http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KI-FTdtg1k8

“Brothers Gonna Work It Out”

Twenty-five years ago Public Enemy brought hip-hop into the mainstream. Before the bling-and-ho silliness of more recent hip-hop, Public Enemy was delivering dispatches from the front. If you want to see the trajectory of the concern for social justice in youth culture over the last few decades, Public Enemy is a good place to gain some perspective. If you wonder why white suburban kids listen to hip-hop, it starts right here.

It’s impossible to convey here the cultural significance of hip-hop. But it is worth emphasizing that its roots run very deep into the oppressive conditions of poverty, and hip-hop, like gospel, blues, and jazz before it, is the musical response to the temptations of despair. The sampling that most characterizes hip-hop is suggestive of the necessity to pull together whatever spare materials are available in the rubble of urban life; in this case, primarily old vinyl records and still-functioning turntables in a world that had already gone digital. In the early days, the samples were primarily from 1970s funk, which made it easy to pick up the beat as a thread through otherwise unfamiliar territory.

Public Enemy, unfortunately, made cumbersome videos that got in the way of the music, so I’ve excluded them here in favor of audio tracks. The track up top, “Brothers Gonna Work It Out” is probably not the one most people think of when they remember Public Enemy: it would more likely be “Fight the Power” or “911 Is a Joke,” both included after the jump. But I’ve posted it first because it may be their best work. The album from which it and the other two tracks are taken, Fear of a Black Planet, was added to the Library of Congress’s National Recording Registry in 2005. When I was searching YouTube for the version with the best sound quality, I noticed that a lot of the comments from various postings of it said something along the lines of, “the best hip-hop recording ever.”

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Tom Waits released a new album a couple of weeks ago, Bad as Me. A friend recently described his music as “a circus cabaret — or an animal burlesque show.” Above is the cold open of the best indie movie set in New Orleans you’ve probably never seen, Jim Jarmusch’s Down By Law. Waits is singing “Jockey Full of Bourbon” on the soundtrack, and that’s him appearing as a drunken hipster crawling into bed at 6 am. (You can listen to the entire song here to experience uninterrupted Marc Ribot’s hard-luck guitar — not to mention that voodoo wood block .) If you hit the play button on this clip, be sure to watch all four minutes and four seconds of it to get the full effect.

After the jump, another scene from Down By Law featuring Waits. Roberto Begnini plays Bob, a displaced Italian felon who can recite long passages from Walt Whitman by heart and in Italian. After that, Waits reading Charles Bukowski’s “The Laughing Heart.” After that, the first video from Bad as Me, “Satisfied.” Review of the album in the Guardian here

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