a Joke, funnyman Flavor Flav dropped his smile to tear into emergency services workers who would stall, or even refuse, to respond to distress calls from black neighbourhoods. “Now I dialed 9-1-1 a long time ago / Don’t you see how late they reactin’? / They only come, and they come when they wanna / So get the morgue truck an’ embalm the goner.”

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