In our weekly series, we revisit some of our favorite music movies—from artist docs and concert films to biopics and fictional fantasies—that are available to stream or rent digitally. Spoilers ahead.
On May 31st, as protests against police brutality broke out across the United States, Spike Lee tweeted out a short film called 3 Brothers. The 94-second video mixes footage from one of the most charged moments of Do the Right Thing—three cops brutally strangling Radio Raheem, a neighborhood fixture in the 1989 film—with clips from the final moments of George Floyd and Eric Garner, who were also asphyxiated by police. Despite one of these deaths being fictional, the combined footage is hauntingly kindred. The three Black men are each swarmed and pinned by white policemen. They are all choked, their bodies slowly, pointlessly emptied of breath. They all die.
Do the Right Thing is frequently revisited when police kill Black men, by viewers and by Lee himself. But the beauty of the film is that its bleakest sequence is tethered to the depth and majesty of every frame that surrounds it. Rather than “a mirror to our society,” as former President Obama once described it, I think of Do the Right Thing as a life-sized snow globe. As much as Lee shakes and agitates the movie’s tense and fractious Bed-Stuy block, it is obvious that he cherishes this tiny, eccentric world. Few films since have matched its lush celebration of Black life or dared to pair such intense rapture with equally complex rage. Do the Right Thing is a fever dream of Black ire and Black nationalism.
Before there’s any death, there’s an abundance of life. The film’s plot is indulgently loose. Mookie, played by an aloof Lee, wanders the neighborhood on the hottest day of the year, delivering pizzas for local slice shop Sal’s. As he interacts with his neighbors and friends, as well as shop owner Sal and his sons, the film becomes a river system of in-jokes, squabbles, and simmering tensions that resonate no matter how far they stray from the main current. At its core, Do the Right Thing is a hangout movie.
Lee justifies this meandering by imbuing the block of Do the Right Thing with a teeming vitality. He has an intense and baroque fixation on setting. Characters are given colorful nicknames like Buggin Out, Mother Sister, and Sweet Dick Willie, conveying the intimacy of the neighborhood. Dialogue is stuffed with distinct cultural references, from “tender-headed” Black women to Italians who love Black people but not their Blackness. Surfaces—from a Larry Bird jersey on a white guy’s shoulders to the Keith Sweat poster in a local radio studio to graffiti declaring “Tawana told the truth”—transmit allegiances and connections.
The film’s main conflict stems from one surface in particular, the “wall of fame” at Sal’s. Exclusively featuring Italian-Americans like Robert DeNiro and Frank Sinatra, despite its location in a majority-Black neighborhood, the wall and Sal’s insistence that Black people have no claim to its contents drive the major events of Do the Right Thing. That this minor, hyper-local rift swells into a neighborhood divide and eventually a death is a testament to how meticulously the film’s world is constructed.
The score is fundamental to making that provincial outlook work. The film starts with a rueful sax playing the Black national anthem, “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” before cutting into four action-packed minutes of a more vital theme: “Fight the Power.” Written and recorded by Public Enemy for the film, the song is Do the Right Thing’s thesis. Lee originally wanted PE leader Chuck D to participate in a rap version of “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” but according to PE producer Hank Shocklee, the group insisted that the song had to fit Brooklyn. “We were in Spike’s office on DeKalb Avenue in Brooklyn, by a busy intersection,” recalled Shocklee. “I pulled down his window, stuck his head out, and was like: ‘Yo man, you’ve got to think about this record as being something played out of these cars going by.’”
That emphasis on presence and range ended up defining the song. Inspired by the Isley Brothers’ 1975 funk number “Fight the Power (Pt. 1 & 2),” Public Enemy built their version into a supercut of Black style and power. Blending funk, soul, and rap, the song explodes with textures, from its delirious thicket of rhythms to its manic scratches to Chuck D’s furious poise. Yet it’s also perfectly clarion, condensing all that chaos into a lucid missive: Fight the fucking powers that be. It’s a jam and a war cry.
Lee mines the richness of the song throughout Do the Right Thing, starting with Rosie Perez’s flawless choreography in the opening credits. Perez’s Tina is one of the film’s more underwritten characters, but in the title sequence, she feels like its centerpiece. Her performance is breathtaking and slyly subversive, taking PE’s notorious machismo and channeling it through a woman’s body, forever changing it. As Perez pops, locks, boogies, and shimmies with abandon and intensity, “Fight the Power” feels like an anthem for anyone willing to enlist.
No one is more down than Radio Raheem. Played by the late Bill Nunn as a living statue of a man, Radio Raheem struts around the neighborhood with a quiet but visible dignity, saying little but always blasting “Fight the Power” from a massive boombox. The song, like Raheem, is both a dominating force and a kind of quaint neighborhood fixture. Its volume fluctuates as Raheem comes and goes, loud when he’s in the frame and fading as he leaves. To see it or him as a threat is to not see them at all. He’s not a menace or even a provocateur. He’s smitten, a point made clear when another character asks why he exclusively plays Public Enemy. “I don’t like nothing else!” he explains. Though the neighborhood is not enthusiastic about Radio Raheem’s fascination with this one song, it accepts him.
That sense of belonging is what makes “Fight the Power” feel so essential to Do the Right Thing’s story. Lee has a canny sense of hip-hop’s tenuous relationship with everything around it, especially in the New York City of Edward Koch. In the late ’70s and throughout the ’80s, Koch was a combative and coarse mayor on virtually every issue, but Black New Yorkers felt especially taken aback by his tendency to equivocate when asked to address the city’s ambient anti-Blackness. Hip-hop emerged during his stormy tenure, and the burgeoning culture drew the mayor’s scorn in an outsized way. Koch’s absurd scapegoating is on full display in the 1983 documentary Style Wars, where he characterizes graffiti as “destroying our lifestyle” and suggests jail time for its artists. “Black people in New York had one of their roughest periods when Ed Koch was the mayor of the city,” wrote Chuck D in his memoir, Fight the Power. “From my vantage point, he didn’t give a fuck about the Black situation in New York at all.”
Do the Right Thing is dedicated to multiple Black victims of racist violence during the Koch era, from graffiti artist Michael Stewart, who was beaten and choked by transit police into a coma, to Michael Griffith, who was lynched by a white mob that chased him out of a pizza shop and onto a Brooklyn freeway where he was struck by a car; both events inspired the film. What’s resonant about Do the Right Thing is that the tail never wags the dog. While Lee suffuses the film’s events with the very real atmospheric racism and contempt that characterizes the period, he never loses sight of the structures that enable them or the resilience of the people that weather the bullshit. Because of its multi-hued cast of Black, Italian, Puerto Rican, Caribbean, and Korean characters and admittedly, the scene about racist stereotypes, the movie is sometimes read as an “everyone is racist” off-color kumbaya, but Lee is ultimately concerned with Black dispossession.
It’s telling that before Radio Raheem is murdered, he loses his stereo. That boombox is one of the neighborhood’s few Black possessions that isn’t clothing or jewelry. It plays a song that you probably won’t hear on the very pro-Black but frankly old-school local radio station. It speaks for a guy whose size and skin color likely tend to cast him as dangerous. So when Sal, a white guy from a distant part of Brooklyn, takes a baseball bat to the box as “Fight the Power” blares from its speakers, he’s silencing a voice and a people that have no other tangible claim to their neighborhood.
When the cops show up and make that symbolic death literal, Mookie severs himself from Sal’s by tossing a garbage can through the front window. The neighborhood then follows, swarming Sal’s and lighting it on fire. It feels like they’re taking it back. As the restaurant burns, “Fight the Power” plays one final time. We first hear it as the camera crawls along the floor, as if searching. It sounds muffled; the percussion is fainter than usual, as are Chuck D and Flavor Flav’s voices. But when the camera finds the wreckage of the boombox, the song regains its strength, eventually returning to full volume when a character pins a picture of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X to the shop’s crumbling walls. The legacy of the song and this sequence suggests that the fight, when shared by a community, always outlasts the power.
Rent Do the Right Thing on Amazon, iTunes, or YouTube
Further viewing: Boyz n the Hood (stream on Showtime), Just Another Girl on I.R.T. (rent on Amazon), Menace II Society (rent on YouTube)
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