Recording and Production
The Bomb Squad, Public Enemy's production team, constructed the music of "Fight the Power" using numerous samples by looping, layering, and transfiguring them. The track utilizes only two actual instrumentalists, saxophonist Branford Marsalis and Terminator X, the group's DJ and turntabilist, who provides the scratches. Marsalis played a saxophone solo for the song's extended soundtrack version. In contrast to Marsalis' school of thought, members of The Bomb Squad such as Chuck D and Hank Schocklee approach their music eschewing melodic clarity and harmonic coherence for crafting a specific mood in the composition. Instead of the instrumental "virtousity" valued in jazz and classical, Shocklee argued that their musicianship was dependant on different tools, exercised in a different medium, and inspired by different cultural priorities. Marsalis later remarked on the group's unconventional musicality, stating:
They're not musicians, and don't claim to be—which makes it easier to be around them. Like, the song's in A minor or something, then it goes to D7, and I think, if I remember, they put some of the A minor solo on the D7, or some of the D7 stuff on the A minor chord at the end. So it sounds really different. And the more unconventional it sounds, the more they like it.As with other songs, they recontextualized various samples and placed them so they would complement the vocals and the mood of "Fight the Power". For percussive sounds, the Bomb Squad placed them either ahead of or behind the beat to create either a feeling of easiness or tension. Elements such as Marsalis' solo were reworked so that it would, as Shocklee viewed, signify something different from if there was harmonic coherence. The Bomb Squad layered parts of Marsalis' D minor improvisations over the song's B♭7 groove, and vice versa. Of their production on the song, American musicologist Robert Walser wrote that the solo "has been carefully reworked into something that Marsalis would never think to play, because Schocklee's goals and premises are different from his."
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MThe ACCUSING SPIRIT which flew up to heaven’s chancery with the oath, blush’d as he gave it in;—and the RECORDING ANGEL as he wrote it down, dropp’d a tear upon the word, and blotted it out for ever.”
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“An art whose limits depend on a moving image, mass audience, and industrial production is bound to differ from an art whose limits depend on language, a limited audience, and individual creation. In short, the filmed novel, in spite of certain resemblances, will inevitably become a different artistic entity from the novel on which it is based.”
—George Bluestone, U.S. educator, critic. “The Limits of the Novel and the Limits of the Film,” Novels Into Film, Johns Hopkins Press (1957)