IT TAKES A NATION OF MILLIONS

TO HOLD US BACK
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It Takes a Nation of Millions to
Hold Us Back

Christopher R. Weingarten
 2010
The Continuum International Publishing Group Inc
80 Maiden Lane, New York, NY 10038

The Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd

The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX
www.continuumbooks.com

Copyright © 2010 by Christopher R. Weingarten

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a

retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written
permission of the publishers.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Weingarten, Christopher R.
It takes a nation of millions to hold us back / Christopher R.
Weingarten.
p. cm. —(33 1/3)
Includes bibliographical references.
eISBN-13: 978-1-4411-4284-9
1. Public Enemy
(Musicalgroup). It takes a nation of millions to hold us back. I.
Title. II.
Series.

ML421.P82W45 2010
782.421649092’2—dc22

Typeset by Pindar NZ, Auckland, New Zealand

Printed in the United States of America
 Table of Contents

1. “Yes . . . The rhythm, the rebel”

2. “This is a sampling sport”

3. “Back . . . Caught you looking for the same thing”

4. “Beat is the father of your rock ’n’ roll”

5. “Consider yourselves warned”

6. “All in, we’re gonna win”

7. “Def Jam tells you who I am”

8. “Here we go again”

Works cited

Special Thanks

Notes
 Chapter One –
“Yes . . . The rhythm, the rebel”

The greatest anti-government record ever made was kicked into funky
gear by a military parade. The heartbeat of Public Enemy’s It Takes a
Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back was officially defibrillated around
1951, within earshot of martial feet clomping on the Tennessee tarmac. At
about 8 or 9 years old, Chattanooga native Clyde Stubblefield attended an
Armed Forces parade after school. He heard the snapping, popping snares
and was hooked. As he marched home to beat on boxes and tin cans, he
took the first steps in changing America’s booty muscles and brain tissue.
By 1965, Stubblefield was the percolating rhythm technician backing
the Godfather himself, James Brown, tip-tapping along the equator of the
most rhythmically adventurous band around. Stubblefield wasn’t the
backbone of the James Brown Orchestra; he was more like its circulatory
system. His grooves didn’t drive the band so much as they floated between
the percussive horn stabs with a delicate interweave, filling in the gaps
between the grooves, a style no drummer has come close to duplicating.
“We all know how to jam,” said Stubblefield, “but to keep from getting up
on somebody else’s pattern, that’s hard to do.”1 Two decades later, when
Public Enemy were layering sample after sample on top of his beats, they
had to adopt the same philosophy, lining up complementary frequencies so
their frenetic collages never got muddy. “We didn’t just put something in
there to put it in there,” said co-producer Keith Shocklee. “Ours had a
science to it.”2
By the late ’60s, every James Brown single graced by Stubblefield
introduced a tricky new contraption: the fluid yet jerky waves and crests of
“Cold Sweat,” his favorite beat; the hyperkinetic drum-’n’-bass
jackhammering of “I Got the Feeling”; the labyrinthine stutter step of “Give
It Up or Turnit a Loose.” They were beats that were works of architecture,
calculated with the same meticulous planning used to erect beams in a
curvy Frank Gehry building. Before each session, Stubblefield would
construct patterns in his head, trying to invent a unique rhythm for each
song. But ask him to play his most famous drum break, and he probably
couldn’t do it.
Born on November 20, 1969, in a studio in Cincinnati, “Funky
Drummer” was never really about a drummer, as it’s mostly a tenor sax solo
and lots of Brown’s unheralded organ work. It was essentially a jam
session, an extended riff that Brown and his band would bang out as a
stopgap between the big singles. For the recording “Funky Drummer,” they
gathered at King Studios for a session of “not playing.” As Stubblefield
said, “You just go into the studio and start up a groove and that’s it.”3 Play a
groove, split it between two sides of vinyl, see if it sticks. Brown spends
this particular session of “not playing” by ad-libbing and shouting. Being
Brown, pretty much everything he said — from band directions to winded
exhalations — has since been regarded as funky gospel.
Brown opens with “Pull back the cover . . . The shades . . . Good God,
it’s a raid.” As Public Enemy tracks like “Party for Your Right to Fight”
teach, the FBI and local police were routinely raiding the California Black
Panther Party in 1969, encouraged by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and his
disruptive covert operations program COINTELPRO. Two weeks after
“Funky Drummer” was recorded, the Chicago Police Department would
raid the Black Panthers’ Chicago chapter, killing Fred Hampton and Mark
Clark at point-blank range.
Brown continues: “Honky Tonk Women . . . is all I need . . .” — a nod
to his good friends the Rolling Stones. They had topped the pop charts with
“Honky Tonk Women” a few months earlier — the same time that Brown
and Stubblefield were topping the R&B chart with “Mother Popcorn,” twin
totems of youth culture circa 1969, ruling a nation bursting with Vietnam
paranoia. Two songs from men claiming to like their women bold and
proud, strong enough to heave you over their shoulder. Coincidentally, the
Stones’ “Honky Tonk Women,” like Brown/Stubblefield songs of the era,
opens with a drum break that would be appropriated by hip-hop producers
in the 1980s.
About four and a half minutes into “Funky Drummer,” Brown gives
listeners a quick and dirty primer on Stubblefield’s many achievements.
“Fellas! One more time, I wanna give the drummer some of this funky soul
we got here.” The “one more time” is because Brown had already given the
drummer some on the chart-topping “Cold Sweat” two summers earlier.
“You don’t have to do any soloing, brother, just keep what you got. Don’t
turn it loose” — as in “Give It Up or . . .” — “‘cause it’s a mother” — as in
“Mother Popcorn.” “When I count to four, I want everybody to lay out and
let the drummer go . . . A-ONE-TWO-THREE-FOUR-GETTIT.”
Stubblefield, on his own, tumbles along with the same beat he’s been
kicking downhill for five and a half minutes. “I didn’t actually care about
the beat,” he later said. “People ask me to play ‘Funky Drummer’ all the
time, and I really don’t know how it goes. It was just something I put
together at that moment.”4 This wasn’t a painstakingly crafted Stubblefield
Beat created through heavy brainstorming but an effortless rhythm that just
came naturally. It was what he was feeling in his body that particular day,
what he felt while “not playing,” caught a little off guard. The now famous
syncopated pulse-gallop rattles like the sounds Stubblefield absorbed during
his childhood in Chattanooga: the compressed air he would hear boom-
banging from the smokestack of the local factory, the locomotives he would
hear rumbling around the bowl-shaped city. Ticka-ticka-takk.

***

“Y’all suck, get the fuck off the stage!”

Public Enemy were onstage at the Latin Quarter in New York in March
of 1987 — the group’s first time performing in Manhattan. Between 1984
and 1988, the Latin Quarter was a Times Square club that served as the
incubator for hip-hop’s golden era. On any given night, the place would be
packed to the gills with famous MCs, hungry record-label reps and the
future pioneers of hip-hop, swarming together from every borough. Public
Enemy had driven from Long Island stuffed inside the unreliable, smoke-
belching yellow-and-white Chevy that frontman Chuck D had borrowed
from his dad. This was the very first promotional show for Public Enemy’s
debut album, Yo! Bum Rush the Show, and no one in the crowd was really
ready for what they were seeing: big beats, a throttling baritone and a bunch
of guys parading around onstage with plastic Uzis. “Get them clowns off
the stage,” the voice boomed.
The heckler was first-wave hip-hopper Grandmaster Melle Mel of the
Furious Five, the “Message”-belting pioneer of political rhymes and one of
Chuck’s all-time favorite rappers. According to Latin Quarter manager DJ
Paradise, Melle Mel saw the guns and freaked out: “We’re supposed to be
stopping the violence! That shit ain’t hip-hop!”5 According to Chuck, Melle
Mel thought that Public Enemy was somehow entangled in Bronx belter
KRS-One’s beef with the Queens-based Juice Crew. Either way, Chuck had
always admired the power of Melle Mel’s voice — and right now it was
carrying some less-than-complimentary words all the way from the back of
the room.
This wasn’t the first time they got dissed. A month earlier, the
influential radio DJ Mr. Magic famously heckled their loping, droning,
head-blowing debut single, “Public Enemy No. 1.” He played the record on
NYC station WBLS exactly once, adding his own commentary about how
the beat was dope, but the rap was wack. “I guarantee you, no more music
by these suckers,” he said, punctuating his statement by smashing the
record on the air. Public Enemy MC/hypeman Flavor Flav had been primed
to hear his song on the radio with has tape recorder at the ready. He ended
up capturing the rant, and P.E. would immortalize Magic’s ill
communications on the opening of Nation of Millions track “Cold Lampin’
with Flavor.” Their “pro-black radical mix” was being snubbed by black
radio.
Beyond that, Bum Rush was kind of dated. Columbia was distributing
their label, Def Jam, and Public Enemy had fallen into the gears of the
major-label machine. Bruce Springsteen’s live box set pushed back the
Beastie Boys, and the Beastie Boys pushed back Public Enemy. Meanwhile,
hip-hop wasn’t going to wait for anyone. It was reinventing itself every six
months, and by spring of 1987 it had made quantum leaps since P.E.
recorded the album way back in August 1986. Digital samplers, which
could capture a few seconds of sound off an existing record, were becoming
commonplace. Producer Marley Marl was already the undisputed king,
snatching a few essential milliseconds off the Honey Drippers’ soul classic
“Impeach the President” for MC Shan’s “The Bridge.” He chopped up the
individual drum hits on his E-Mu synthesizer, replayed them back on the
sample pads and layered the spacious break with storm clouds of noise and
echo. In 1987, soul and funk samples became the new building blocks for
rap music. Tempos became quicker and peppy drum licks zipped around the
sluggish elephant stomps of 1986’s DMX drum machines. Public Enemy
were a throwback before they had a chance.
 Bum Rush lurched out of the gate to sell about 100,000 copies that year
— the least successful album at the time for a label pulling platinum
plaques with the Beasties and LL Cool J. Chuck D and Hank Shocklee,
leader of Public Enemy production crew the Bomb Squad, went to a
throwdown at Old Westbury University in New York and heard the tides
change without them. They heard Eric B and Rakim’s “I Know You Got
Soul,” a lean monorail of a track featuring a Funkadelic break and a spindly
Bobby Byrd sample, which were both totally dominated by the “serious as
cancer” tone of MC Rakim. He juggled his syllables with a goldsmith’s
attention to detail, spilling out a rhythmic complexity that left competitors
gasping for air. Sure, Bum Rush rocked bells harder than LL, but it was still
a time capsule from 1986, a lumbering rock record based around booming
beats and fanciful boasts. Rakim on “I Know You Got Soul” was Ali
gracefully dancing around the ring, while Bum Rush tracks like “Miuzi
Weighs a Ton” were like body slams from a professional wrestler. “It was
frightening,” recounted Chuck. “I looked at Hank, he looked back at me,
and the DJ must’ve played this record 60 times. I was like, ‘Hank, that’s the
greatest record.’ We was fuckin’ mad. We left Old Westbury University
pissed.”6 Indeed, nothing changed the dynamic of hip-hop that year like
Marley’s production on “I Know You Got Soul.” Planet Rock was ready to
abandon ye olde boom-bap for the sleek stick-and-move of funk breaks.
Everyone wanted to have soul. Said Chuck in his autobiography: “‘I Know
You Got Soul’ . . . was the most incredible rap record I ever heard. I was
fanatical being a rap fan and pissed by being a competitor, because I knew
we didn’t have anything to go up against that. And it was coming from the
same camp that was dissing me, saying I sounded old. Hank and I got
together and said, ‘We have to do some wild shit.’”7
Hank Shocklee was what his bandmates called “the mastermind, the con
man, the talker, the brain.”8 He had hundreds of theories about frequencies
and sound and recording, when to create consonance and when to revel in
dissonance. He had knowledge of how acoustics work. He had no trouble
telling you that you were wack. And so he aligned his troops, preparing to
hunker down at 510 South Franklin St. in Hempstead, Long Island. This
had been Chuck and Hank’s recording studio and war room since 1982, the
days when the duo were making mixes to play on the Super Spectrum Mix
Hour, their pioneering radio show on Adelphi University station WBAU.
 Hank’s brother Keith was the record vulture of the group. Their studio
was basically two rooms of records, and Keith could navigate them better
than anyone. Back in 1981, Hank, Keith and the MC known as “Chuckie
D” were a mobile Long Island DJ crew known as Spectrum City. The crew
was involved in the Intermetro Record Pool, a club that helped DJs get the
latest records. Being a lesser-known crew and on one of the lower rungs on
the totem pole, they would usually get armloads of wack “post-disco disco”
records. It was Keith’s job to listen to those records and separate the party-
starting wheat from the floor-clearing chaff. They would catalog the albums
using a Dewey Decimal-style system that Chuck invented, including labels
by artist, title, label, beats per minute and crowd reaction. By the time the
crew started making bold sample collages in 1987, Keith could point to all
the right records in this more-than-10,000-slab-deep library, each one
occupying a distinct part of his memory bank like guitar chords or drum
rudiments.
The third member of the Squad was Eric “Vietnam” Sadler —
nicknamed so because he would always be spotted wearing fatigues and
sunglasses. Sadler was the musician, a veteran of Long Island funk bands
who wound up downstairs at 510 South Franklin after his mom kicked his
band out of her basement. After Public Enemy moved in, Sadler ended up
joining the crew, playing synths and programming tricky drum patterns as if
they were live drums. Sadler played the mediator who would translate the
group’s expressionist ideas into language that a tech-minded studio engineer
could understand. As Hank chipped away at the line between music and
noise, it was Sadler who always spoke up when two samples were out of
tune, a bass line wasn’t in the right key or a beat was too far beyond
rhythm. Accordingly, the two would spar over Hank’s methods, which often
reveled in the sounds, vibrations and tensions of dissonance.
The fourth and final member of the Bomb Squad was listed in the liner
notes as Carl Ryder. “Ryder” was Chuck himself, sporting a play on his
God-given name Carlton Ridenhour. It was a pseudonym he’d used since
his days of doing sports reporting on WBAU. Chuck felt that giving “Chuck
D” an extra credit on an album’s liner notes would be too self-serving. Plus,
an additional name made their posse look even thicker.
However, by all accounts, the song they were about to unleash was
Chuck and Hank’s baby. A month after Bum Rush dropped, right after “I
Know You Got Soul” set everything in motion, they were on the defensive,
ready to create something people couldn’t ignore. Marley Marl treated his
sampler like a well-oiled machine, full of crisp breaks and sharp, jabbing
riffs. But with “Rebel without a Pause,” the Bomb Squad were out to make
organized chaos, dog-piling samples into a mind-rattling mess. Hank and
Keith had lived next to musicians when they were kids on Long Island, and
every day they would wait outside their garage waiting for them to play.
Hank said this ritual helped him learn the intricacies of what made a good
band work. In turn, he would have the members of the Bomb Squad tap
their samples in by hand. While Marley let his sampler do the heavy lifting,
Public Enemy jammed in the studio like James Brown’s band, creating
natural tensions and queasiness when things didn’t line up perfectly, a push-
and-pull that by comparison made most hip-hop sound clinical and safe.
Hank’s vision demanded layers and layers until you couldn’t tell what was a
sample and what was a drum machine. “We never would have the ‘Impeach
the President’ snare laid out there all naked,” said Hank. “Marley Marl
would have that snare butt-naked.”9
This was battle music made by a band that was feeling abandoned by the
industry and frustrated by record-label politics. They felt ignored by other
musicians because of the stigma of their being DJs instead of dudes who
caressed instruments, as well as ignored by hip-hip because they were from
Long Island and not from Queens or the boogie-down Bronx.
More important, Public Enemy were feeling like public enemy No. 1,
men in the crosshairs as mid-’80s New York exploded with incidents of
racial violence. In the four months leading up to the recording of “Rebel
without a Pause,” the Big Apple poured salt on old wounds and opened
some fresh ones:
• New York was boiling over the Howard Beach incident of December
1986, when three African-American men were brutally assaulted by a
gang of white teenagers. In April 1987, Police Commissioner Benjamin
Ward warned that racial violence could erupt throughout the summer. A
group of 400 African-Americans marched through a Hassidic
neighborhood in Brooklyn, claiming harassment by the local community.
• In 1984, 66-year-old mentally ill African-American woman Eleanor
Bumpers was reluctant to be evicted from her Bronx apartment, arming
herself with a 10-inch kitchen knife and lunging at a policeman. In an
attempt to subdue her, white officer Stephen Sullivan ended up killing her
 with two shotgun blasts. In February 1987, the officer was acquitted of all
charges.
• In 1983, 25-year-old African-American graffiti artist Michael Stewart was
arrested on charges of tagging the Union Square subway station. Stewart
was punched and kicked by the officers, according to conflicting reports.
He lapsed into a coma while in custody and died 13 days later. The six
officers charged with his death were acquitted. In March 1987, despite
much public outcry, the Metropolitan Transit Authority decided that ten of
the 11 transit police involved wouldn’t face any departmental charges.
• In 1985, white electrician Bernhard Goetz shot four African-American
teenagers with a .38 revolver, paralyzing one, after they approached him
on the subway. In the weeks leading up to April 1987, the state supreme
court was assembling the predominately white jury that would eventually
acquit him.
• Bronx resident Larry Davis wounded six white police officers that came to
arrest him on suspicion of the murders of four suspected drug dealers.
After Davis slid out a back window and eluded capture for 17 days, The
New York Times reported that he was regarded as a local “folk hero” in a
climate of police brutality. When he was finally captured, “tenants who
had lain low during an all-night police siege threw open their windows and
erupted into cheers: ‘Lar-ry! Lar-ry!’”10

Public Enemy’s iconic black-man-as-target logo was born out of these

chilling realities. Design fiend Chuck D originally created the crosshairs
logo in art class for the fictional group Funky Frank and the Street Force.
Using the same cut-and-paste technique the Bomb Squad used on their
records, Chuck X-Acto-knifed a picture of LL Cool J’s buddy E Love from
an issue of tweenie rap rag Right On! and fit it with crosshairs. When the
group came up with their name in 1986, Chuck placed the logo next to
some stenciled letters that were influenced by a gangster move he had seen
on TV and broke it up with a Run-DMC-style horizontal crossbar. The logo
alone was a stark, perfect symbol of how Public Enemy perceived racial
anxiety in the late ’80s, the seemingly endless long, hot summer that
received its most lyrical interpretation in Spike Lee’s P.E.-scored Do the
Right Thing.
 Dissed by rappers, dismissed by radio, pissed at the world — Public
Enemy were ready to fight back. And their choices for samples were
perfect.
BEEP — BEEP — BEEP: Three horn stabs borrowed from James
Brown’s 1976 single “Get Up Offa That Thing” spurt out of the gates like a
drummer clicking off a rock song. Hip-hop fans knew this sound better as
the staccato punch that kicked off Boogie Down Productions’ already-
classic 1986 “South Bronx.” Public Enemy using this sound was a false
start, a red herring, a crafty “fuck you” to anyone who thought Public
Enemy was still stuck in ’86.
They were saying goodbye to the old school, opening with a blast from
the last James Brown track to crack the Top 50 in the ’70s. In 1976, Brown
was feeling low and defeated. He was still reeling from the death of his son
three years earlier. He was pinched for $4.5 million in back taxes. He hated
his deal with Polydor; his wife, Dee Dee, wanted him to stay home with his
daughters; his radio stations and Future Shock TV show weren’t getting the
ad dollars they needed; and he considered himself in semi-retirement. He
played a show at Bachelor’s III in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, a bar owned by
Joe Namath. The audience was sitting down, being polite, listening instead
of dancing. Says Brown in his autobiography: “I had worked hard and
dehydrated myself and was feeling depressed. I looked at all these people
sitting there, and because I was depressed, they looked depressed. I yelled,
‘Get up offa that thing and dance ’til you feel better!’ I probably meant until
I feel better.”11
In the third verse of “Rebel,” Chuck shouts, “Soul, rock ’n’ roll comin’
like a rhino.” As if to make the track extra heavy by osmosis, he and Hank
had picked not one but two songs with the word “rock” in the title. First up,
the drums from Jefferson Starship’s “Rock Music,” a relatively vacant,
proto-“We Built This City” celebration of rock’s endurance. Like P.E.,
Jefferson Starship circa 1979 were regrouping after taking a few hits. After
a handful of Top 20 hits, vets Grace Slick and Marty Balin left the band at
different points of the same tour. Drummer John Barbata was in a car
accident and had to depart as well. The remaining members retreated to San
Francisco and turned Jefferson Starship from glossy, power-ballad AOR
band into a hard-rock avalanche. The title of the resulting album, Freedom
at Point Zero, could have just as easily been the name of a P.E. song, even if
the grooves it housed were mostly Foreigner-aping arena rock. For the start
of “Rock Music,” new drummer Aynsley Dunbar (ex-Journey) laid down a
hard-hitting boom-thwack with much joy and volume. These drums are the
only time “Rebel without a Pause” gasps for air, a break in the horrific
chaos.
For the “Rock ’n’ roll!” scratch, Terminator scratched in Chubb Rock’s
“Rock & Roll Dude.” At the time, Terminator was eager to prove himself to
the guys, who were seconds away from phoning Public Enemy’s trusted
ghost-scratcher DJ Johnny Juice. Listening to Terminator’s talk about his
ideas, Hank had been expecting a monumental feat of turntable
pyrotechnics. However, Terminator wound up using the most minimal of
hand motions to scuttle out a tense transformer rhythm. Hank thought it was
just terrible, a bass-heavy blurble that muddied their track, a messy
scramble in which all the frequencies had been carefully considered. He had
engineer Steve Ett pull the bass out of it — and all of a sudden it popped
and crawled, quickly becoming one of his favorite scratches ever, and
possibly the most important scratch solo in history.
The track he slices, Chubb Rock’s “Rock & Roll Dude” is a celebratory
if prickly assessment of rock history. By 1986, Def Jam/Rush
Management’s double-attack of the Beastie Boys and Run-DMC had
pushed the boundaries of what “rocked” in suburbia, with the two rap
groups storming the lily-white play-lists of rock radio and MTV. Radio-
station callers and frightened parents bubbled with racist comments. But the
press didn’t really latch on to the Hip-Hop Menace until August 17, 1986,
when an isolated incident of gang violence in Long Beach, California,
brought a Run-DMC show to a hasty close. It would only get worse from
there: When it came time for Run-DMC to tour again, in the summer of
1987, nothing would drive home the racist response to rap music like the
police response to this tour. An article in The Cincinnati Enquirer quoted
the chief of police saying the Beasties were garbage, and ran with the
provocative headline “It’s the Neo-Nasty Era.” A show in Seattle was
canceled out of fear of race wars. A Portland, Oregon, paper described the
possibility of gang fights.
To confront the silliness of hip-hop phobia in 1987, Chubb Rock
playfully rapped over the sound white dudes considered their home turf: the
chugging heavy metal riff. Chuck would do a similar trick with the title of
“Rebel without a Pause,” a mutation of the title of Rebel without a Cause,
the archetypal rebellious-white-dude non-conformist hipstersploitation
flick. More than a pun, “Without a Pause” reveals the skulking nihilism of
James Dean’s James Stark to be lazy, selfish and reactionary, especially in
the face of Chuck D’s tireless, pointed aggression.
Over wailing guitars, Chubb questioned racist myths about rap and rock.
They include the one about how rock is white-people music (African-
Americans invented the stuff, duh), the one about how black people don’t
listen to rock (“I’m not Jackie Gleason and he’s not Art Carney / But you
know who’s hard? Hmm . . . Paul McCartney!”), and the one about how rap
is dangerous (“What they said about rap and violence last year / Could be
said about rock ’n’ roll yesteryear”). At the time, Chuck D was especially
upset that people weren’t considering rap music “music.” He recalled a
radio interview during which George Harrison called rap “computerized
rot”: “If it were Lennon or McCartney, I would have felt dissed.”12 But
despite Chubb Rock’s ironic surfer drawl on the chorus, “Rock & Roll
Dude” asserts that rap audiences and rock audiences have more in common
than people think. It would be a few more years before Public Enemy
would drive that point home through their tours with Anthrax, Gang of Four
and U2. Public Enemy’s “Bring the Noise” — which would get its own
Anthrax-assisted rock remake in 1991 — would confront the racial divide
head on. Chuck D, who lists Chubb Rock as one of his all-time most
underrated rappers, said in his guide Lyrics of a Rap Revolutionary, “In
‘Bring The Noise,’ I was specifically talking about how people at the time
considered all rap music ‘noise’ . . . If you’re calling that noise, we have
some noise for your ass. This will throttle you to the edge.”13 The noise in
this track would be supplied by tenor saxophonist Robert McCullough,
wailing over and over again. This sound is from “The Grunt,” the debut
single from the James Brown band the JB’s, when they too were just a
group of guys still figuring things out.
Underneath the JB’s, between the Jefferson Starship, anchoring the
Chubb Rock, beside a little bit of Joeski Love’s “Pee-Wee’s Dance,” the
perpetual-motion machine constantly pushing everything forward was
Clyde Stubblefield, the funky drummer, a never-ending cartwheel of funk in
its purest form.
Stubblefield’s journey back onto hit records began a decade after he
recorded “Funky Drummer” in the mid-’70s. He had left Brown’s band
some time ago. Brown, on the wane commercially, was incensed, whinging
that disco had sanitized the funk, diluted it, made it repetitive and
nonsensical. Ironically, the non-stop, double-sided James Brown vamps like
“Funky Drummer” had set the stage for disco’s extended 12-inches. Even
worse: The Godfather eventually got his hustle on with The Original Disco
Man LP. But somewhere in the West Bronx, classic funk was still spinning.
Starting in the first-floor community room at 1520 Sedgwick Ave. in
1973 and eventually trickling out into parks for monster jams, Jamaican
transplant Kool Herc was resurrecting all the old grooves in his DJ sets.
Uninterested in the glossy dance music that chic Manhattanites were
snorting behind velvet-roped fences, Herc created a new canon smelted
from old material: forgotten records, both classic and obscure, stuff that he
found best resonated with his predominantly black and Hispanic audiences.
He tried reggae at first, but when that didn’t move the crowd, he pushed on
to funk and soul: James Brown, Jimmy Castor, Baby Huey.
Watching the dancers get down every night, Herc saw that their limbs
were loosest during the “breaks,” or isolated drum parts, when the band
pulled out and gave the drummer some. He wondered: Could you prolong
the break? Could you make an endless break? By cutting the audio back and
forth between two records during the critical drum solo, Herc inadvertently
invented the “breakbeat” — two seconds of feverish climax looped
eternally, the point where Steve Miller turns into Steve Reich, a limitless
pulse to make B-boys go ga-ga night after night. This became the
foundation for hip-hop music. Brown and Stubblefield may have slid off the
Billboard charts, but Herc was keeping them alive with all the energy he
could borrow from local streetlamps, recontextualizing gritty drum breaks
pushed out of the spotlight by blinding glitter balls. Looking for the perfect
beat, he played rock bands like Rare Earth (“Get Ready”), disco groups like
Mandrill (“Fencewalk”) and Latin-tinged funk bands like the Incredible
Bongo Band (“Apache”). And no one could deny the transformative power
of a Clyde Stubblefield break like Herc’s break of choice: “Give It Up or
Turnit a Loose.” It’s uncertain when or how the “Funky Drummer” break
entered the picture, but its rollicking presence is felt on any number of
vintage party tapes by DJs like Grandmaster Flash. By 1979, it was so
engrained in break lexicon that it was immortalized as the lead track on
Super Disco Brakes Vol. 2. White-label bootlegs of popular breakbeat
records were popping up underneath the counters of Manhattan record hot
spots. Capitalizing on the trend, New York label owner Paul Winley made
the two lo-fi Super Disco Brakes comps (all pressings of the first one had a
scratch in it) which allowed new DJs to ensnare bonkers beats without
having to peek over Herc’s or Afrika Bambaataa’s hulking shoulders,
attempting to guess what artist and song title was written on the record
before they had steamed off the label.
When rappers started recording their own records in 1979, live bands
played most of the music. When James Brown joined Bambaataa for the
“Unity” 12-inch in 1984, the track was a mix of drum machines and tireless
session dudes like Sugarhill’s house rhythm section Doug Wimbish and
Keith LeBlanc playing through a leaden version of Brown’s “Get Up Offa
That Thing.” Around that time, a few mavericks started “sampling” James
and Stubblefield, but only through incredibly cumbersome, time-consuming
tape edits. In 1984, audio collage artists Steinski and Double Dee set about
making a compilation of Brown’s greatest grunts, and ended up with their
“Lesson 2 (James Brown Mix),” a mastermix of a whole buncha Brown
absurdly gyrating against Bugs Bunny, “Double Dutch Bus” and kitschy
dance instructional records. “Funky Drummer” appeared on another
mysterious bootleg tape-edit record floating around in 1986, “Feelin’
James” (on TD Records), a six-minute track that squeezed a sizable chunk
of Brown’s discography into one monstrous mush-up. Brown felt that disco
was just “bits and pieces from everybody, including me, made very
simple,”14 but this was pieces of Brown made very, very complex.
With the birth of the E-Mu SP-12 sampler in 1985, sampling became
sport. Marley Marl discovered the power of sampling drums by accident
during a Captain Rock session and soon, as rap journalist Chairman Mao
wrote, “magically enabling funky drummers from his scratchy record
collection to cross decades and sit in on his own productions.”15 The Clyde
Stubblefield breaks that had been rocking parties for the past 12 years were
being used to elevate a new generation of songs. In 1986, Ultramagnetic
MC Ced Gee chopped and flipped a James Brown break on Boogie Down
Productions’ epochal “South Bronx” (“Get Up Offa That Thing”), and
Marley and Eric B would soon follow with Eric B and Rakim’s “Eric B for
President” (“Funky President” — a track Rakim rhymed on back in the
day).
 The Ultimate Breaks and Beats series of records appeared almost
immediately. UBB pulled back the Wizard of Oz curtain shrouding hip-hop’s
building blocks, exposing all the classic head-knocker loops that DJs had
been hiding in their arsenals for years. No longer did aspiring wax
technicians have to play “guess the label.” This revealed the magician’s
secrets in 25 volumes of vinyl, making a decade of tricks available to
anyone with one turntable, let alone two. Combine these Cliff’s Notes with
the new digital samplers and you’ve got the tools for any producer to
quickly loop time-tested body movers. By the time “Funky Drummer” was
etched to Volume 12 — either the last UBB record to be released in 1986 or
the first one to be released in 1987 — it was already floating around on the
Marley Marl-produced “It’s a Demo” 12-inch by Kool G Rap and DJ Polo.
Marley sampled Stubblefield off a record Polo brought with him when they
met for the first time — literally to make a demo. “Demo” got a uniquely
funky “Funky Drummer” treatment when Marley stuttered Stubblefield’s
licks. Producer Herbie Luv Bug used a slowed-down “Funky Drummer” for
Sweet Tee and Jazzy Joyce’s end-of-year hit “It’s My Beat.”
Seeing Brown’s music voraciously mined by hip-hoppers, Polydor
issued a compilation album, In the Jungle Groove, full of 1969–71-era
Brown, ready for looping and scratching (and probably, years later, some
angry phone calls from lawyers). A three-minute “Funky Drummer (Bonus
Beat Reprise)” closed out Side A, looping the soon-to-be-epochal break for
anyone who couldn’t afford a sampler. Still, “Funky Drummer” wasn’t
totally in vogue when the Bomb Squad jacked it. They were sick of the
stock snares of the DMX drum machine, which Hank Shocklee said were in
everything from Midnight Starr to the Thompson Twins. To get the snare
sound they wanted for “Rebel without a Pause,” they just went to the record
they loved the most.
It was a beat that Stubblefield himself couldn’t figure out the science
behind, as it was so instinctual and immediate. And this is something Hank
stressed in his own music: Don’t think it; feel it. Hank and consummate
musician Eric Sadler would bicker in the studio when one of Hank’s layered
tracks was out of key or rhythm, the unease perking up Sadler’s classically
trained ears. Sadler remembered, “They were teachin’ me at the same time:
Fuck all that technical shit. Do what’s funky. Do what feels good.”16
Another time, when an engineer told Hank that two of his samples clashed
in a way that wasn’t exactly musical, he reportedly shot back, “Fuck
music!” The “Funky Drummer” break was all about feel — a natural fit for
the Bomb Squad . . .
. . . Or so it was popularly thought. At a panel discussion in Chicago in
2008, Chuck said that it is not “Funky Drummer” under “Rebel without a
Pause,” but some other mystery break — despite Hank’s insisting otherwise
in interviews. Chuck has been understandably mum on the details (as Hank
said in that same panel, “Sampling is almost like committing murder:
There’s no statute of limitations”). But the damage had been done. Actual
sample or no, “Rebel without a Pause” became the standard-bearer by
which all “Funky Drummer” tracks would be judged.
When It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back was released in
1988, it would ultimately make “Funky Drummer” its engine. On the
album, at the end of “Rebel without a Pause,” you can hear a live snippet of
Public Enemy performing “Rebel” at the Hammersmith Odeon. Chuck
demands that Terminator X “bring that beat back” — and the beat he brings
back is ripped straight from a vinyl copy of “Funky Drummer” which he
had been dutifully beat-matching with “Rebel” during the show. “Funky
Drummer” is the eye of the storm in “Bring the Noise,” anchoring the
second verse (hell, it even makes a cameo in the Anthrax version in ’91).
It’s also likely the headbanger time-keeper buoying the Slayer riffs in “She
Watch Channel Zero?!” When asked why he used “Funky Drummer” on
“Rebel without a Pause,” Hank told Rolling Stone, “Because that song was
my milk — like when you’re baking.”17
In 1988, hip-hop stood up and took notice. Chuck D says the first two
copies of Nation of Millions that he received went to N.W.A.’s Dr. Dre and
Eazy-E during a tour stop. Dre is an avowed fan of Nation of Millions, so
maybe it’s no coincidence how the “Funky Drummer” break sneaks into
one tension-releasing bar of the second verse of their “Fuck tha Police” —
exactly the same as it does in the second verse of “Bring the Noise.” Run-
DMC concocted an early version of “Beats to the Rhyme” with “Funky
Drummer” underneath in an attempt to be more like Public Enemy (they
eventually settled on using the “Funky Drummer” loop in “Run’s House”).
Other notable Stubblejackers in ’88: Eric B and Rakim’s “Lyrics of Fury”
and Stetsasonic’s “DBC Let the Music Play.”
Despite being tortured by art-terrorists Atari Teenage Riot, slowed down
for Nine Inch Nails, drowned in bass by 2 Live Crew, surrounded by plush
Dr. Dre interior and rapped over by practically every MC on the planet from
1988 to 1991, no one made “Funky Drummer” more arresting than Public
Enemy. They practically own it. By the time Chuck and Flav were dubbed
the conscience of the hip-hop generation, naturally given the final word in
the landmark 1989 anti-violence benefit record “Self-Destruction,” the faint
echo of “Funky Drummer” played in the background, a familiar bustle that
everyone recognizes is there to clear the way for the prophets of rage.
Stubblefield claims that the beat was influenced from the rumbling
trains and appliances of his childhood. James Brown went even further
back, taking a little credit for himself (as he was wont to do), saying the
“beat of rap” was based on “the old drums of passion, my personal
combination of the drums of Africa and the drums of the American Indian,
both of whom I claim a heritage from.”18
“Funky Drummer” is a tricky, ineffable thing full of ghost notes. Biz
Markie says he never heard anyone beatbox it. None of the videos of people
playing “Funky Drummer” on YouTube even come close. And even if the
Bomb Squad didn’t sample it on “Rebel,” they certainly tried to capture its
human element. The Bomb Squad huddled around samplers and pressed
buttons in fractured unison, making sure it never looped perfectly. Flavor
Flav tapped the snares in by hand on the Akai S-900 drum machine. They
used him because Flav’s feel was different, something uniquely Flav — an
example of the Bomb Squad going with what felt good over what felt right.
Hank would later fill Nation of Millions with near silent ghosted notes so
even the drum-machine beats sounded like breaks. There are extra kicks
tacked in “Rebel” like drum fills so the beat never repeats itself. The beat
isn’t a static loop: it’s a living organism. According to Hank there are four
beats at play in “Rebel,” each with a different turnaround, all mixed and
programmed and played so as to not repeat themselves. He says, “It gives
you the illusion that the record is getting better instead of just staying
linear.”19 It’s truly a performance piece, closer to James Brown than the rap
groups that sample him, the sound of a bunch of people sitting in a room
and creating.
After the Bomb Squad opened the floodgates, chopped-up loops of
Brown became the soundtrack of hip-hop’s greatest year. Copyright lawyers
and “traditional” musicians had some bones to pick. “Tell the truth, James
Brown was old,” responded original hip-hop band Stetsasonic, “‘til Eric and
Ra’ came out with ‘I Got Soul.’” The hardest-sampled man in show
business recognized the loops’ import, as heard via James Brown’s official
rebuttal on the Full Force track “I’m Real”: “All you copycats out there . . .
Take my voice off your record until I’m paid in full.”

***

1970: Bassist William “Bootsy” Collins, his brother, guitarist Phelps

“Catfish” Collins and drummer Frankie “Kash” Waddy were teenagers in a
local Cincinatti band called the Pacesetters. They never really played for
money but would play benefits and parties for a good time. A&R guy
Charles Spaulding spotted them one night and invited them to be the
recording band for King Records — “Yeah, King’s,” Bootsy said. “Ain’t
that where James Brown is?”20
It was, and the band laid down a couple of sides for Brown associates
Hank Ballard and Marva Whitney. Meanwhile, the World’s Greatest
Entertainer was busy running his notoriously tight ship, and his band was
ready to mutiny. James Brown was famous for fining these guys, docking
their pay for dirty uniforms, unshined shoes, late attendance, flubbed notes,
clumsy steps — and may God help you if you showed up drunk. One
afternoon in March 1970, at a hotel in Columbus, Georgia, Brown heard
rumblings that his band was disgruntled, refusing to go on that evening,
demanding more money. As if negotiating with terrorists, Brown saw
giving in to the ultimatum as the ultimate loss of control.
The Pacesetters were 500 miles away at the Wine Bar in Cincinnati,
pretty much just playing to the bartender. According to Waddy, the band
raked in a total of $15 that evening. In the middle of one of their bar-rattling
numbers — the band always played loud — the bartender walked up to
Bootsy and delivered a message: “Hey, Bobby Byrd wants to talk to you
about playing with James Brown.” The band laughed off this joke until they
heard the intrepid sideman’s voice on the other end of the phone.
A plane was on its way — “No, no way. James’ jet! No way,”21 said
Bootsy. Hell, none of them had ever flown anywhere. According to Bootsy,
Byrd was there within 45 minutes with no time to fix up his hair. “Next
thing you know, we was on an airplane, my Afro was in the back of my
head, and we was flying up 40,000 feet in a Learjet. And I had never been
on a plane before. I’m 17 years old, flying on the Godfather of Soul’s plane,
and I’m like, What is going on? Talk about a kid trippin’.”22
In Georgia, Brown told the restless audience to be patient. Byrd brought
the Pacesetters downstairs and taught them some quick licks, arrangements
and cues. No worries; they already knew the songs inside and out. Right
there, Brown fired his whole band. Maceo Parker, Melvin Parker, Jimmy
Nolen and the rest of Brown’s band cleared their equipment from the stage
and left. The Pacesetters lugged their gear onstage and, without so much as
a rehearsal, the guard was changed. On the biggest stage they had ever been
on, in front of the largest audience they’ve ever seen, going from Dodge
Dart to Learjet in a night. Baptism by fire. That night Brown dubbed the
Pacesetters the “New Breed,” but they would go on to rewrite the rules of
funk as the JB’s.
The fresh-from-the-clubs grit, youthful energy, wide-eyed wonder and
deadly chops of these five kids would be captured most ferociously on their
first solo single, recorded only two months after gracing the stage with
Brown. Compared to the jittery, popcorn-popper funk of the previous year’s
James Brown model, 1970’s “The Grunt” was white noise, a hailstorm, pure
adrenaline. From the second the needle hits the groove, Robert
McCullough’s tenor sax explodes with the most hellish, inhuman screech
imaginable. A bottle rocket, the screeching tires before a car accident, a
tortured animal — certainly not a sax. Even if you had been thoroughly
prepped for a heavy JB’s funk slab with the just-released “Get Up (I Feel
Like Being a) Sex Machine,” nothing could prepare you for the icy
glissando that opens “The Grunt,” a siren that whines like bombs are
coming next. Clearly this was the four seconds that Public Enemy needed.
In “Rebel without a Pause,” the Bomb Squad used only two seconds,
borrowing just that original shock. “Rebel’s” loops were produced on the
only sampler that Hank Shocklee could get his hands on at the time: the
Ensoniq Mirage. One of the earliest samplers in common use, it was
decidedly lo-fi — 8-bit resolution, 32khz sampling rate, three seconds of
sampling time. The next step up was the Synclavier, and that was out of the
question, as Hank Shocklee remembered: “Oh man, it was, like, $250,000,
and the only person that had one was Stevie Wonder!”23 The Mirage left a
fraction-of-a-second delay at the end of each track before it looped around
again. So each sample was just the tiniest bit off. The Bomb Squad went
intentionally lo-fi and sampled “The Grunt” with a mere 2-bit sampling rate
for extra gnarl. They turned a two-second warning sign into an adenoidal
wail that keeps screaming at you for five minutes.
They did the final mix at Chung King House of Metal studio in
Chinatown. Owned by John King, a friend from Def Jam co-owner Rick
Rubin’s days of hanging out at the Danceteria, Chung King was a single-
room, sixth-floor, graffiti-splashed, piss-stenched hole where Def Jam had
already recorded knockout albums by Run-DMC, LL Cool J and the Beastie
Boys. The place was listed in the phone book as “Secret Society,” but Rubin
didn’t want the industry to know they recorded in such a dump, so he
renamed it in LL Cool J’s Radio liner notes in 1985, and the name stuck.
There, the Bomb Squad taught themselves new things every day. In the
middle of recording “Rebel,” Chung King got the new Akai S-900 sampler
— 30 seconds of sampling time! — which ended up on the track too,
though Hank ultimately preferred the personality of the hiccupping, skuzzy
Mirage. They didn’t have automated mixing boards at Chung King, so the
Bomb Squad would do mixdowns with five or six guys manning the faders,
each one with three to six faders to look after, ducking them or raising them
to create the huge switches in action.
And so in addition to the rock vibe of the Jefferson Starship and Chubb
Rock, “Rebel” contains this skipping loop of James Brown’s band at their
heaviest, the most “rock” of any lineup in his six-decade career. The fresh-
from-Cinci JB’s brought a combination of daring and pure cockiness that
was surely embraced by Public Enemy, a group whose “sole intent was to
destroy music.”24 Bassist Bootsy Collins, still a teenager, may well have
been playing on a $29 electric guitar that he had rigged to play like a bass:
The result was a snapshot of kids learning new ways to swing, sampled by
adults learning new ways to rattle.
All the pieces fit. Chuck knew “Rebel” was something special when
they played the instrumental for three high school kids who were hanging
around the studio, all of whom immediately started bugging out and
dancing like crazy. (Those three kids would later be known as Busta
Rhymes, Disco D and Charlie Brown of Leaders of the New School.)
Chuck locked himself in his house for two days trying to get the vocals
right. He listened to the song over and over again. His mom, hearing
McCullough’s tenor squeaking from the other room, asked, “What’s this
teakettle?”25 Once in the studio, it took Chuck two more days to nail down
the vocal tracks — exhibiting a dangerous perfectionism in an age when
studio time was a precious and costly resource. Clearly no longer
intimidated by the shadow of Marley Marl’s “I Know You Got Soul,”
Chuck kicked “Rebel” off with a resonant “Yes . . .,” an affirmative inspired
by the opening of Biz Markie’s “Nobody Beats the Biz.” That record was
one of Marley’s masterpieces and Chuck’s favorite record at the time. Later
in the song, in a nod to the record that set Public Enemy into a writing
frenzy, he even says, “I got soul too.”
It was time to release the second single off Bum Rush, the “ultimate
homeboy car” anthem “You’re Gonna Get Yours” — and Public Enemy
wanted “Rebel” for the B-side. Def Jam balked at the idea since they felt B-
sides cut into album sales. At the time, Public Enemy had sold about 82,000
copies of Bum Rush, so they countered with, “What album sales?” They
followed Def Jam co-founder Russell Simmons all the way to JFK Airport
to harangue him before he left for London with Run-DMC. “We were so
glad those guys were always late,”26 said Hank. They rushed up to the door
of a PanAm flight about to take off. According to Chuck’s autobiography,
Simmons didn’t want to be bothered with the B-side — “I don’t know. I’ll
talk to y’all when I get back” — and walked onto the plane. Run turned
around, looked at them and said, “Go ahead and do it.” Chuck said they just
needed the go-ahead from somebody and Run’s word was good enough.
They went to the offices of Def Jam distributor CBS, filled out the
paperwork, and the single was etched to vinyl before the Def Jam brass
caught wind. Simmons didn’t even know they had pressed the record at all
until it started tearing up radio. And even then, he couldn’t exactly scold
them. The B-side won: “Rebel” was an instant smash.
When Public Enemy got the test pressing, they didn’t even listen to it,
they just drove it straight to KISS-FM. It was a Saturday night and Chuck
Chillout was on the air. Public Enemy couldn’t get inside, so they left their
test pressing with the security guard — “Please, just give it to Chuck
Chillout, please.” They left, walked to the car, and the minute Chuck started
the car, those sax screeches poured through the speakers.
Lady B, host of Philly’s fabled “Street Beat” show on Power 99, was
next to catch on. That summer, P.E. hit Philly’s Greek Picnic — a
celebration of African-American fraternities and sororities — and said they
heard it out of every car system and portable stereo. Months later, they
would debut it on Soul Train and Public Enemy would go national. Even
former critic Melle Mel recognized its brilliance. Whenever that record
came on at Latin Quarter, he would grab the mic excitedly and pump up the
crowd along with it.
“Just a little bit of the taste of the bass for you,” Public Enemy later
responded in “Don’t Believe the Hype.” “As you get up and dance at the
LQ . . .”
 Chapter Two –
“This is a sampling sport”

In the spring of 2008, the strange story of a Georgia widow was tearing
up the AP wire. In 1995, her 33-year-old husband, Terry, had committed
suicide, ending his life with a single shotgun blast. His heart was salvaged
and donated to a man at risk for congestive heart failure, 57-year-old Sonny
Graham. Grateful for his new lease on life, Sonny tracked down the widow
to thank her. When he met her, he felt like he had known her for years.
Exactly like the previous owner of the heart beating in his chest, he fell in
love with her. They got married. Eventually, he too killed himself with a
self-inflicted gunshot to the head.
Scientists say they’ve documented more than 70 cases of organ
transplant recipients who adopt the personality traits of their donors.
Parapsychologist Gary Schwartz told the New York Post that living cells
have memory cells that store information that can be passed along when the
organ is transplanted. The examples read like Twilight Zone episodes. A 68-
year-old woman suddenly craves the favorite foods of her 18-year-old heart
donor, a 56-year-old professor gets strange flashes of light in his dreams
and learns that his donor was a cop who was shot in the face by a drug
dealer. Does a sample on a record work in the same way? Can the essence
of a hip-hop record be found in the motives, emotions and energies of the
artists it samples? Is it likely that something an artist intended 20 years ago
will re-emerge anew?
Hip-hop is folk music. Melodies, motifs, stories, cadences, slang and
pulses are all handed down among generations and micro-generations,
evolving so rapidly that it’s easy to lose track of exactly where anything
actually began. Check the technique and see if you can follow it:
• In 1986 in New York, Kool Moe Dee told careless Casanovas to “Go See
the Doctor.”
• In 1989, Dr. Dre manipulated Moe Dee’s record, giving his self-assured
baritone a case of the hiccups, making him stutter out “the-the-Doc, the-
the-the-Doc” on “Mind Blowin’,” a single by Dre’s protégée The D.O.C.
• In 1993, to show respect to his West Coast paterfamilias, Snoop Dogg
vocally emulated the Dre-tweaked stutter on his debut single, “Who Am I
(What’s My Name),” rapping he’s “funky as the-the-the Doc.” As the
centerpiece of a multiplatinum album, Snoop’s version of the line ended
up being the most popular one of all.
• Snoop was surely the influence when the line went back to New York in
1999, when Jay-Z started “Jigga My N----” with a salute to his Roc-A-
Fella record label: “Jay-Z, motherfucker, from the-the-the Roc.”
• Influenced by Jay-Z’s unknockable hustle, Atlanta rapper Young Jeezy
flipped Jigga’s rock-hard version in 2005 on “Bottom of the Map” with “I
do it for the trappers with the-the-the rocks.”

It’s similar to the way folk musicians update the storyline of a popular
murder ballad or put their unique pluck on a familiar set of chords.
Sampling, however is a uniquely post-modern twist, turning folk heritage
into a living being, something that transfers more than just DNA. Through
sampling, hip-hop producers can literally borrow the song that influenced
them, replay it, reuse it, rethink it, repeat it, recontextualize it. Some
samples leave all the emotional weight and cultural signifiers of an existing
piece of music intact — a colloidal particle that floats inside a piece of
music yet maintains its inherent properties. All the associations that a
listener may have with an existing piece of music are handed down to the
new creation — whether it’s as complicated as a nostalgic memory over a
beloved hook or as elemental as a head-nod to a funky groove you don’t
specifically recognize.
Take the piano riff in Joe Cocker’s 1973 hit “Woman to Woman,” used
in 2Pac and Dr. Dre’s 1995 smash “California Love.” Upon hearing
“California Love,” an older listener might associate the riff with how much
they did or didn’t enjoy the Joe Cocker original. A younger listener might
think of it as a hip-hop hand-me-down, associating it with the
Ultramagnetic MCs or EPMD songs that sampled the riff in the late ’80s.
An even younger listener might not recognize it at all but simply understand
that, since it clashes against a high-polished Dr. Dre production, it’s
something “old” or “borrowed” or “funky,” imbued with an odor that’s
mysterious but still evocative.
Nation of Millions is congested with 100 of these samples — maybe
more — ranging from the familiar to the obscure to the completely
unrecognizable. A guitar lick from British rock band Sweet adds to the
delirious feel of “Cold Lampin with Flavor.” Is it enough to say that the
track “Funk It Up” is a great circa-1976 groove chugger on par with Thin
Lizzy’s “Johnny the Fox”? Or is it worth noting that, just like Public Enemy
in 1987, Sweet in 1976 were trying to reposition their band as a heavier,
meaner, steely-eyed alternative to their past work? Is it a coincidence that
Nation of Millions, an album focused on liberation, samples Isaac Hayes’
legendary move away from record company dictates, itself a singular
success that followed a retail flop? Are the JB’s and Funkadelic and
Temptations records that Public Enemy use permeated with special triumph
and tumult since they originally appeared shortly after lineup changes?
“We use samples like an artist would use paint,”27 Hank Shocklee once
said. Their style was not the surrealist clouds of the Beastie Boys or the De
La Soul sample collisions that would follow in Nation of Millions’ wake.
The Bomb Squad style of painting was a violent pointillism, taking a single
guitar stab or drum kick and dotting the landscape until a song emerged.
The Bomb Squad mistreated their samples — when one sounded too
“clean,” Hank would throw the record to the floor, stomp on it and try
again. They would occasionally break the (still standing) unspoken
producer’s rule of “always sample the original recording” and sample a
sample, just for an extra bit of chaos.
Their techniques were unlike anything of the era. And thanks to the
diligent work of copyright attorneys, their cavalier, frontiersman attitude
toward samples will never be repeated — at least not with the support and
budget of a record label. They sampled dozens of records because there was
never anyone saying they couldn’t. When Chuck envisioned the courtroom
drama in “Caught, Can I Get a Witness,” a track in which he’s called in
front of a judge because he “stole a beat,” it was a dystopic fantasy, a piece
of fiction. Within a year, his story became reality. Once hip-hop started
reaching critical mass in the late ’80s, many white rock artists were coming
out saying they were simply livid over the fact that their music was being
used in rap. Lawsuits started popping up everywhere, as old-guard
musicians demanded to be paid. The Turtles spoke up first when their
woozy 1969 hit “You Showed Me” (a song they didn’t even write
themselves) was used in a skit by the equally tripped-out De La Soul. The
rappers, admitting no guilt, were taken for an out-of-court settlement. In a
landmark 1991 case, Biz Markie was sued by bushy-haired ’70s soft-rock
balladeer Gilbert O’Sullivan for using parts of O’Sullivan’s No. 1 single
“Alone Again (Naturally).” The court equated sampling with theft, citing
precedent in the Bible’s(!) ruling of “Thou shalt not steal.” It ruled that
Biz’s label, Warner Bros., had a “callous disregard for the law and for the
rights of others.”28 Since this case, record labels have been legally bound to
pay for every sample on a record, making sample-heavy records like Nation
of Millions a cost-prohibitive exercise. As record labels became savvier in
regard to the lucrative world of sample clearance, even borrowing the
simplest snare crack became an impossible hurdle. As Hank told Stay Free
magazine:

The first thing that was starting to happen by the late 1980s was that
the people were doing buyouts. You could have a buyout —
meaning you could purchase the rights to sample a sound — for
around $1,500. Then it started creeping up to $3,000, $3,500,
$5,000, $7,500. Then they threw in this thing called rollover rates. If
your rollover rate is every 100,000 units, then for every 100,000
units you sell, you have to pay an additional $7,500. A record that
sells two million copies would kick that cost up twenty times. Now
you’re looking at one song costing you more than half of what you
would make on your album.29

By 1991, Public Enemy had to move from the sample-splatter of Nation of

Millions to the more skeletal, studio-styled headbang of Apocalypse ’91. By
the time they did the He Got Game soundtrack, in 1998, Hank said Def Jam
had hired someone to be in the studio with them, looking over their
shoulders in case they reached for a piece of unlicensed vinyl contraband.
Today, the average price to sample a record is about $10,000 — meaning
that making a masterwork like Nation of Millions would cost literally
millions.
 Chapter Three –
“Back . . . Caught you looking for the same thing”

Chuck D was no young pup when Nation of Millions was released. He

had long since graduated college, he had already held down jobs he hated
and jobs he liked, he had already given up on his dreams of being a rapper
(“I was already a certain age. I looked at being an entertainer as a step
down”30) and then rebuilt them from the ground up, and he had already
released an album, all by the time he was 28. “Don’t print my age,” Chuck
told Spin in 1988. “[I]n order to communicate with the youth, you have to
be recognized as a peer. Something has to be there that they can say, ‘This
is me.’”31
To put it in perspective, compare Chuck’s age to that of the other MCs
who, at the dawn of 1988, were preparing to release their soon-to-be-classic
second records. According to the admittedly sketchy information floating
around the Internet about rappers’ real ages: Rakim was around 20 for his
second round; KRS-One, 23; Salt-N-Pepa were both 24; the set-to-blow
Fresh Prince was 20; already-blown LL Cool J, also 20, was between his
second and third records; Chuck’s idols Run-DMC, about to release their
fourth album, were collectively around 24; Too $hort, already a legend at
22, was on his fifth. Not to mention all the new faces who would appear in
the course of the year — Ice Cube and MC Ren, MC Lyte, King Tee, De La
Soul, Super Lover Cee and Casanova Rud — all mostly still in their teens.
In “Rebel without a Pause,” when Chuck says “Rough . . .’cause I’m a
man,” it is no empty boast. “Old enough to raise ya, so this will faze ya.”
Chuck, Flav, Hank and Eric had a unique perspective not afforded to
their contemporaries: vivid memories of the 1960s. “I can’t even relate to
some of the subjects people are talking about today,” said Chuck in his bio,
“because they are products of the ’70s and ’80s and were influenced by TV
shows like Good Times, The Jeffersons and Sanford and Son . . . [In the
1970s] Vietnam was over. It was an era of cocaine, heroin, partying and
having a good time.”32 The age difference meant Public Enemy witnessed
the rise of Nation of Islam and Elijah Muhammad, the speeches of Malcolm
X, the emergence of the Black Panther Party, the start of the Vietnam War
and its protest movement, the assassinations of Malcolm and Robert
Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. and the gunning down of Black
Panthers Fred Hampton and Mark Clark by the Chicago Police. And even
though he was about 3 years old at the time, Chuck remembers 1963; he
remembers NAACP field secretary Medgar Evars being murdered by a
white supremacist in front of his Mississippi home, he remembers the
250,000-plus-strong March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where
MLK did some sampling of his own, invoking the “Free at Last” spiritual
for the climax of his “I Have a Dream” speech. Chuck remembers JFK
being assassinated five months after the president introduced his plan for
the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He remembers being in the third grade and
seeing his activist mother go to work dressed in black. She told Chuck that
her white co-workers were terrified that one man could move so many
African-Americans.
The slow crescendo of the black radical movement in the 1960s was
echoed by James Brown’s transformation from the ballad-belting Mr.
Dynamite to a fiery voice of protest. In the early part of the decade, there
was a balancing act between Martin Luther King’s message of integration
and non-violence and Malcolm X’s message of racial separatism and “by
any means necessary” actions. Funk anthologist Rickey Vincent notes, “Dr.
King had a dream that blacks could work together, while Malcolm X was
adamant that blacks take care of their own business. The two leaders
balanced each other, fed off each other’s roles and provided the strongest
leadership core black Americans had enjoyed since the Harlem
Renaissance.”33 But after Malcolm’s assassination in February 1965, non-
violence slowly became an antiquated notion to some African-American
youth — a frustration eventually played out in the charred buildings of the
Watts rebellion and the embrace of the well-armed resistance of the Black
Panthers. Angrier times called for harder music. The same month that
Malcolm X was shot, James Brown recorded “Papa’s Got a Brand New
Bag,” the song that put the downbeat on the spine-cracking “one” instead of
the two and four, the song that used violent horn explosions and guitar
pinpricks as percussion instruments, the song that essentially invented funk
as we know it. That track was slightly sped up in post-production to be
extra frantic — a trick that Hank Shocklee would later use to help make
Nation of Millions the most hectic hip-hop record ever.
Brown was still a few steps behind the counter-culture in 1966. While
the Black Panthers were rejecting Martin Luther King’s integrationist
stance, Brown’s single “Don’t Be a Dropout” was actually a proud mirror of
King’s messages of unity, inclusion and using the system to your advantage.
Brown was the living symbol of an African-American achieving enormous
success in a white music industry, and he began to take his position as a role
model seriously, visiting schools as part of an anti-dropout campaign,
reporting to vice president Hubert Humphries on what was happening in the
places the government didn’t visit, buying radio stations to serve black
communities, even offering to play for the troops in Vietnam. He became
the symbolic voice of the civil rights movement. When King was
assassinated on April 4, 1968, Brown famously asked the mayor of Boston
to televise his (almost canceled) concert the following evening, to give
people something else to think about. While black nationalists like H. Rap
Brown and Eldridge Cleaver spoke of government upheaval and violent
revolution, Brown was still saying, “The real answer to race problems in
this country is education. Be qualified. Own something. Be somebody.
That’s Black Power.”34
The summer of 1968 saw the assassination of civil rights advocate
Robert Kennedy and the FBI raid on the Black Panthers. Militants criticized
Brown’s “America Is My Home” single and his stumping for Humphries.
Syndicated news columnist Earl Wilson asked Brown, on the record, if he
didn’t think that by dining with LBJ and going to Vietnam made him some
kind of “Uncle Tom.” He even received death threats. Enough was enough.
Brown had so much trouble on his mind. He fired off some socially
conscious burners, writing and producing two songs for Hank Ballard:
“Blackenized” (“You been leanin’ on others to be your keeper / That’s why
they call you Negroes and colored people”) and “How You Gonna Get
Respect (When You Haven’t Cut Your Process Yet),” a song about taking
pride in natural, unrelaxed hair (Brown had, for a while, symbolically
ditched his iconic processed pompadour). But most important, Brown
dropped “Say It Loud (I’m Black and I’m Proud).” “‘Say It Loud’ was a
turning point in black music,” says Vincent. “Never before had black
popular music explicitly reflected the bitterness of blacks towards the white
man — and here it was done with ferocious funk.” In between takes, Brown
said to everyone in the room, “About 50 million people waitin’ to hear this
one.”35
Public Enemy were in a similar position in the late ’80s, though Chuck
was assuredly a more reluctant hero. The writing was on the wall as early as
the turn of the decade: In a 1980 readers’ poll in Black Enterprise
magazine, 73 percent of respondents said black Americans lacked effective
leadership. Bill Stephney, who originally signed and marketed Public
Enemy, broke it down to rap historian Jeff Chang: “In our hunger for a
charismatic, post-King/Malcolm figure, a vacuum existed. I don’t think that
the times of the ’80s were any less politically volatile than at any other
point in history. The difference was the vacuum of leadership.”36 For a
while in the late 1980s, Chuck D was painted as the leader of the post-civil
rights generation. As anyone who heard him knew, he was incredibly
outspoken, with a stentorian boom that was impossible to ignore, even if
you couldn’t always get behind what he was saying or fully understand it.
For those who lacked a knowledge base about the black radical
movement, Public Enemy’s lyrics and imagery played referents like
samples, placing iconic names into records as punctuation, dropping clues
that their music was bigger than hip-hop. They name-checked Joanne
Chesimard in “Rebel without a Pause,” referenced Louis Farrakhan in their
second and third singles, sampled Farrakhan’s adviser Khalid Muhammad
and Jesse Jackson in other tracks, calling Professor Griff the “Minister of
Information” as a shout-out to Eldridge Cleaver’s title in the Black
Panthers. Even a reference to Charles Barkley in “Rebel without a Pause”
carried a unique weight, since the then 76ers baller was integral in shifting
basketball aesthetics from the graceful game of Dr. J to a more powerful,
aggressive sport. Says Chuck about his mosaic rhyme technique: “I just
spewed all kinds of things that was on my brain. That became my rap style
for a while, spewing out different phrases, never staying on one subject. I
turned into a schizophrenic rapper, because of people’s attention spans
being so short. I figured I’d rap the same way people paid attention, giving
five seconds to one thought, 10 seconds to another thought, and seven
seconds to another thought.”37
In a turbulent time, hip-hoppers were forced to take on the role of a
generation’s voice, and Chuck was forced to assume the role of the
revolution’s nuclear core — he and Flav got the closing verse on “Self
Destruction” for a reason. It helped that Chuck was eminently quotable, a
guy whose sound bites were more famous than most rappers’ music.
(Google currently shows 7,710 results for “Chuck D”+“black CNN”.)
In a contentious interview with writer John Leland, Chuck laid out the
dilemma of his position: “The only thing that gives the straight-up facts on
how the black youth feels is a rap record. It’s the number one
communicator, force and source in America right now . . . I look at myself
as an interpreter and dispatcher.” In the interview, Chuck took credit for the
paradigm shift from talking about gold chains to talking about the
government, from looking out for No. 1 to looking out for your community.
But he asserted that he was not assuming the role of a political leader.
“People are always looking to catch me in fucking double-talk and
loopholes,” he said. “They treat me like I’m Jesse Jackson. I’m not running,
I’m just offering a little bit of a solution, or at least explaining why things
are the way they are.”38
Even though the core message of Brown’s “Say It Loud” was
confrontational — “We demand a chance to do things for ourself / We’re
tired of beatin’ our head against the wall / And workin’ for someone else”
— the song reached far beyond the radicals. It broke the Top 10 of the
Billboard Hot 100, even though Brown said it ultimately cost him a lot of
his white audience as many white radio stations refused to play it. But more
important, the song took an unwavering stance of self-pride and righteous
anger in the face of adversity that held appeal no matter what side of the
revolution you were on.
This was the type of James Brown song that raised Chuck D. As Chang
notes in Can’t Stop Won’t Stop, “Say It Loud” and “I Don’t Want Nobody to
Give Me Nothing (Open the Door, I’ll Get It Myself)” had messages of
change and upheaval that could appeal to everyone from the radicals
preparing for armed revolution to the black conservatives who stressed
economic self-sufficiency. The songs — like those of Public Enemy 20
years later — were radical at heart but crossed a wide audience: black
radicals, pro-black non-radical integrationists, white hipsters and teenage
kids of all races looking for voices that mirrored their alienation. “People
called ‘Black and Proud’ militant and angry,” said Brown in his
autobiography. “But really, if you listen to it, it sounds like a children’s
song. That’s why I had children in it, so children who heard it could grow
up feeling pride. It’s a rap song too.”39 Chuck D, then known as Carlton
Ridenhour, had just turned 9. He says, “As a youngster in school, we sang
that record like there was no tomorrow.”40
These songs would provide a spiritual center for Public Enemy, but they
were ultimately not the pistons gunning inside Nation of Millions. They
lacked the paranoia, moodiness, abandon and noise needed to build a better
bomb. Instead, the Bomb Squad found armaments in James Brown’s work
from 1970 to 1972, a time when the Godfather, like Public Enemy, was
doing constant rethinking, regrouping and reassembling. The time when he
had two bands that played like they could take over the world. The time
when his funk was at its absolute heaviest.

***

“The Grunt” wasn’t the only triumph from the Bootsy Collins-led JB’s. By
the end of 1970, the group had played on seminal Brown tracks such as
“Get Up (I Feel Like Being a Sex Machine),” “Super Bad” and “Talkin’
Loud and Sayin’ Nothing.” From this period, Public Enemy took liberal use
of Brown’s “Get Up, Get Into It, Get Involved,” seemingly for spiritual
guidance. Brown himself called “Get Up” a rap song.
“Get Up” beefs up the Nation of Millions closer “Party for Your Right to
Fight.” Chuck and right-hand man Flavor Flav run down a quickie history
of COINTELPRO, blaming the U.S. government and J. Edgar Hoover for
disrupting and destroying the Black Panthers. James Brown’s right-hand
man Bobby Byrd provides the punctuation. Byrd’s voice is speaking from
the winter of 1970, less than a year after Hoover’s secret FBI squad helped
coordinate the raid in which Fred Hampton was assassinated. He turns
Public Enemy’s history lesson into a call to action: “Get into it!” “Get
involved!” Byrd, always the intrepid sideman, even gives Chuck and Flav a
quick “You got it!” from “I Know You Got Soul.”
A word on Byrd: When they met as teenagers in the early ’50s, James
Brown and Byrd were both keyboardists in gospel groups in Toccoa,
Georgia. However, Brown was stuck behind a prison fence and Byrd was a
curious town gawker striking up conversation from the other side. When
Brown was released from prison at age 19 with nowhere to go, Byrd’s
family gave him a place to stay. In no time Brown was playing with Byrd’s
group the Avons. Byrd and bandmate Sylvester Keels pushed Brown out
front, the Avons became the Flames, the Flames became the Famous
Flames, the Famous Flames became a couple of different versions of James
Brown and the Famous Flames, and it all eventually became the-amazing-
Mr.-Please-Please-himself-the-star-of-the-show-Jaaaaames-Broooown —
Byrd Bobby was by Brown’s side for every step of the way. They were so
close, in fact, that there was even a rumor in 1965 that Brown was getting a
sex change so he could marry Byrd.
Byrd was always there to add a “Get on up!,” and he pretty much
invented the concept of the hypeman. Chuck would be the first to point out
how closely the Brown/Byrd dynamic mirrored that of himself and Flavor
Flav. When Public Enemy was signed to Def Jam in 1986, Hank Shocklee
and Chuck wanted to bring Flavor Flav in as part of the group, an idea that
both Rick Rubin and Russell Simmons loathed. They wondered what
exactly Flav did. Hank and Chuck couldn’t really explain, but they knew he
would bring the “supercalifragihestikalagoothki.” Chuck wanted someone
to bounce things off of, citing Byrd as a direct influence.
The JB’s who backed Byrd on “Get Up” weren’t the same JB’s whom
Brown had plucked from obscurity two years earlier. That band and Brown
clashed over creative control, and after a European tour, they decided to
split ways. Bootsy Collins tells an interesting story about battling the
staunchly anti-drug Brown after a show where he thought the neck of his
bass guitar had turned into a snake while tripping on acid. Even though
Brown never really yelled at the guys or fined them like he did with the
previous band, it was time for them to go. As Brown’s heaviest band, it was
only natural that Collins and crew would hitch their next ride on the just-
launched P-Funk Mothership. By 1971, Brown had a new band whose
experimental spirit was analogous to Pubic Enemy circa 1987.

***

After the success of “Rebel without a Pause” in May 1987, Chuck, Flav,
Terminator and the plastic-Uzi-toting S1Ws spent their summer on the Def
Jam tour, gigging across the U.S. with Whodini, Doug E. Fresh, Eric B and
Rakim, Stetsasonic and, the star attraction: the sweat-dappled chest of LL
Cool J. On the bus, Professor Griff would play Farrakhan tapes and the
S1Ws would practice their defense moves — a far cry from the party
atmosphere in Whodini’s ride. Meanwhile, the Shocklee brothers and Eric
Sadler stayed behind in their 510 South Franklin pre-production studio,
cooking up tracks. They would send Chuck tapes of what would be “Don’t
Believe the Hype” and “Bring the Noise.”
When Chuck returned in September, the first track they finished was
“Don’t Believe the Hype,” a slow, punchy rumbler that seemed downright
friendly compared to the spastic “Rebel.” On “Don’t Believe the Hype,” the
Bomb Squad did some of their heaviest experimenting. The opening of the
song sounds like two tracks jogging in reverse, an effect created by
sampling sounds they first manipulated on a turntable. In this case, mainly
through the transformer scratch. The transformer, an invention usually
credited to DJ Jazzy Jeff, is the slurping sound of a DJ pulling a record
backward against the needle, ducking the crossfader during the parts where
it plays forward. It’s a woozy effect built solely on the noises a DJ usually
doesn’t want you to hear. It’s often used as an embellishment, but here it
makes up most of the track — ugly noise for noise’s sake. Another
experiment involved the Bomb Squad inventing their own bass sound.
Sitting around toying with the gear, Sadler took the sine wave from the
Akai’s tone generator, tuned it down an octave and made a bass track from
it.
The shrill, one-note tenor-sax blast anchoring the song is from the lungs
of St. Clair Pickney. It’s a rubbed-raw squonk taken from James Brown’s
“Escape-Ism Pt. 1.” On the original Brown recording, it’s a piercing
surprise, an unexpected peak in a solo that probably set the track into the
red for a split second, an ill squeal like a heavy boot stepping on a cat’s tail.
This piercing moment of music comes from a band — like the Bomb Squad
— that was forced to do a little quick experimenting. After the Bootsy
Collins-led JB’s jumped ship, veteran trombonist Fred Wesley was recruited
to assemble a new band in December 1970. This was not the crack lineup of
gifted teen savants from Collins’ Pacesetters; this band was raw. Said
Wesley: “They were totally green. Cheese Martin was so used to playing
rhythm, just scratching behind James, that I had to teach him to play lead
guitar. And at first Fred Thomas wasn’t much of a bass player. We
rehearsed for two weeks in the basement of the Apollo Theater just to get
the show together.”41 They contacted Jimmy Parker, who they thought was
an alto sax player. He accepted the gig but had never played an alto sax
prior to joining the band. They put a show together in eight days. Within
two months, the band had recorded two hits for Bobby Byrd — “I Know
You Got Soul” (sampled on “Cold Lampin’ with Flavor”) and follow-up
“Hot Pants — I’m Coming, I’m Coming, I’m Coming” (sampled on
“Caught, Can I Get a Witness”).
James Brown’s “Escape-Ism Pt. 1” was released in a turbulent time. It
was one of the first songs the new band recorded together, the first single
under Brown’s name with the new band, one of the last singles released as
part of his King Records deal and the first track on Side B of the album that
his new label rushed out in order to keep the momentum going. Like
“Funky Drummer,” it’s just an extended studio groove paired down to fit
two sides of a single. The uncut, 19-minute take (available on the Hot Pants
reissue) reveals just how fresh everything is. Brown ad-libs in his classic
style, going around the room to ask his new sidemen where they’re from.
When he gets to Jimmy Parker, he stumbles: “Where’re you from, uh . . .
You know I keep forgetting this cat’s name . . . What your name is, man?”
Immediately after the recording, the band was scheduled to play at the
Apollo to record Brown’s sixth live album. Barely together three months,
they rehearsed day and night in the Apollo’s basement to work up the
telekinetic bond that made Brown’s live shows so amazing. The live album,
Revolution of the Mind, released in 1971, would be incredibly influential for
Public Enemy. For starters, the cover image is the spiritual blueprint for the
Nation of Millions sleeve. On the jacket of Revolution, James Brown is
pictured behind bars, looking resolute and unbreakable, the dull orange wall
behind him seemingly one cell over from Chuck and Flav’s.
The Nation of Millions cover was shot by punk-rock archivist and
skateboard photographer Glen E. Friedman, who also shot the cover of Yo!
Bum Rush the Show. The shoot was at a midtown Manhattan police station
in some vacant jail cells. They had to reschedule the shoot after Flav didn’t
turn up — apparently he was in an actual jail at the time. Friedman told
U.K. hip-hop magazine Hip Hop Connection that Flav wasn’t too excited to
spend another day sitting in a cell. The now-classic cover wasn’t the image
that Friedman wanted. He had aimed for something grittier, shooting a
series of black-and-white photos of Chuck and Flav breaking out of jail
from the perspective of the surveillance cameras. His preferred cover was a
black-and-white image of the last thing a security camera would see before
Chuck clocked out with a swift punch.
 But Public Enemy balked at Friedman’s idea from the beginning, saying
it was too conceptual. They asked him to do a simpler shot of the two MCs
in a cell. The shot they eventually chose was not Friedman’s favorite (he
even threatened to scratch the negative), but it was picked because they
thought thick bars would look stark and compelling even under a tiny
cassette tray. The photo of Chuck knocking out the surveillance camera
would later turn up as the cover of the “Don’t Believe the Hype” single.
And the cover of Nation — despite Freidman’s complaint that you can’t see
Chuck’s eyes — is one of pop music’s most enduring images,
overshadowing its forebear, Revolution of the Mind.
Around the release of Revolution, James Brown started noticing that
radio was being segregated and formatted by genre. Despite the fact that he
sold tons of records (he would have two No. 1 R&B singles in 1971, the
year Revolution was released), he said that rock stations stopped playing
him: “I was making some of my strongest music during that period, and I
think most whites have been deprived of it.”42 “The radio’s scared of me,”
echoes Chuck on “Hype.” “’Cause I’m mad, plus I’m the enemy.” It didn’t
end there: Public Enemy would sample Revolution of the Mind throughout
their career. MC Danny Ray’s intro (“Are you really ready for some super
dynamite soul?”) would turn up on Nation’s 1990 follow-up Fear of a
Black Planet. The rapturous screams from the audience in “Soul Power”
would be transformed into whistling missiles in the bridge of “Caught, Can
I Get a Witness.”
And the JB’s would find even more session work on “Don’t Believe the
Hype”: Some guitar (either by Cheese Martin or Robert Coleman) from
Brown’s 1971 single “I Got Ants in My Pants, Pt. 1” is sliced in under the
verses. One of Chuck D’s unheralded roles as a Bomb Squad member was
doing light scratching and turntable manipulation, and this song features his
handiwork.
“‘Don’t Believe the Hype,’ it’s a sequel,” begins Chuck in the third
verse, still mulling over the can of worms he opened in “Rebel without a
Pause.” His line “They claim that I’m a criminal” is in the same vein as
“Rebel’s” “Designed to scatter a line of suckers that claim I do crime” —
consecutive songs in a row that put racist cops on blast. Fittingly, Public
Enemy borrow from Whodini’s “Fugitive” for that paranoid “hu-ahh-AHH-
ahhhm-yah” vocal ejaculation. “Fugitive,” a hard-rocking track off
Whodini’s 1986 album Back in Black is also about being wrongly accused.
But this time, Chuck had music critics in his scope, most notably writer
John Leland. Much like radio stations, American critics weren’t too
receptive to Yo! Bum Rush the Show, and Leland was especially vicious in
his Village Voice review titled after the Buzzcocks song “Noise Annoys.”
Chuck later told NME that he attended a Spin party looking to fuck Leland
up. Chuck heard he was hiding. When Public Enemy were cornered, they
would bite back. Here was a band that not only read their press but would
call writers out on it. In a Spin interview in 1988, they had a comically tense
exchange: “Your last single, ‘Bring The Noise,’ was basically about what
other people are saying about you.” . . . “Oh, yeah, that was about you. I
was talking right at you.”43
“White media were terrified of these guys,”44 said Public Enemy
publicist Leyla Turkkan at a panel in New York City. She told a story about
how one prominent rock critic cowered in fear during the drive to a face-to-
face interview with Chuck.
Def Jam co-founder Rick Rubin spent his summer vacation in L.A.,
recording metal bands Danzig and Slayer for the Def Jam helmed
soundtrack to Less Than Zero, the chilly, druggy, cult flick loosely based on
the Bret Easton Ellis book. When Rubin returned to New York in August,
he wanted a Public Enemy track to top the soundtrack off, and they
submitted “Don’t Believe the Hype.” Rubin didn’t think the song fit. Hank
Shocklee was never the biggest fan of it, and the rest of the group agreed
they wanted to make something “turbulent, not funky.”45 Ultimately, the
song was scrapped for the punkier “Bring the Noise.” The group put “Don’t
Believe the Hype” on the shelf and forgot about it.
“Don’t Believe the Hype,” the true “sequel” to “Rebel without a Pause,”
became more of a Part 3, since it didn’t see the light of day until later. Like
with “Rebel,” Chuck’s heroes Run-DMC were integral in giving the song
the go-ahead. Since tapes were easy to get in the Def Jam office, DMC had
gotten a copy of “Don’t Believe the Hype” after mastering.
Hank later stumbled across DMC blasting the track from his Bronco on
a Saturday night — on the Lower East Side or in Harlem depending on
whom you ask. The entire block was grooving along. Public Enemy
changed their opinion on the track immediately and, once May 1988 rolled
around, wrapped tightly under Friedman’s surveillance-camera cover, it
became Nation of Millions ’ third single.
 Chapter Four –
“Beat is the father of your rock ’n’ roll”

While James Brown, Fred Wesley and the JB’s were picking up the
pieces in 1971, space cadet Bootsy Collins and his brother Catfish had run
away to join George Clinton’s P-Funk circus. Over the next decade,
Parliament and Funkadelic would leave an acid-soaked trail that ushered in
the second wave of funk, providing hip-hop with enough low-end theories
to wear out a generation of woofers. (Old George would be sampled so
reliably in the ’90s that he eventually released his own series of snatchable
snippets called Sample Some of Disc, Sample Some of D.A.T.) But before
Digital Underground and Dr. Dre made their Mothership Connection, the
Bomb Squad was borrowing Funkadelic’s gnarliest transmissions.
Funkadelic was the hard-rock branch of the Clinton legislature.
Evolving from a ’60s doo-wop band, Funkadelic turned into a fuzzed-out
monster after borrowing Vanilla Fudge’s Marshall stacks at a college show.
From then on out, Parliament were smooth and Funkadelic (same members,
different label) were crunchy — a band synonymous with swirling clouds
of feedback, Black Cheer crunge, cartoon voices and infectious chants. Like
the Bomb Squad, Clinton produced Funkadelic records for maximum
headfuck: “You turned on a Funkadelic record with earphones on, drums
running across your head, panning the foot, we panned everything . . . We
went to colleges where they wasn’t taking anything, but they was tripping
on the records.”46
But Funkadelic were Public Enemy’s forefathers for reasons well
beyond their affinity for noise and hard rock. They had a visual aesthetic
that spoke as loud as their message, something Chuck would allude to in a
London interview when he talked about Public Enemy’s bold stage
presence. “We wanted to be identified visually because we knew sonically a
lot of music would not be understood . . . We knew that when people came
to a concert, the No. 1 reaction was based on what they saw, and what they
heard second.”47 Public Enemy surrounded themselves with arresting gold
and black banners, one of the highest-visibility color combinations
available. The unforgettable Instamatic icon of Flavor Flav’s clock pendant
was a signifier at once simple and loaded with meaning, something that
evolved naturally from Funkadelic stage wear like Bootsy’s sparkling star
glasses or Gary Shider’s diaper. P-Funk did it all first. They would flank
themselves with a logo onstage: a massive skull that would, at show’s
climax, smoke a six-and-a-half-foot joint. And hey, there were guns onstage
too, even if the kitschy, strobe-lit “bop gun” held by Shider wasn’t exactly
the Uzis toted by the S1Ws. Years after Alice Cooper and Kiss started
packing semi trucks with explosives and guillotines and fake blood, this
may not seem like a big deal, but remember that the only black groups with
huge production budgets for theatrical stage shows in the mid-’70s were P-
Funk, the Commodores and Earth, Wind and Fire. And only P-Funk had
their own spaceship.
Funkadelic paid attention to album art, which surely drew in Chuck,
who had studied graphic design at Adelphi University. While there, Chuck
drew a comic for the school paper called “Tales of the Skind” — short for
“Takes of the Spectrum Kind.” Every day in the cartoon, Chuckie D and the
members of the mobile DJ crew Spectrum Crew would assume the role of
superheroes from outer space that battled Ronald Reagan or drug dealers or
whomever from their Funkadelic-styled spaceship. Keith Shocklee credits
the use of characters in the group’s aesthetic — from the Spectrum days all
the way through Terminator X, who “speaks with his hands” — with the
group’s love of cartoons, television and comic books. The closest
antecedent to “Skind” was Pedro Bell’s artwork on the Funkadelic albums,
a busy Technicolor world of Afro’d Amazons, cyborg warriors and space
warfare. By the ’90s, cultural critics were retroactively calling Bell’s
cosmic slop and the P-Funk intergalactic mythos a defining moment in
“Afrofuturism,” a way to explore the black experience via tales of
encountering alien worlds and fantastic technologies. Essayist Greg Tate
wrote, “Black people live the estrangement that science-fiction writers
imagine.”48 George Clinton took it even deeper: “I knew I had to find
another place for black people to be. And space was that place.”49
“African-American culture is Afrofuturist at its heart,” wrote critic Mark
Dery in the definitive essay on the topic. “With trickster élan, it retrofits,
refunctions and willfully misuses the technocommodities and science
fictions generated by a dominant culture that has always been not only
white but a wielder, as well, of instrumental technologies.” In Bell’s version
of Afrofuturism, his “zeep-speak” slanguage transmutes the English
language into P-Funk’s cosmic-beatnik universe, an alternate land of the
“epizootic,” the “foxative,” of “baby-masturbating nixonharpies” and the
“neegroid protoplasm of cherrybustative dimensions.” Classic sci-fi tropes
got pushed through the Funkadelic particle demobilizer: the sexy robot
from Metropolis gets a funky overhaul for the cover of 1976’s Tales of Kidd
Funkadelic; “Ratman and Robinlee” hide from the flagrant, filthy, flastic
forces of Funkadelia on the back of Hardcore Jollies; a Kubrickian star-
child relaxes in the corner of Cosmic Slop. Bell’s felt-tip
recontextualizations were Funkadelic’s version of sampling.
While most agree that the crowded covers of Hardcore Jollies and
Cosmic Slop are classics, Bell looks back at the austere cover of 1975’s
Let’s Take It to the Stage with some criticism — “a little too much mutant
science on that one.”50 The cover is almost a prototype for heavy metal
album art, with a green autopsy subject who’s a mix of Linda Blair in The
Exorcist and Iron Maiden’s as-yet-unborn mascot Eddie. This is the album
from which the Bomb Squad took the most crucial noise in “Bring the
Noise.” The album was driven by the same competitive spirit that drove
Public Enemy to be overachievers, its lyrics full of jocular jibes at
Funkadelic’s competition: “Slufus,” “Earth Hot Air and No Fire,” “Fool and
the Gang,” “the Godmother,” etc. The title Let’s Take It to the Stage was a
battle cry that said no one could defeat them onstage, something that Chuck
D pressed upon his own troops when he saw rock bands outhustling his
group.
Like the JB’s in 1971, P-Funk in 1974 were going through some
changes that altered the band’s chemistry. Funkadelic’s signature guitar
magician, Eddie “Maggot Brain” Hazel, had a habit of disappearing and
returning to the lineup in erratic bursts — he was locked up in a
correctional institution in California after attacking a female flight attendant
and punching an air marshal. Hazel appears sporadically on Stage — he’s
listed in the liner notes as “Alumni Funkadelic” — which allows new
guitarist Michael Hampton to shine. P-Funk found Hampton fresh out of
high school, jamming at a Cleveland house party. Pressured by his friends,
Hampton played Funkadelic’s signature “Maggot Brain” in the living room,
sitting on a tiny Fender amp. “I knew Mike was gonna be with the group
then,” remembers Gary Shider, “’cause he played it note for note. Eddie
couldn’t even play it note for note.”51 In addition to the lineup shift, Bootsy
Collins had his star-shaped goggles dead set on being a star and started
singing on “Be My Beach,” eventually stealing the spotlight, a turn that
would result in his own Rubber Band two years later. In the following
years, money issues would tear Funkadelic even further apart.
It’s not certain who plays the opening acid-flashback ambulance siren
on “Get Off Your Ass and Jam” — probably Hampton. It ended up as the
main riff on “Bring the Noise” because it’s noisy as all hell, a stabbing
wheedle-throb like the inside of a calliope. Three disparate noises appear in
10 seconds, perhaps tape-spliced together. The riff devolves into a
syncopated skritch-scratch like the sound of a DJ cutting up a trumpet, and
concludes with a funky, incredulous, “Gawwwd, I’m trippin’ on that,” as if
even Funkadelic were shocked by this mysterious haunted-house monster
mashup of noises.

***

Chuck’s first reaction to hearing the instrumental of “Bring the Noise”:

“What am I supposed to do with this?”52 “Rebel without a Pause” was
already Public Enemy’s punk-rock gambit. Says Chuck: “It was our
statement to say, ‘Hey, we can make the records that everybody is making
right now and even make them faster.’”53 “Rebel” was a rebellious 100
beats per minute, but “Bring the Noise” was a dervish at 109 — “damn near
disco.”54 Like “Don’t Believe the Hype,” this track began as a beat tape that
Chuck received while on the Def Jam tour. “Bring the Noise” would
eventually introduce a new frontier in how fast a rap record could be, but on
the tour bus, Chuck found the speed daunting. Using the working title
“Countdown to Armageddon,” he spent the summer trying to tackle it,
writing four or five verses in Rakim’s “break-up” style, doing quick bursts
of speedy rap with dramatic pauses. It would help usher in the break-neck
speed that would be Nation of Millions’ calling card. Chuck felt that rappers
were “victimized” by their slow tempos — if rock bands could play their
songs faster to match the energy of their crowds, why shouldn’t rappers
play their records faster? Sometimes Public Enemy would have Terminator
speed up the records when they performed, but you can only pitch up a
record so much. “We made a fast record for the days of crack,” said Chuck.
“That was the speed that we took it to, which matched the drug at the
time.”55
When Chuck returned from tour in September, Public Enemy recorded
“Bring the Noise” so Rick Rubin would have something for the Less Than
Zero soundtrack to fill the place of the then scrapped “Don’t Believe the
Hype.” The crew showed up at Sabella Studios in Long Island to record —
Keith and Hank laying down the drums, Chuck bringing in the samples —
presumably including sounds from Funkadelic’s Let’s Take It to the Stage.
Chuck had penned lyrics while driving in his car alongside the ocean in
Long Island, playing the track in his tape deck and taking notes. He later
said he hit a creative wall, faced with pages of lyrics but no idea of which
ones to use. Hank suggested that Chuck tackle each verse with a different
style. The crew stayed in the studio until early morning, Terminator X
laying down the final scratches around 5 a.m.
Chuck wasn’t originally sold on the song when Harry Allen brought him
a tape of the mix in Atlanta. Frustrated that they had made an innovative
track that wasn’t a potential hit, he threw the tape across the room and
“damn near out the window.”56 He would be surprised in November when
Public Enemy toured Europe. Chuck had Terminator throw on the acetate,
and the crowd went nuts — the track would become one of their signatures.
Just like “Rebel without a Pause,” “Bring The Noise” proved that the “B-
side wins again.” Upon its release in November 1987 as the B-side to a split
12-inch, it would immediately steal the spotlight from the Black Flames, the
R&B group leading with a stiff, robotic, un-fun cover of the Chi-Lites’
triumphant “Are You My Woman? (Tell Me So).” Russell Simmons had
picked the Black Flames for the soundtrack, much to Rubin’s dismay, who
would rather have been in L.A. recording with Slayer. The split single was a
living symbol that the Def Jam co-conspirators were headed in two
disparate directions: Simmons looking to diversify with R&B, Rubin
looking to destroy speakers with heavy records.

***

Immediately after Let’s Take It to the Stage, P-Funk would blow up both
financially (due to the success of the Mothership Connection album and
tour) and internally (original funkateers Calvin Simon, Grady Thomas,
Fuzzy Haskins and Ray Davis called it quits). Using records from this same
era, Public Enemy would construct “Party for Your Right to Fight” from
some guitars and synths on Tales of Kidd Funkadelic — an album in which
the Undisco Kidd would, in fact, declare himself “Public Enemy No. 1 to
the undisco scene.”
After making its wheedly appearance on “Bring the Noise,” chunks of
Funkadelic’s “Get Off Your Ass and Jam” would appear on countless rap
records. “Get Off Your Ass and Jam” actually became the center of a
landmark sampling lawsuit in 2004, after three guitar notes were used —
with permission, no less — in N.W.A.’s chaotic, Shocklee-jacking 1990
single “100 Miles and Runnin’.” Bridgeport Music, the owners of George
Clinton’s publishing, heard the N.W.A track in Master P’s movie I Got the
Hook Up and realized that sync rights for movie use were never given.
N.W.A.’s actual use of Funkadelic was negligible — the sound was a mere
sliver (only three notes), it was manipulated into oblivion (producer Dr. Dre
pitch-shifted it down to fit the key of the song), making it almost
unrecognizable under his mix. But still, after the smoke cleared, the Sixth
Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that any use of a sound recording constitutes
copyright infringement.
Despite the actions of his publishers, Clinton enjoyed a great symbiotic
relationship with hip-hop, appreciating the re-energizing of his tracks as a
way to keep his music from becoming nostalgia fodder. He even
experimented with samplers and hip-hop on 1989’s The Cinderella Theory,
inviting Chuck and Flav along for the party. “I like Public Enemy especially
because they’re using the philosophy,” Clinton told Rolling Stone in 1990.
“Like, America Eats Its Young sounds just like what they’re saying today . .
. They, to me, are like Bob Dylan.”57
 Chapter Five –
“Consider yourselves warned”

American critics had responded to Yo! Bum Rush the Show with barbs
(see John Leland’s Village Voice takedown), ambivalence (The New York
Times loved the message, but hated the “adolescent macho”58) and
complete indifference (Rolling Stone didn’t review it until year’s end). But
in the U.K., early adopter critics in magazines like Melody Maker and NME
were already crowning Public Enemy as kings. While many rappers were
treating the U.K. as a secondary market, Chuck was knee-deep in his
strategy of doing as many interviews as possible, priming the pump for their
visit in November. Chuck wanted Public Enemy to be the first rap group to
conquer the international market. Said Chuck in his autobiography: “Other
artists had a negative attitude about going overseas. They would complain
about the lack of good food, the lack of what they felt was fine females, and
the cold weather. We went overseas with an attitude like we were going to
boot camp.”59
The first stop of the Def Jam Europe tour was the Hammersmith Odeon
on November 1, 1987. Although Public Enemy went on first, opening for
LL Cool J and Eric B and Rakim, they received a hero’s welcome —
complete with the rowdy whistle-blowing, air-horn-tooting and singing
along that British hip-hop audiences would later be known for. P.E. spent
the summer months watching American girls swoon over Cool J, but the
U.K. market wasn’t having it. Public Enemy were greeted with bedlam, LL
with a hailstorm of coins. The audience was assuredly not loving Cool
James when LL mounted the couch he had onstage for his hit ballad “I
Need Love.” “London wasn’t into soft music,” said Chuck. “They wanted
their music rock-hard.”60 Chuck had been voraciously reading the British
press, so the response didn’t shock him, but Flavor Flav, who had never
been to another country, was a bit taken aback.
 The show on November 3, the third triumphant night at the Odeon, was
recorded, videotaped and broadcast by the BBC. When they brought the
tapes home, Public Enemy decided to use pieces of them on Nation of
Millions to make it clear to everyone in America who had slept on Yo! Bum
Rush the Show that they needed to, in the words of Professor Griff, “get a
late pass.” Said Chuck in a London interview at the time: “There’s a certain
situation over here that’s ready for us. In the States, they’re just about
rockin’ boots, but over here, it’s some kind of awareness that they don’t
have in the States . . . as of yet. But they will.”61
The voice at the beginning of Nation of Millions is British DJ Dave
Pearce, host of BBC Radio’s pioneering show “Fresh Start to the Week,”
one of the first shows to bring hip-hop to the U.K. “Hammersmith Odeon,
are you ready for the Def Jam Tour? Let me hear you make some noise!”
The crowd obliged. If you listen to tapes of the concert, the audio for
“Rebel without a Pause” is mostly whistles. Chuck and Flav stalked the
stage, both wearing white for ultimate visibility. Back then, both Chuck and
Flav wore big bathroom clocks that they had copped from Long Island
retailer Fortunoff, a style they borrowed from high school kids. Flav made
his look timeless, eventually bringing it to prime time. Chuck abandoned
his clock after it kept hitting him in the chest.
Segments from the high-energy, 35-minute set would be peppered
throughout Nation of Millions — from Flav calling out for a “Hoooooo” to
Chuck D giving props to Terminator X, to Professor Griff counting down
“Armageddon.” With this glue eventually binding the album’s 16 tracks, the
samples would give Nation of Millions a cohesion that, for the first time,
established hip-hop as an album genre. American rock critics and rap fans
would take note: Unlike any rap album that came before, this was a 57:51
statement, not a collection of singles.
 Chapter Six –
“All in, we’re gonna win”

After the initial three singles and the riotous Hammersmith Odeon
interludes, the bulk of Nation of Millions was recorded within the first eight
weeks of hip-hop’s golden year: 1988. Using the working title Countdown
to Armageddon, the Bomb Squad toiled in January and February as the
world continued to burn. Every day, the newspapers were peppered with
incidents of racial discrimination. An all-white village board of a Chicago
suburb was petitioning against a black church that was moving into its
neighborhood. A 50-year-old African-American mother of five was
attacked and rubbed with feces by two white assailants in the predominantly
white city of Newton, New Jersey. A Texas court ruled that three police
officers were guilty of beating an African-American Louisiana truck driver
to death in a Texas jail. New York newspapers had shocking daily updates
on the slowly unfolding case of Tawana Brawley, a 15-year-old who
claimed that a gang of white men abducted her, sexually assaulted her and
scrawled racial slurs on her body. Brawley would later make a cameo in
Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” video. It was clear that a fiery response
was overdue.
With a $52,000 budget, the gang once again did pre-production at 510
South Franklin and finished up at Def Jam home base Chung King.
Sometime in the middle of the sessions, operations were moved to Greene
Street, where Salt-N-Pepa producer Hurby Luv Bug had set up shop. Unlike
the three-minute Rick Rubin-curated riff-rap that was falling off the end of
the Def Jam assembly line, it was very important to Hank Shocklee that
Public Enemy were awarded full creative control. “Executive producer”
Rubin thankfully had the trust and foresight to grant it to them, but Hank
wasn’t taking any chances. He wouldn’t allow Russell Simmons, Rubin or
anyone not directly involved with the creative process near the studio. His
motto: They can hear it when it’s done. After Nation of Millions blew up
and the Bomb Squad were commissioned to do remixes for Janet Jackson
and Madonna, Hank wouldn’t even let the superstars gaze at his console.
Creative freedom was imperative because, as they would be the first to tell
you, Public Enemy were out to make history, not please an A&R rep.
According to Hank, Simmons didn’t even like Public Enemy records until
they started selling.
With Rubin’s blessing, Public Enemy were able to work outside the
time-tested model of the record label. Their defiance would cement hip-hop
as an album genre, just like what Marvin Gaye helped do for soul when he
threatened the Motown pop factory with defection if they didn’t support
What’s Going On, or Stevie Wonder when he used the independently
produced Music of My Mind as a bargaining chip in his contract. But in
1969, one album in particular cleared a slow, smooth, string-soaked path to
autonomy.

***

When Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, the black-consciousness

movement lost its voice and — about two miles away from where it
happened — so did Isaac Hayes. “I went blank,” said Hayes. “I couldn’t
write for about a year — I was filled with so much bitterness and anguish,
till I couldn’t deal with it.”62 Just the day before, Hayes had marched with
King in support of Memphis’ striking sanitation workers. For their troubles,
they were hit with mace and attack dogs. Sometime after 6:01 p.m. on April
4, 1968, King was shot by a rifleman’s bullet on the second-floor balcony of
the Lorraine Motel. Hayes was only a stone’s throw away, in a taxicab
headed to the Stax recording studio. When he got the news, Hayes and
songwriting partner David Porter drove over to the Lorraine and saw the
pandemonium first-hand. On some streets there was looting; others had an
eerie stillness. Hayes took to the radio that night to plead for peace.
More than 125 cities reported racial violence, and many of them took
advantage of the 24,000 National Guards that President Lyndon B. Johnson
had dispatched. The National Guard in Memphis enforced a curfew, which
Stax — in consideration of the studio’s importance to the community —
was given permission to ignore. The Stax team set out to record throughout
the night. Staffers moved some of the master tapes out of the studio as a
precautionary measure, in case they were victims of rioting. The grocery
store across the street was burned to the ground, but rioters would not touch
the Stax studio, a revered community institution.
The National Guard set up camp on the corner outside the studio. A
guardsman almost shot Hayes’ friend Benny Mabone when he poked his
head outside the studio door. The morning after, MGs bassist Duck Dunn
was sitting in his car when Hayes walked over to have a chat — a
conversation that was immediately broken up by a swarm of police cars,
with officers pointing shotguns at Hayes. As white-owned businesses
around the studio burned to the ground, new tensions would be created in
the Stax family, a crew that was made up of white and black musicians who
had collaborated for years to make hit records.
Since first playing piano and co-writing Floyd Newman’s “Frog Stomp”
in 1964, Hayes had been an integral player in what the bottom of the Stax
letterhead asserted was “The Memphis Sound — The soul label for your
swinging turntable.” With records cut live in the back of a converted movie
theater, Stax was the sound of soul — as in human soul. It allowed house
drummer Al Jackson, Jr.’s snare cracks to lag behind the beat; it released
takes in which the energy and feel were more important than things like
tempo and pitch; its studio never really had the best equipment — all in
sharp contrast to the comparatively clinical music coming out of Detroit,
the Public Enemy to Motown’s Marley Marl. Stax owner Jim Stewart, a
white bank teller and country fiddler who had formed the label out of his
Satellite Records upstart in 1958, always asserted that it made “black
music,” unlike Motown, which made hits geared for maximum crossover
appeal.
In 1964, Hayes would begin a fruitful partnership with co-writer David
Porter that would produce more than 200 songs for Carla and Rufus
Thomas, Johnny Taylor and Sam & Dave — many of them written while
Hayes was still supporting himself by working in a slaughterhouse. To get a
physical element in Sam & Dave tracks like “You Don’t Know Like I
Know,” Hayes and Porter would raise the key of the track until Sam Moore
would be forced to sing uncomfortably out of his range. Hayes was
responsible for bringing a funkier edge to Stax, co-writing the deadly “Hold
On! I’m Coming” as well as “Soul Man,” a track that was overtly inspired
by the black-consciousness movement and recorded a year before James
Brown said it loud. Having seen “soul” scrawled on buildings in Detroit and
hearing the phrase “soul brother” become more popular every day, Hayes
wrote the song to be a proud, pro-black anthem.
But things felt different after King was assassinated. Hayes’ prolific
nature took a dive, and he said it took him a year to recapture what he once
had. Still angry over King’s death, he focused on making sure that Stax
hired more African-American employees, including its first black secretary.
With help from a banker friend, Hayes formed the Black Knights, a group
whose purpose was to “tug at the apron strings of consciousness,” bringing
attention to Memphis’ problems with job discrimination and police
brutality.
Meanwhile, Stax’s distributor, Atlantic Records, had been sold.
Atlantic’s Jerry Wexler dropped a bombshell on Jim Stewart about the fine
print in their contract: By the way, Warner Brothers now owns all your
records, all your masters, all these unreleased tapes and, oh yeah, Sam &
Dave too. This was a sizable blow, since Sam & Dave were Stax’s most
successful act to date next to Otis Redding — who had died in a plane crash
in December 1967.
Left with nothing but the as-yet-unrecorded music of a handful of artists
who were under contract, Stax moved forward a year later with a blitzkrieg
of releases. In May 1969, Stax pulled the improbable business stunt of
releasing 27 singles and 27 albums simultaneously. The label flew more
than 200 journalists to Memphis for an immense press summit at the
Holiday Inn Rivermont, where Stax unleashed a massive new catalog to
replace the one it had just lost. Every Stax artist was represented. But the
record with the least pressure to move units ended up changing music
forever.
Stax executive vice president Al Bell had wanted a reluctant Isaac
Hayes to produce a solo record for the 27-album push. Hayes’ last album,
1967’s Presenting Isaac Hayes, was little more than an alcohol-fueled jam
session that had been edited to album format. It tanked, and Hayes vowed to
never do another album unless Stax granted him complete creative control.
Hayes was given a lot of leeway as one of Stax’s head songwriters, but suits
were still suits. Jim Stewart was obsessed with keeping things simple and
accessible. He would dissuade Hayes from using minor chords in any song
he produced for Stax. On the occasions when Hayes would ask Stewart to
record him, Stewart would decline, telling Hayes that his voice was too
pretty.
But with 26 other albums for Stax to worry about, Bell granted Hayes
the freedom to make whatever type of record he wanted. “I didn’t give a
damn if it didn’t sell because I was going for the true artistic side . . . I had
an opportunity to express myself no holds barred, no restrictions, and that’s
why I did it.”63 Compare Hayes’ approach to that of Hank Shocklee, who
said about Nation of Millions, “We didn’t go in there tryin’ to make a record
that an A&R person had to like. We didn’t care.”64 In 1969, this felt like a
wild luxury, but after the release and subsequent success of Hayes’ Hot
Buttered Soul, groups like Public Enemy could treat creative freedom as an
ultimatum, an absolute imperative.
Hayes couldn’t fit everything he wanted to say on a three-minute side of
a Stax 45, so he let himself stretch out for 18-minute workouts like “By the
Time I Get to Phoenix” — a song Public Enemy no doubt found inspiration
in for their MLK Day screed “By the Time I Get to Arizona.” Hot Buttered
Soul was as unlikely an album as they came during a time when most R&B
albums were just cobbled-together collections of singles and covers. Hot
Buttered Soul dripped with extended jams that challenged the radio-single
format, slurring strings in sharp contrast to the spare Stax output, showing a
bassy bravado that wallowed below the timbres that R&B fans were used
to. Plus, it had no singles or promotion to speak of until a month after its
release. Nevertheless, it single-handedly changed R&B from a singles genre
to an album genre after it sold a million copies, landing simultaneously on
the R&B, pop, jazz and easy listening charts. Part of its unique appeal was a
result of Hayes pulling from a slew of disparate sources, much in the way
that P.E. would stack Slayer and Spoonie Gee. Hayes originally heard
“Phoenix” on the radio as performed by country-pop artist Glen Campbell,
and none of the Bar-Kays in his backing band were too excited about it.
Out of the four songs on the album, Hayes wrote only one himself, the
nine-minute sex romp “Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymistic.” “We wanted
to tease one’s intellect,” said Hayes about this juicy jabberwock. “It only
meant that I had a roll in the hay and wanted an encore. All of those
extensive words, all those syllables — I had a nice roll in the hay, and I
want some more.”65 After some lexual healing and a line about hearing a
“discussion about a racial relationship,” Hayes plays a six-minute piano
solo, including five seconds that are looped for the tense nail-biter of a beat
for Public Enemy’s “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos.” A Hayes track
talking about his “gastronomical stupensity” and “love asphixiation” may
have seemed better suited for Flav getting brainknowledgeably wizzy than
Chuck D mounting the greatest jailbreak ever put to wax. But P.E.’s use of
the only Hayes-penned song on R&B’s creative breakthrough represents the
importance of autonomy and self-reliance that Public Enemy stress both
creatively and politically.
Isaac Hayes was one of Chuck’s heroes, his “musical godfather” who
appeared on records bought by his aunts, uncles and parents. He was a
figure whom Chuck has described as larger than life in his childhood —
“like Superman, black Superman.”66 Chuck had picked out the Hayes
sample for a Bomb Squad production in 1987, but not for Public Enemy. It
was originally intended for a track by True Mathematics, one of a handful
of Hempstead MCs whom the Bomb Squad were managing at the time. Yet
Chuck wanted it for himself and quietly prayed that Mathematics couldn’t
handle it. As fate would have it, the track quickly ended up in Chuck’s more
able hands. At that point, Chuck reached back to the years when Hayes was
at Stax for inspiration.
The Vietnam War weighed heavily on Chuck, who, around 1967, saw
one of his uncles come over to his grandmother’s house to pick up his draft
papers. At age 7, Chuck couldn’t understand much beyond the look on
everyone’s faces. He had relatives who were drafted out of high school —
when they returned, they had Purple Hearts. One had shrapnel in his leg. In
“Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos,” Chuck plays a conscientious objector
who was imprisoned because he tossed his draft notice. The track’s escape
plot, somewhere between story rap and gangsta rap, offers vivid imagery
and violent solutions that stand in sharp contrast to the rest of Nation of
Millions — the corrections officer who catches a slug in the track stands as
the only person whom Chuck has ever killed on a record.
When it came time to lay down vocals, Chuck was hesitant to record
them because he had a cold, but the tense, fatigued effect it left on his
vocals ended up capturing the passion such a track demanded. To record
Flavor’s phone call to Chuck, the Bomb Squad set up a phone in another
room. Flav ended up riffing so long that Hank had to run into the room to
try and shut him up. At 2:42, you can still hear Flav say, “Yo, Hank, don’t
stop me, man.”
The Bomb Squad laid down “Black Steel” on the SP-1200, the sampler
that was quickly becoming the standard for producers in 1988. They were
still tinkering with their equipment to get it to do what they wanted — for
example, playing 33 1/3 records on 45 to get more from the SP-1200’s mere
10 seconds of sample time. When recording “Black Steel,” the Bomb Squad
accidentally left one of the effects leads half-unplugged. All they heard was
a muffled rumble and none of the high end. Hank learned that if you pull
the quarter-inch jack out halfway, it yanks a lot of the high-frequency
information from the track, leaving only thick bass lines. By pure accident,
they discovered “filtering,” a technique which would be used throughout
the ’90s by producers such as Large Professor and Da Beatminerz.
Eventually this technique would be so common that it would be a standard
preset on outboard gear.
Chuck finally met Isaac Hayes in Cape Coast, Ghana, in 1993. The two
were playing the Panafest Cultural Festival. Hayes was surprised that
Chuck knew so much about him; Chuck was gassed that Hayes knew about
Public Enemy at all. Years later, after P.E. blew through Memphis, Hayes
came by and asked Chuck if he would rap on his 1995 comeback record,
Branded. Hayes holed up in Memphis, reunited with his old songwriting
partner David Porter and picked a slew of pop songs to cover. For the last
track, he completed the circle, rebooting
“Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymistic” for a 12-minute version with Chuck
D on the microphone. Instead of blowing through prison walls with a
bazooka, Chuck gets into the hot-buttered spirit, doing what is probably the
only sex rap of his career: “I think I better let it go / But I go hetero / Bring
on the TKO.” They worked again a year later, when Hayes played
keyboards and co-produced a track on Chuck’s solo album. But as Chuck
mapped out in his liner notes to the Ultimate Isaac Hayes greatest-hits set:
“When he and David Porter pulled me to the side during the Stax reunion
concert and officially named me a ‘soul man.’ It gets no better than that,
I’m telling you.”

***
By the summer of 1972, Isaac Hayes was maybe the most famous African-
American in the country, after the Godfather. He was a dude who called his
own shots, whether that meant picking up Academy Awards in a fuzzy blue
suit, driving a gold-plated Cadillac or calling himself “Black Moses” — a
beacon of independence and the model for R&B autonomy. However, when
P.E. looked to 1972 for their mantra, they found one written by an
overzealous manager who had lorded over his group. Spoken at the
beginning of P.E.’s “Show ’Em Whatcha Got” and typewritten on the
album’s inner sleeve is the nine-word Bar-Kays affirmation: “Freedom is a
road seldom traveled by the multitude.”
According to Stax historian Rob Bowman, that line was probably
penned by Bar-Kays manager Allen Jones. At the time, Jones decided
everything, from what they wore to what they said onstage. For their
appearance at the seven-hour Wattstax festival, held in Los Angeles in
August 1972, the Bar-Kays had a 15-minute set booked in the middle of a
long day — a mere three songs to be played somewhere in between
performances by more than 25 of their Stax brothers and sisters, including
Hayes, Rufus Thomas, Carla Thomas and blues legend Albert King. A huge
impression was needed, and Jones had been planning a production for
weeks. The band was suited in daring gladiator uniforms that made Hayes’
giant chains look demure — a look that, like their single asserted, truly
made them the “Son of Shaft.” Saxophonist Harvey Henderson was fitted
with a giant gray Afro that would have been visible from the top rows of the
Los Angeles Coliseum. The original plan was even more audacious — the
band had intended to circle the stadium on chariots driven by white horses.
Supposedly everything was on order but Stax top brass caught word and
canceled that stunt, so no performer would outshine Black Moses’ headline
spot that evening.
The Bar-Kays had backed Otis Redding in the ’60s until four members
perished in the same plane crash that killed the singer in 1967. After
reforming around bassist James Alexander and playing as Hayes’
supporting cast on Hot Buttered Soul, the Bar-Kays started moving into
funkier, wilder directions throughout the ’70s. They picked up vocalist
Larry Dodson, explored post-Sly psychedelic swirls and released an
ambitious but commercially unsuccessful album called Black Rock. When
they hit the stage at Wattstax, they were cresting on their highest-charting
single in five years—the hard-as-hell “Son of Shaft.” The track’s opening
guitar riff wouldn’t prove to be as iconic as Hayes’ Oscar-winning original,
but was just as funky, eventually even playing a role as the high-octane
theme to the courtroom drama in Public Enemy’s “Caught, Can I Get a
Witness.” The Bar-Kays were all set to open their Wattstax set with the
explosive “Son of Shaft” — part parody, part tribute, part barb directed at
the man who had just stolen a few Bar-Kays for his own touring band.
From the second Henderson stepped onstage, you could tell he was
burning to make an impact. Jesse Jackson had given his stirring “I Am
Somebody” speech earlier in the day, and Dodson said it was still ringing in
the heads of his bandmates. “Black people were in a ball of emotion,” he
said, “but if you looked out into the audience, you saw black people
becoming proud of themselves. Maybe for the first time in a lot of
instances.”67 Sometime before the sun went down, Henderson stepped up to
the mic, his tenor sax around his neck, and surveyed the audience with a
look of both assurance and surprise — with an estimated 112,000 people in
attendance, it was the largest audience the band had ever rocked. With
gusto, he opened with the immortal salvo, written by his manager in an
effort to be mysterious, with shades of both George Clinton and Robert
Frost: “It’s been said many times, in many places . . . that freedom is a road
seldom traveled by the multitude. And we would like to invite each of you
to come and go with us, and perhaps you’ll see a side of life you’ve never
seen before.” Years later, Dodson remembered, “Right there we were saying
if you’re free in your mind, ain’t nobody got you locked up. You’re free to
do whatever you wanna do. We ain’t ever gonna be locked up.”68
With the speech and the three sweat-soaked songs that followed, the
band clearly made the impact they wanted — especially so with Chuck D,
who said on the Wattstax DVD commentary, “When I think of Wattstax and
images, even beyond Isaac Hayes, I think of the Bar-Kays. They’re going
for broke.” Just as it set off a Bar-Kays performance, the line “Freedom is a
road seldom traveled by the multitude” was almost the first thing you heard
on Nation of Millions. It opens “Show ’Em Whatcha Got,” a two-minute
instrumental made up of noir saxophones and drums (taken from Parisian
funk band Lafayette Afro Rock Band’s 1975 track “Darkest Light”) that’s
basically a spotlight for a speech by Nation of Islam general counsel Sister
Ava Muhammad. Through a cloak of Bomb Squad distortion, Muhammad
runs down a list of civil rights leaders, anti-apartheid activists and black
figures who picked the road less traveled. Muhammad herself would
eventually become the first woman in the history of the Nation of Islam to
ever head up a mosque.
In the original mix of Nation of Millions, “Show ’Em” was the first song
on the record, serving as an intro that would allow the names of Malcolm
X, Marcus Garvey and Rosa Parks to work like samples. It was a statement
to prepare the listener for a radical package that couldn’t be reduced to the
politics of just one individual. As Chuck vowed to ’80s-era interviewers,
one of Public Enemy’s goals was to “build 5,000 political black leaders in
the span of two years.” Nation of Millions was meant as a jumping-off point
to forming your own opinions and making your own revolutions — the
operative word in “Show ’Em Whatcha Got” was “you.” And just like it
was impossible to lump together the politics of Malcolm and Martin and
Farrakhan, Public Enemy themselves were, as Chuck said, a “diverse
consortium of black men”69 — how else do you explain the severe,
proselytizing Professor Griff coexisting in a band with the future Viking-
helmeted star of Flavor of Love?
In a way, Wattstax was a perfect antecedent, the living embodiment of
the Public Enemy line “All in, we’re gonna win.” The festival brought
together a diverse group of people from South Central L.A. for a day of
music and revolution. On the Wattstax DVD commentary, Chuck
remembered 1972 as a crossroads, with the idea of black power “falling out
of favor” for “a time to focus on your individuality and your
collectiveness.” Chuck commented on the panoply of ages, fashion styles,
dance moves and attitudes, saying it all drove home the spirit of
individuality for him. As for the collectiveness, that manifested in the
estimated 112,000 people in attendance, one of the largest gatherings of
African-Americans in history at that point — second only to King’s March
on Washington.
Wattstax was a response to the six-day Watts rebellion in 1965, a
breaking point of racial tension in the L.A. area that left 34 dead and the
neighborhood in flames. Stax was building its brand in Watts that summer
with the Stax Revue — a series of Los Angeles shows including Booker T
and the MGs, Carla and Rufus Thomas, and Wilson Pickett — which was to
culminate over a weekend at 700-capacity 4/5 Ballroom, promoted by
KGFJ DJ Magnificent Montague. At the show, Montague was sure to use
his excited catchphrase — “Burn, baby, burn!” — which would take new
life in the oncoming days. A groundswell of racial tension in the area
peaked after a struggle between a white motorcycle patrolman and an
African-American accused of driving under the influence. The
neighborhood subsequently erupted.
Out of the rebellion’s ashes, the Watts Summer Festival was held every
year, raising awareness of political issues, fostering economic development
in the community, commemorating the lives lost and building toward the
future. Stax’s California representative Forest Hamilton suggested that the
label get involved with the festival in 1972, proposing what funky Stax poet
John KaSandra once pitched as a “Black Woodstock.”70 Under the guidance
of Stax president Al Bell, the festival grew into a massive charity exercise
that drew an unparalleled number of attendees. Poet and Watts prophet
Jacquette Dedeaux, who helped Hamilton and Bell with the original ideas,
said the LAPD recommended that they use the Los Angeles Coliseum
because “they didn’t want to see that many black people in Watts
‘uncorralled.’”71 Despite the inflammatory, paranoid suggestion, the venue
choice did accommodate a massive crowd, ultimately raising thousands of
dollars for the Watts Summer Festival, Martin Luther King Hospital, the
Sickle Cell Anemia Foundation, Jesse Jackson’s Operation PUSH and the
Watts Labor Action Committee. Stax and Schlitz Brewing ate the entire cost
of production, and all the artists played for free. Tickets were priced at $1
— tax deductible, no less — so that everyone could come. The original
press release for the film called it “The best deal in town. Any town.” And,
of course, Stax would get something out of it too: promotion for its sizable
roster, its first steps into the film business and two soundtracks that would
follow.
One of the largest black-owned companies in America, Stax made sure
the event was a pro-black event with no equal. It requested that the LAPD
use African-American officers and that the security forces at the Coliseum
do the same. The private security force that Stax hired was African-
American as well. No one was to carry a gun. “It was a hot day in Los
Angeles in mid-August, and we did not have one incident amid 112,000
black people that went through the turnstiles in that 90,000-seat stadium,”
said Bell. “That, to me, is terribly significant. Everyone was saying that all
of these people from Watts were supposed to be violent.”72 In addition, Bell
insisted that film producer David Wolper integrate his camera crew with
local African-American cameramen. Forty-five out of the 48 cameramen
were, as Stax press materials put it, “skilled Blacks who have been
‘discovered’ for Hollywood” — a coup in the still-very-segregated ’70s
movie business.
Essentially, pretty much anyone who said a word, played a note or
danced in the bleachers at Wattstax was a participant in history. Public
Enemy pulled a series of spoken-word vignettes from the 1973 soundtrack
for Nation of Millions. The speeches and announcements peppered
throughout the soundtrack LP inspired the Bomb Squad to fill Public
Enemy’s album with similar off-the-cuff live material from their December
U.K. concert, giving their own album the same sense of weight and
cohesion. They used Wattstax dialogue on at least five occasions, pulling
not only the Bar-Kays’ “Freedom is a road” speech, but also their cry of
“We’re gonna get on down now” for “Night of the Living Baseheads.”
Public Enemy used a harried Rufus Thomas going, “Now wait a . . .
minute” for “Baseheads” and added his “Now here’s what I want you all to
do for me” for “Don’t Believe the Hype.” They got Jesse Jackson saying he
doesn’t know what this world is coming to for the opening of “Rebel.”
Chuck told Michael Kelly, the archivist who restored the Wattstax film, in
Wax Poetics magazine:

“Because you’re talking about all those thousands of people

assembling in the Los Angeles Coliseum, a majority of Black people
from the ’hood. Those voices, the voices speaking to 100,000
people, had to have soul riding with it. It was the soul in the voices,
that’s what we were after. The soul in the voices gets the groove
ready . . . Back when we made those first Public Enemy records . . .
black music was hurting for soul. All the soul had been smoothed
out. It was all champagne and caviar, so you couldn’t get any soul
out of R&B, which wasn’t really rhythm and blues anyway. It was
just homogenized record company drivel. So by using Rufus
Thomas’s voice from Wattstax to intro a record — by some kind of
science of the soul-da-funk — it brought connection to that soul.
There was some kind of intangible feeling in there we could
somehow transfer to our audience.”73
Rufus Thomas may have had more soul in his voice than anyone at
Wattstax because, at 55 years old, he was the history of popular music. At
the start of the 1970s, he was entering his fifth decade in show business and
had dabbled in every form of music available. He was an irresistible force
and consummate showman who made comeback after comeback. Thomas’
career dates back to the pre-soul era; he cut his teeth in 1936 as a tap dancer
in Mississippi’s all-black revue, the Rabbit’s Foot Minstrels. He was briefly
a blues crooner in the ’40s with the release of a 78 called “I’ll Be a Good
Boy.” His 3 p.m. slot as a DJ at Memphis’ highly influential radio station
WDIA, the first all-black-programmed station in the country, was full of
unfiltered energy and his unique language. He opened every show with his
trademark rap: “I’m loose as a goose and full of juice / I’ve got the goose,
so what’s the use.” Probably listening was Elvis Presley, an avowed fan of
the station. Definitely listening was Memphis’ young Isaac Hayes. Thomas
gave rock ’n’ roll label Sun Records its first hit in 1953 with “Bear Cat.”
With daughter Carla, he gave Memphis’ Satellite Records its first hit in
1960 with “’Cause I Love You,” a song that gave founder James Stewart his
first taste of success — inspiring him to turn the fledgling imprint into an
R&B label, which was renamed Stax.
Rufus Thomas performed at Wattstax with second billing under Isaac
Hayes. He was in the middle of one of his many comebacks, thanks to his
funk-era smash “Do the Funky Chicken.” Much like what Clyde
Stubblefield said about his drums in “Funky Drummer,” Thomas said the
lyrics to the cluckin’ dance sensation simply generated inside of him
without thought. “The words just started to come,” he said. “I don’t know
how; they just came out of the blue.”74 The night before he performed
“Chicken” at Wattstax, the L.A. Rams were busy blowing out the Oakland
Raiders in a 34–9 pre-season game at the Coliseum. The staff had to
assemble the stage in the wee hours, starting at 2:30 a.m. and toiling until
the morning. There was a hefty insurance policy against Stax if something
should happen to the grass. The fans would be relegated to the stands, and
the grass was off-limits.
Once Thomas came out — stomping around the stage in shin-high white
boots, pink hot pants and a cape while the sun set in the distance — people
started scaling the fence and storming the football field. Once “Funky
Chicken” played at a breakneck tempo, it was pandemonium. The Raiders’
playground turned into the Land of 1,000 Dances. Embodying Chuck D’s
idea of “individuality and collectiveness,” everyone was freaking in their
own style, from the Funky Chicken to ebullient bursts of whatever. With the
insurance policy looming and the grass being stomped upon by thousands
of feet, Bell started to panic. Thomas had to come to the rescue. “He was
the last of that era of people that came out of that minstrel period. He knew
how to work a crowd because he came from that era where you walked out
without a microphone, and you had to get that crowd and work ’em up,”
said Bell. “The only way that we’re gonna get these people off the field is
with Rufus Thomas.”75
Thomas’ voice was authoritative enough to burrow through the bedlam:
“Now wait a minute. Wait aaaaa minute.” The line, of course, was
employed to usher in the bridge of Public Enemy’s “Night of the Living
Baseheads.” And like Thomas’ plea, it was used to break the tension,
leading to the few moments in “Baseheads” in which the honking sax and
uneasy shaker could take five. Professor Griff knocks down the door with
sermonizing: “Succotash is a means for kids to make cash / Selling drugs to
the brother man instead of the other man.” Meanwhile, back in 1972,
Thomas had some political-style rhetoric of his own with an improv speech
that mirrored the language of protest at the time: “More power to the folks,
let’s go up to the stands / Don’t jump the fence / Because it don’t make
sense.”
“Now here’s what I want you all to do for me,” added Thomas, which
ended up as the intro to “Don’t Believe the Hype.” “Rufus Thomas has
more soul in that statement to get you ready for a rap joint,” Chuck said.
“’Cause you know Rufus Thomas must have introduced a whole lot of
funky records back when he was a DJ.”76 Chuck, once a DJ himself,
understood the power of voice. At 12 years old, he was too young to get
into the theater and see Wattstax when it came out. But he frequently saw
ads for the soundtrack in Jet magazine — at one point he even wondered if
it were even possible for the 100,000 people on the album cover to be all
black. Since Chuck wouldn’t be able to see Thomas’ flashy Wattstax
performance until he was adult, he could only hear the record and be
influenced by Thomas’ voice, a force that was at once authoritative and
avuncular.
One of the most important voices on the Wattstax record belonged to a
young Jesse Jackson, who kicked off the festival with an invocation that
ended with his legendary “I Am Somebody” speech. When Martin Luther
King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis four years earlier, Jackson had been
standing even closer to King than Isaac Hayes — he was in the courtyard at
the Lorraine Motel, close enough to hear the rifle clap. Jackson’s ascension
as a public figure soon followed, occurring in the same post-Malcolm, post-
King void of leadership that also gave rise to the Black Panthers and James
Brown’s political singles. Charismatic, ambitious and tireless, Jackson was
the champion of television sound bites. As a bridge between MLK’s
messages of economic empowerment and the Panthers’ calls for immediate
revolution, Jackson was the perfect complement to the rise of Stax Records
— one of the largest black-owned businesses in the country that worked
with an integrated staff, a company who’s biggest recording artist oozed
black power after charting a record made up of white pop hits.
Heading up the Chicago chapter of Operation Breadbasket, Jackson
turned a campaign to improve economic conditions into an aggressive agent
of change. With tactics like picketing chain stores and threatening boycotts
if they didn’t carry enough black products or hire enough black employees,
Breadbasket’s efforts resulted in what a 1971 Life magazine article claimed
was 4,000 jobs for Chicago’s black residents, plus 10,000 more jobs that
were created indirectly. By 1974, black entrepreneurs in Chicago had a
more extensive financial stronghold than in any other city in the country.
With these efforts, Jackson got the attention and adoration of Stax Records
and Al Bell. Isaac Hayes started showing up to Jackson’s three-hour
Breadbasket service meetings, get-togethers that treated protest and
community organization as a spiritual, inspirational event. Bell signed
Jackson as the first artist on Stax’s consciousness-heavy daughter label,
Respect Records, and released his album I Am Somebody under the name
the Country Preacher: The Rev. Jesse Jackson.
To this day, “I Am Somebody” is regarded as Jackson’s most famous
speech. An intense work of call-and-response that follows Christian litanies
and anticipates hip-hop, “Somebody” also makes use of sampling. The
familiar refrain — “I am . . . somebody” was used by Jackson’s father
figure, Martin Luther King, Jr., in a speech delivered in Mississippi during
the summer of 1964. But the way Jackson flipped the line turned it into an
unforgettable chorus, something that worked with the unique chemistry of a
chart-topping pop song. It was something uncomplicated enough to
resonate when Jackson said it on a 1971 episode of Sesame Street but deep
enough to inspire the masses at Wattstax. Bell had seen Jackson deliver the
speech in Chicago, and he said being on the Wattstax stage for Jackson’s
sweaty, passionate, fist-heavenward reading was “a highlight in my life on
planet earth.”77
For Wattstax, Jackson flew into L.A. from Chicago, where he was
putting together the PUSH Expo, an event for his new Operation PUSH —
People United to Save Humanity. At its first convention, held about three
weeks before Wattstax, Jackson vowed to take on the film industry with
direct-action demonstrations, fighting for more films to include black actors
and crew — pushing against the same segregated Hollywood that the
Wattstax film crew was fighting. When he landed in L.A. at 1:30 p.m., he
booked it straight to the venue. Only 30 years old, sporting bushy sideburns,
an afro, a colorful dashiki, a PUSH button and a MLK medallion, Jackson
opened Wattstax with stirring words: “Today, we are together. We are
unified and on one accord. When we are together, we got power and we can
make decisions!” Following with his “I Am Somebody” speech, he set the
tone for the event that would follow.
But none of Jackson’s revolutionary rhetoric made the official Wattstax
album. After his opening speech, he helped MC the event, using his deep,
churchly voice to introduce bands throughout the day. He was what The
New York Times Magazine just one month earlier had called “perhaps the
finest preacher in the country . . . as good as, perhaps better than, Malcolm
or Martin.”78 Even when Jackson announced bands, he spoke with the
weight of a sermon. Combining the motivational churn of a preacher with
the joyful bluster of a rock star was how Jackson built his name, and he
introduced Stax artists with the same zeal he put into his sermons. For Isaac
Hayes: “Brothers and Sisters! We are now about to bring forth a bad . . . bad
. . . I’m a preacher, I can’t say it!”
The Jesse Jackson sound bites that Public Enemy borrowed weren’t
from Jackson’s opening charge-up, legendary speech or closing prayer; they
were from his introduction to the Soul Children, the R&B group that led
into Hayes’s show-stopping performance with a two-song set. “Brothers
and sisters! Brothers and sisters! I don’t know what that world is coming
to,” said Jackson in what would become the opening of “Rebel without a
Pause.” But what you don’t hear on Nation of Millions is Jackson’s next
words: “. . . the Soul Children.” They were opening with the song “I Don’t
Know What This World Is Coming To,” a tune by Detroit gospel group the
Violinaires. Soul Children leader J. Blackfoot thought it would be poignant
for an event commemorating the Watts rebellion.
In the beginning of 1988, Jackson was deep into his second run at the
presidency, and the Bomb Squad sampled Jesse Jackson the MC instead of
Jesse Jackson the country’s finest preacher. A generation unfamiliar with
Wattstax was none the wiser. This speaks volumes about Public Enemy’s
ability to bend, twist and recontextualize samples until they become
propaganda. Note how they re-used Jackson’s “Brothers and sisters” line in
“Bring the Noise.” Jackson spoke of a “rainbow coalition” in which he saw
all disadvantaged races and creeds as one alliance. It’s not a stretch to think
that Jackson intended his words to mean we’re all “brothers and sisters” in
the eyes of the Lord. When Chuck says “They’ll never care for the brothers
and sisters now across the country has us up for the war” in “Bring the
Noise,” they inject a sampled Jackson in the background, but there’s no
question that the “brothers and sisters” that Chuck is speaking of are fellow
African-Africans rejected by the U.S. legal system.
Or maybe Jackson’s omnipresence on Nation of Millions just speaks to
his oratory style — his voice on the Wattstax record would stick out, no
matter what it was saying. At the time, Jackson represented what biographer
Marshall Frady called, a “militant non-violence to accommodate and disarm
the new mystique of violence by assuming its sounds and manner and
gestures.”79 His speaking style alone could move mountains. No matter his
message, Jackson spoke like he was demanding revolution, whether calling
for economic empowerment or introducing a song — which is something
that Chuck clearly picked up in his role as professional firebrand.
 Chapter Seven –
“Def Jam tells you who I am”

The first track Public Enemy laid down for the primary Nation of
Millions sessions at Chung King Studios was also their most intricate.
“Night of the Living Baseheads” was stuffed to the breaking point with
layers upon layers of sounds. The Bomb Squad intentionally left tiny
pockmarks in the track and re-stuffed them with what Chuck called “cram-
sampling” — microscopic snippets of at least 20 different records, each
weighing in with a pointed “Listen!” or “Hold it!” After its triumphant role
in “Rebel without a Pause,” the JB’s track “The Grunt” makes a second
appearance, this time with an even more abrasive two-note sax prickle. An
errant shaker in “The Grunt” — which Polygram lists on the record as
“unidentified maracas” — is played just a little bit off, rushing and slowing
down against the usually razor-sharp band. Used in a song in which Chuck
details the horrors of drug abuse, the uneasy maracas become a haunting
death rattle. Adding to the chaos of “Baseheads,” post-punk group ESG is
slowed down to an apocalyptic screech. David Bowie plays the lead-in to
“Fame” but it never resolves.
Smart collage work sure, but Public Enemy take reappropriation to
seismic levels of cleverness, subjecting samples to the same type of artful
wordplay that Chuck uses in his raps. For example, George Clinton,
wrapped in a cherry-red spacesuit and sunglasses in 1976, just wanted to
pump up a Houston crowd before playing “Do That Stuff.” He announced,
“Ain’t nothing but a party y’all! Let’s get it on!” Centered in Public
Enemy’s “Party for Your Right to Fight,” the same phrase, spoken by the
same funky spaceman, takes on an entirely new layer of political and social
resonance: In the mischievous hands of the Bomb Squad, Clinton is
transformed, Manchurian Candidate-style, into the unwitting spokesman
for the Black Panther Party.
 From its Romero-nod title on down, “Night of the Living Baseheads” is
a horrific account of the drug trade that ravaged New York City. Instead of
preaching about its dangers, Public Enemy just tried to make crack look
unpleasant and unfashionable. Crack users are painted as glassy-eyed
zombies who are shriveling to shells, pushers are monsters who wreak
havoc on their own communities to make a fast buck, a former rapper takes
to stripping cars to feed his addiction. But when the Bomb Squad flip
samples in “Baseheads,” they truly flip samples. Original meanings and
intents are turned asunder; the words of sampled artists get twisted and
dragged through dark-humored puns that bolster Chuck’s message.
“Baseheads” was produced with a roguish spirit of cultural appropriation
and a deep-seated reverence towards the original artists — a piece of
perfect pop art worthy of Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe Diptych. Samples
collide at a rapid pace. Chuck nails a few of them down and distorts them:
• In “Sucker MCs,” the B-side of Run-DMC’s debut single, a still very
young MC Run says he can’t fit all the girls who want to ride in his
Cadillac. “First come, first serve basis,” he pants, nearly out of breath. In
“Baseheads,” the line takes on a new meaning as it is used in conjunction
with a queue of crack fiends who are praying for a fix. Suddenly, Run is
commenting on crack: “First come, first served bases.”
• Salt-N-Pepa call out for producer Herbie Luv Bug to start the track in
1986’s “My Mike Sounds Nice”: “Yo, Herb, take it from the top.” In
“Baseheads,” a quick blast of “Yo, herb” becomes a reference to
marijuana, a gateway drug for the people who eventually went looking for
a better fix.
• The Bomb Squad cannibalize one of Public Enemy’s own tracks by
scratching up “Bring the Noise,” which was released on vinyl barely two
months before the recording session. Chuck’s opening line, “Bass! How
low can you go?” was once a triumphant salute to hip-hop’s booming
backbone. But here it turns into a criticism of “base,” the slang term for
freebase cocaine. The single booming syllable represents at once the
hypnotic power of music to enact social change (“bass”) and the hypnotic
power of narcotics to destroy it (“base”). The addendum “How low can
you go?” supplies an extra layer of poignancy when transformed from
celebratory intent to accusatory. Not only does the profound play on words
create tension in “Baseheads,” but it also helped create Public Enemy’s
legacy as the go-to infinitely quotable, sample-ready band. Chuck’s
 “Bass!” — used in either capacity — became ubiquitous on rap records in
the following years.
• In the same vein, Flavor Flav gets a quick sample taken from Yo! Bum
Rush the Show. A pointed “Kick it!” in “Baseheads” could be read as a
plea for drug users to kick their habits.

Not as heavy, but just as clever: In the music video “Here it is . . . Bam!” is
concluded with an acknowledging point from Chuck to “Bam” himself —
original sample slayer Afrika Bambaataa. This was Public Enemy’s first
music video, not counting the U.K. rush-job for “Don’t Believe the Hype”
which was done as a school project. Created for play on the nascent hip-hop
program Yo! MTV Raps, the six-minute “Baseheads” video is as ambitious
and chaotic as the track, violently breaking up the song with fake
newscasts, investigative reports from MC Lyte, commentary from comedian
Chris Thomas and SNL-style commercials. “We have two turntables to
work with in hip-hop,” said Chuck in the authorized Public Enemy
biography. “Why can’t you do it from a film perspective? If you come from
hip-hop, going in and out of a song is not unusual.”80 The visuals in the
video complement Chuck’s unique double meanings (a “red-alert bulletin”
is handed to a reporter by DJ Red Alert). Visuals are played like samples,
imbuing meaning and resonance just by their presence — what hip-hop
scholar Tricia Rose calls “one of rap music’s most extravagant displays of
the tension between post-modern ruptures and the continuities of
oppression.”81
In the video, Chuck raps in front of Washington Heights’ Audubon
Ballroom, the site where Malcolm X was shot in 1965. Said Rose, “The
Audubon Ballroom is a symbol of black protest and loss. Twenty-three
years [before the video], it was a site where ‘truth’ was spoken. But, today,
the Audubon is closed and gutted — Chuck cannot speak from its
podium.”82 Being captured by a gang of anti-rap activists called the “brown
bags” who obscure their faces behind plain, brown shopping bags compares
anti-rap hysteria to the centuries-old tradition of the Ku Klux Klan hiding
hatred behind hoods.
The song’s intro offers a speech from Nation of Islam minister and
onetime Farrakhan protégé Khalid Muhammad: “Have you forgotten that
once we were brought here we were robbed of our name? Robbed of our
language. We lost our religion, our culture, our God. And many of us, by
the way we acted, we even lost our minds.” In the context of the song, the
final line takes on a double meaning: losing one’s mind to drugs. Speeches
like this one came from cassettes that Professor Griff and the S1Ws
collected. On their first tour, a trip out with the Beastie Boys in 1987, Griff
would play tapes of Muhammad and Farrakhan on the tour bus. Sometimes
Chuck and Griff would pick choice sections to quote in interviews to
provoke journalists.
While a lot of the lyrics on Nation of Millions focus on national matters,
the lyrics to “Baseheads” were directly inspired by Chuck’s experiences
from his year as a label-endorsed rapper. He was moved to write the song
after looking out the windows of the Def Jam offices and seeing addicts
breaking into cars. Similarly, “Louder Than a Bomb” is about Chuck’s life
as a real public enemy, after the release of the rabble-rousing Bum Rush.
His phone would go dead every night somewhere between 11 p.m. and 2
a.m. Constant calls to the phone company didn’t alleviate the problem. The
MC concluded that — like with the black leaders who were documented on
“Party for Your Right to Fight” — this was the work of the FBI tapping his
line, keeping their ears on a potential insurgent. “So what?” was Chuck’s
official answer. “What I say comes through on records and in interviews.
It’s no secret at all what I say, ’cause I’m louder than a bomb.”83
The rapid patchwork of hip-hop samples used in “Night of the Living
Baseheads” and “Louder Than a Bomb” are a testament to the decade
leading up to Nation of Millions. The records used are a laundry list of
dreamers and risk takers who shaped recorded hip-hop’s first nine years,
influencing Public Enemy as they grew from a Long Island DJ crew to go-
getter college-radio DJs to Def Jam family to the most important rap group
in the world.
A fatherly “’Twas the night—” that fights to tell a story in “Night of the
Living Baseheads” and the brusk “Hold it now” that interrupts it are both
sampled from the Kurtis Blow single “Christmas Rappin’” — the first rap
record released by a major label. The partnership that birthed the
“Christmas Rappin’” 12-inch formed in 1979, just a few months after
Adelphi freshman Carlton Ridenhour met Hank Shocklee. In Long Island,
Hank was fretting outside after a bummer show, trying to figure out how he
was going to tell his mother that he blew his yearbook and school-ring
money on a party that didn’t recoup. Chuck rolled up and said, “You know
why nobody came to your party, man? Because your flyer was wack.”84
Hank thought nothing of the conversation, but he would recruit Chuck later
that year when looking for a full-time MC for his Spectrum City crew.
The initial meeting behind “Christmas Rappin’” was far more fortuitous.
Robert Ford was writing about R&B for Billboard magazine and made it a
point to find the kid behind the Rush Productions stickers he saw affixed to
subway cars while commuting to his home in St. Albans, Queens. While
researching a story on the burgeoning breakbeat culture, he saw a young
Joseph Simmons sticking a Rush Productions sticker on the inside of a bus.
Ford approached him in hopes that he was the mastermind behind the
massive street-team project. He wasn’t, but he hooked Ford up with a card
with which he could contact his older brother Russell.
Ford gelled with the restless and impossibly motivated Russell
Simmons, who helped Ford with the contacts for his articles — the
interviews and research that would yield the first national coverage of hip-
hop culture. As the story goes, Simmons was dying to release the first rap
record, and he reached out to Ford to open the doors at labels — or, as
Simmons liked to tell it, Ford was inspired to cut a rap record and needed a
conduit into the hip-hop world. Either way, the two of them wanted to get in
on the ground floor, and had a symbiotic relationship that could make it
happen. Ford, 30 years old and approaching fatherhood, even had some of
the “Am I too old for this?” worries that Chuck had when he was
approached for his Def Jam deal a decade later. But Simmons, who deftly
played the role of young hip-hop ambassador, assuaged his fears. Ford was
stuck on recording the then ubiquitous Eddie Cheeba, but consummate
promoter Simmons steered Ford toward an artist he was actively promoting:
Harlem MC Kurtis Blow.
They had no precedent for making a record — and, save the Fatback
Band’s proto-rap “King Tim III (Personality Jock),” there was no precedent
for a rap record existing at all. So their first release was a home-crafted
affair concocted among friends and co-workers. Billboard sales guy and
onetime Perry Como songwriter Mickey Addy came up with the idea for
doing a Christmas song; fellow co-worker J.B. Moore wrote a chunk of the
lyrics and put up some cash; old friend (and future Def Jam producer) Larry
Smith played bass; fellow Queens resident Eddie Martinez played guitar.
According to Russell, his brother Joseph (later to be known as Run)
contributed a slew of uncredited lyrics. Blow filled out the second half of
the song with rhymes he wrote on the subway. The whole ordeal was the
group’s first experience at Greene Street Recordings — the same downtown
studio where Public Enemy would record a chunk of Nation of Millions.
The Sugarhill Gang and “Rapper’s Delight” ended up beating everyone
to the punch. Even worse, like “Christmas Rappin’,” their track was also
based on a re-creation of viral breakbeat “Good Times” by Chic. When
Simmons and Ford shopped their record, more than 20 labels rejected them.
The vibe they got from executives was that it had missed its window of
opportunity. Why would radio want two records with this novelty of
rapping? Ever tenacious, Simmons put in a pile of fake orders to Polygram
for the 12-inch, giving the impression of demand. Polygram division
Mercury finally picked up the record, which quickly became a gold-selling
hit that Christmas season — and miraculously, it kept selling a solid eight
months afterward.
The record provided Simmons with the energy and capital to take Blow
under his wing and unleash Rush Artist Management, the management arm
that would eventually launch the careers of Run-DMC, the Beastie Boys,
LL Cool J and, of course, Public Enemy. Chuck had heard of Blow well
before “Christmas Rappin’” was released, thanks to the merciless
promotion of Simmons. But once he got a pair of gold records, Blow
became the world’s first superstar MC, someone whom Chuck regarded as
“almost like the Jackie Robinson of hip-hop.” He gushed to Blow during his
Air America radio show in 2008, “I would say, Godfather . . . you made
these things possible. In other music, other artists are revered, like the Who,
the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, Bob Marley — but Kurtis Blow definitely
deserves that ranking.”85
Blow’s neighborhood of Harlem was being hit hard by the crack
epidemic in the late ’80s. About ten months before Public Enemy recorded
“Baseheads,” The New York Times reported on “cocaine psychosis,” leading
with the vivid example of an East Harlem man who held four people
hostage for 30 hours pleading for baking soda. In the beginning of January
1988, when Public Enemy started to work on the song, 17-year-old crack
addict Leslie Torres was charged with a crack-fueled robbery spree that
killed five people in East Harlem. Said the Times: “The police described the
case as among the worst examples of crack-related violence in New York
City since the highly addictive, smokable form of cocaine appeared more
than two years ago.”86 In March, investigators linked drug gangs to
anywhere from 359 to 523 deaths in upper Manhattan in five years.
Accordingly — or coincidentally — “Baseheads” was packed with
samples of rappers who had grown up in Harlem. The track includes
exclamations from superstar Blow (“Hold it now”), the Disco Four (“One,
two, three, four, five, six . . .”) and the Boogie Boys (“We are williiiing”).
Harlem MCs the Fearless Four get in a “Word!” from “Problems of the
World Today,” a classic political, reality rap that came in the wake of
Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five’s pioneering “The Message.”
Harlem crew Masterdon Committee get in a quick “Listennnn!” from their
classic skate anthem “Funk Box Party.” Possibly the Committee’s biggest
influence on Chuck was when they didn’t show up to a headlining gig he
had booked at a roller rink in 1984. Upstart rhymer LL Cool J stepped in,
doing a monumental, 10-minute a cappella freestyle that “defied all
gravity,” and blew the crowd away, allowing Chuck to promote shows
another day.

***

The scratching on “Louder Than a Bomb” is primitive, noisy, the fader

wide open as the record spins back — “Come on,” skwwwwwik, “come on.”
It’s a fitting tribute to the Bronx’s Grand Wizard Theodore, whose crew, the
Fantastic Romantic Freaks, appear on the track, telling everyone to come
on, telling the soundman to turn it up, begging for everything to get louder.
Theodore’s earliest scratches were similarly noisy and curt; they were, for
all intents and purposes, the very first scratches anywhere. Like the
Shocklee brothers, Theodore was part of a two DJ household. His older
brother Mean Gene Livingstone worked with Grandmaster Flash, and a
preteen Theodore would serve as their breakbeat intern, lugging amps,
connecting speaker cables, pulling out the right records from the crates or
going beat-digging in Manhattan at Downstairs Records. He would practice
on his brother’s equipment — the improbably young DJ standing on a milk
crate — and soon developed an acute ear (and thumb) for dropping the
needle on the break over and over again in perfect rhythm. One day while
he was practicing, his mom started to bang on the door telling him to turn
the volume down. He stopped the record with one hand while the other
continued to spin — the abrupt rubbing sound started some gears turning in
his head. After some finessing, Theodore invented the scratch.
Theodore broke out with his own crew, the L Brothers, who would rock
massive block parties, blowing minds with Theo’s telekinetic ability to lift
and drop the needle on a break. When it came time for Theodore to go out
on his own, he took along a crew of rappers that would evolve into the
lineup of the Fantastic Five, a.k.a. the Fantastic Romantic Freaks: Dota
Rock, Master Rob, Kevie Kev, Ruby Dee and Prince Whipper Whip. The
group picked their name because they loved the “number” posses that were
coming out at the time — Treacherous 3, Funky 4, Furious 5. Incidentally,
the seven-deep Public Enemy gravitated toward this posse style of
recording groups as well, but only because they had fallen out of favor by
1986, replaced by MC and DJ duos. Unlike P.E., the Freaks were not
focused on taking over the world: They made one 12-inch (1981’s “Can I
Get a Soul Clap, Fresh Out the Pack”), refused to do interviews and were
rarely photographed. They were the type of performers who simply took it
to the stage.
Ultimately, their biggest exposure was in the 1982 film Wild Style, the
quasi-documentary that finally gave a vivid, global stage to the hip-hop
culture that had been draining streetlight power for years. Wild Style came
from a brainstorm pitched by graffiti artist and metropolitan scenester Fab 5
Freddy. He felt that the DJ culture and graffiti art he was introducing to the
art elite and punk rockers should be immortalized in film. In the untrained-
but-nimble hands of Super 8 kung-fu flick director Charlie Ahearn, the
intention was to make a grafsploitation movie ready to play between the
grindhouse karate-chop movies in Times Square. But Wild Style was hip-
hop’s first step toward becoming an international phenomenon, thanks to
Ahearn’s reverential depictions of popping and locking B-boys, MCs in
heated rhyme battles, DJs slicing records in dewy clubs and graffiti snaking
alongside the steel torsos of subway cars.
Two denizens of the art world, Freddy and Ahearn were fast friends.
Freddy loved hip-hop for the punk-rock element — the destruction and
détournement of vinyl, the brash statement of graffiti tags, the way limited
resources turned into grand gestures. He also linked it to pop art’s reflection
of cultural symbols, even going so far as to spray paint Warhol’s iconic
Campbell’s soup cans on a subway car. Ahearn loved the avant-garde
element — the expressionistic lettering of graffiti, the post-modern
recycling of familiar sounds into new forms. Years later, when critics would
throw around phrases like “punk rock” and “avant-garde” about Public
Enemy, their “louder, louder” backspin of a Wild Style sample would
embody the aesthetics with a violent fwiiiikk. Not to mention the punk
dictum of doing it yourself, which — despite their being part of the major-
label system — Public Enemy embodied via the massive amount of pre-
production they did at their South Franklin home base, mapping out their
records in advance instead of writing in the studio. Wild Style itself was a
testament to DIY art, beyond its focus on the Bronx visionaries who turned
records, spray paint and cardboard into vibrant art forms. The entire Wild
Style production was performed by non-actors, filmed by a non-professional
director and culminated in a guerrilla party that transformed a decrepit East
River amphitheater into a legendary party fueled by a single power box
under the Williamsburg Bridge.
Ahearn and Freddy would frequent Bronx clubs like the T-Connection,
Ecstasy Garage and Harlem World while the movie was in its research
stages. The headlining buzz was the explosive rivalry between the Fantastic
Freaks and the bombastic Cold Crush Brothers. The two crews spent a year
battling to see which could be second-biggest group in the Bronx — the
clear winners, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, were busy touring
Europe with the Clash. The Freaks and Cold Crush would take their battles
public with onstage fights and drama. Sometimes they would revert to
being the old neighborhood friends who occasionally partied backstage;
other times they would stop talking to one another entirely. One such
occasion was one of the most anticipated battles in hip-hop history, the
Harlem World Showdown in 1981. The Freaks showed up in tuxedos, and
Theodore cut records with handcuffs on. They took the glory and 500
bucks, but they ended up getting the silent treatment from Cold Crush for
quite a while.
When it came time to film Wild Style, the rivalry was at a fever pitch.
For the movie, Cold Crush and the Freaks battled in a West Side Story
homage on the basketball courts — both groups still tired from rocking
shows the evening before, Dota Rock still wearing the previous night’s
clothes under his sweatshirt. For their battle in the Dixie club, one of
Flash’s old haunts, the animosity was as real as they could make it, with the
two groups being at the top of their game, reaching for the true spirit of
competition. You can hear the urgency of the moment, the amp-peaking
distortion and deafening volumes of hip-hop in its most unadulterated form.
The excitement of kids with limited tools making the biggest impression
possible was palpable in the way they shouted “Louder!” (used in “Louder
Than a Bomb”) or “Soundman, say, ‘Turn it up!’” (used in “Bring the
Noise”). Twelve years later, with the beef presumably squashed, both Cold
Crush and the Freaks reunited on friendlier terms on Terminator X’s slept-
on second solo album, Super Bad. Said Chuck in the liner notes: “Getting
these brothers back into the flow was not only a joy, but an obligation.”
Kevie Kev has said that having the Freaks’ Dixie chant sampled by Public
Enemy was like “throwing a lottery ticket in the hamper and it hits.”87
However, the first time Public Enemy shared studio space with the Wild
Style pioneers was during the Nation of Millions sessions, when Fab 5
Freddy dropped by to kick some background vocals in “She Watch Channel
Zero?!”
The Bomb Squad loved to give slipmat service to the funk, soul and hip-
hop that paved the way for them, but “Night of the Living Baseheads” and
“Louder Than a Bomb” are also full of their immediate family: the close-
knit Def Jam/Rush Management crew, whose meteoric rise throughout the
’80s changed the way hip-hop looked, sounded, toured and got paid. For
starters, Run-DMC were not only P.E.’s Rush cohorts, but also their heroes.
As Chuck said in a Rolling Stone article, Run-DMC were “the Beatles of
hip-hop . . . a model for Public Enemy in that we both made loud, blasting
records for arenas, not clubs. You couldn’t rap in a low tone over a blaring
guitar in an arena.”88 Public Enemy wouldn’t storm arenas with Run-DMC
until the summer of 1988, but their history goes back to the most embryonic
stages of both groups.
After Chuckie D joined the Spectrum City mobile DJ crew in 1979, they
spent the next few years promoting parties, making mixtapes, manning the
Super Spectrum Mix Hour on WBAU and trekking from Long Island to
Soho to pick up vinyl from their record pool offices. A concept pioneered
by New York disco DJs in 1974, a record pool was a group of DJs who paid
a fee to grab the first pieces of promotional vinyl that were printed up by
record companies. Spectrum City were involved with the Intermetro record
pool, which was described by Chuck as “predominantly a pool of gay house
DJs who were also into rap.”89 They were pretty much the only crew in the
pool playing all rap records. One time Keith Shocklee came back from the
Intermetro offices with a white-label promo carrying a name they thought
sounded more like a machine than a rap group. It was one of the first copies
of Run-DMC’s debut single, “It’s Like That” b/w “Sucker MCs (Krush
Groove 1)” — a copy that has since been saddled with the (probably untrue)
rumor that it was the very first copy anywhere. It thrilled the crew with just
one listen. WBAU program director and future Public Enemy marketing
guru Bill Stephney was the first person to play the record on the radio. He
played both sides of the record on the air for a solid four weeks before it
started making buzz on the streets, raising the profile of both the rap group
and the rap station in the process.
Run and DMC (without Jam-Master Jay in tow) took the 15-minute ride
from Hollis, Queens, to do their first interview ever, live on WBAU with
Stephney. Their 12-inch came heavier than a steamroller, giving hip-hop’s
disco phase a black leather beatdown, coming pavement-hard with
metronomic concussion beats and shouted boasts. But ironically, the group,
still in their teens, were a little shy and nervous in the presence of the
Adelphi radio crew. They clammed up and didn’t have much to say, forcing
the radio crew to joke that you could learn more about the group on the
grooves of a record that began, “Two years ago, a friend of mine . . .”
However, Run-DMC would return, never forgetting the Adelphi crew
that gave them their start. They appeared on the show well after becoming
globetrotting superstars, and forged a friendship with the Spectrum Crew
that would last for decades. Run-DMC listened to cassettes of the Super
Spectrum Mix Hour, and they influenced the group when they made records
like Raising Hell. Raising Hell’s album-length cohesion and booming 808s
would, in turn, influence Public Enemy. Chuck cites it as his favorite album
of all time. “To me, that album was like Wilt Chamberlain’s 100 point
game,” said Chuck in the Run-DMC reissue liner notes “What next? How
do you top that? You don’t. Instead, you go another direction.”90
Jam-Master Jay would be the catalyst for bringing Public Enemy’s demo
tape to the attention of Rick Rubin. As Public Enemy progressed, Run gave
the thumbs up to “Rebel without a Pause” in Russell Simmons’ absence,
DMC gave “Don’t Believe the Hype” approval after the group had
abandoned it. By the time Run-DMC were making their fourth album,
Tougher Than Leather, in 1988, DMC was scooping up Chuck’s rhyme
styles and producers Jam-Master Jay and Davy D were borrowing Public
Enemy’s sample library — copping both Bobby Byrd and Joeski Love in
similar ways. They opened tracks with recordings of speeches and
copiously sampled “Bring the Noise.” Chuck’s omnipresent “Bass!” makes
a very 1988 appearance in the hectic “I’m Not Going Out Like That.”
Chuck was downright honored to donate the sampled hook of “Radio
Station.”
When Chuck was still on the fence about quitting his messenger job, it
was Jam-Master Jay who talked him into a rap career. Chuck said that after
hearing Raising Hell, he was convinced rap had grown up, and made the
decision to make emceeing his adult career in 1986. Chuck owed a lot to
Run-DMC and, fittingly, Public Enemy sampled “Sucker MCs,” the track
where the two teenage MCs were at a similar crossroads. In 1982, Joseph
“Run” Simmons and Darryl “DMC” McDaniels were fresh out of high
school and unsure about their paths in life. DMC was attending St. John’s
University, unhappy with his choice of major in business management. Run
said, “I thought I was gonna get a job at Woolworth’s . . . Come home, do
my little homework and not know what the fuck I’m gonna do.”91 Jam-
Master Jay, not yet part of the group, had dropped out of high school and
was attending to his ill father.
After having much success with Kurtis Blow, budding guru Russell
Simmons was trying to break into the punk/dance/hip-hop crossover realm
that Fab 5 Freddy had helped usher in. Simmons and producer Larry Smith
were covering all their bases, flirting with the idea of street-conscious rap
like the critical smash “The Message” over a beat like Afrika Bambaataa’s
Kraftwerk-twurking robo-bop “Planet Rock.” Simmons recruited his
younger brother Run, who insisted — like the initial meetings between Def
Jam and Chuck D — that the upcoming project be a group. He wanted
something with the feel of the Cold Crush Brothers, the heavy stuff he’d
been batting around in his attic with his stage-shy, bespectacled buddy, Easy
D. Without D, Run didn’t want to make a record.
Simmons didn’t like D’s voice but put him on anyway. D filled up 15
notebook pages of matter-of-fact rhymes about poverty, wage inequity,
prejudice and clock-punching morass. Or in brief: “Disillusioned is the
word.” The team met in Smith’s attic in Jamaica, Queens. D, who had an
overprotective mom, had to sneak out of the house and return undetected at
1 a.m. Simmons wanted the duo to have a Kurtis Blow feel, but D wanted it
to be loud, abrasive and booming like their attic jam sessions. Once
Simmons was out of the room, they did a take with the bellowing, hard-
rocking feel of “Planet Rock,” cementing the sound of Run and the rapper
soon renamed DMC. They recorded the final version of “It’s Like That” at
Greene Street Studios, where Simmons had laid down “Christmas Rappin’.”
For a B-side, Smith had tapped out an aggro version of his band Orange
Krush’s “Action,” a dance hit that had taken new life as a popular
breakbeat. The duo rapped the entire song without stopping — which is
why Run sounds so breathless when he blurts out the “first come, first
served basis” line used in “Night of the Living Baseheads.”
The track, “Sucker MCs (Krush Groove 1),” was unlike anything on
earth, a two-ton revelation, a line ferociously drawn in the sand separating
the old school from the new school. Said Simmons in his autobiography:
“No one could even imagine what the fuck it was. No melody. No harmony.
No keyboards. Just a beat, some fake-sounding handclaps and these n-----
from Queens yelling over the track.”92 Originally, Simmons and Smith
wanted to add a melody onto it, but the group balked. No music, DMC
insisted, since they wanted the feel of a park jam. Going against Simmons’
instincts would clearly pay off for Run-DMC — and it paid off for Public
Enemy as well.
When WBAU alumnus and future Yo! MTV Raps host Dr. Dre played
Public Enemy to Simmons for the first time in 1986, Simmons rolled off a
mattress and threw the tape out of a window in disgust. When Rick Rubin
scouted the group for Def Jam, Simmons said, “Rick, I don’t even know
why you’re wasting your time with this garbage. No one’s ever going to
like this. This is like black punk rock.”93 He added, “You make records with
the Bangles. Why do you care about this?”94 As Hank Shocklee has been
quick to say in interviews, “Russell Simmons hated our records. He didn’t
like our records. I mean, he liked the records after they started selling.”95
Once Simmons started getting serious about pushing R&B acts like Oran
“Juice” Jones, Newkirk and Alyson Williams, Hank figured that a hit Public
Enemy record would be the one that Simmons hated on first listen.
But of course, Russell Simmons is only half of the Def Jam story, since
the label didn’t coalesce until he hooked up with NYU film student,
headbanger, aspiring DJ and hip-hop fanatic Rick Rubin in 1984. Rubin had
thrown the original, self-designed Def Jam logo on the sleeve of an EP by
his art-fuck band, Hose. Rubin picked up a copy of “Sucker MCs” and was
instantly blown away — and energized to try and top it.
Rubin had been hanging around Club Negril, a New York reggae hot
spot that had warmed up to hip-hop shows. He became fast friends with DJ
Jazzy Jay, a Bronx DJ and protégé of Afrika Bambaataa’s. Jazzy taught
Rubin how to use a drum machine and was willing to help with his idea:
creating a drum machine-based rap with the feel of the steamy club shows
he went to in Manhattan. Rubin’s hopes to record Kool Moe Dee of the
mighty Treacherous Three were dashed almost immediately. Dee was under
contract with Sugar Hill, as was his partner Special K. But they hooked
Rubin up with K’s brother T La Rock.
T La Rock was a hip-hop diehard, having emceed, deejayed and b-
boyed his way throughout the Bronx for nine years. After Rubin learned
how to use a drum machine, he cooked up a headache-inducing 808 thump
in his dorm room. Some of the fills in the middle were courtesy of some
fooling around by fellow punk turned hip-hop fan Adam “Ad-Rock”
Horowitz of the Beastie Boys. After the demo was finished, T La Rock’s DJ
Louie Lou and Special K got into a screaming match over who should take
home the cassette. Since Special K didn’t want Louie coming back to the
sessions, T La Rock had to find a new DJ to do the scratching. Rubin
suggested his friend Jazzy Jay, who would give the song aggressive, jabbing
scratches that sounded like someone digging into a guitar pickup with a
screwdriver. Beyond the crunching scratch-riffs, “It’s Yours” would gain its
reputation as the heaviest hip-hop single of the time because of its trunk-
exploding 808s. “We were in the studio mixing down,” says T La Rock.
“And I just kept on saying, ‘More bass! More bass! More bass!’”96
The single was released on Arthur Baker’s Party Time Records, but
Rubin insisted he put a Def Jam logo on it. A smash hit, “It’s Yours” gave
Rubin the boost to make more records, and he gained loads of credibility
when a stunned Russell Simmons learned that an aggro new hip-hop single
was rocketing up playlists without his helping hand. Once they met,
Simmons told Rubin it was his favorite record. The two men soon teamed
up in Rubin’s messy dorm room to create the label that would launch the
Beastie Boys, LL Cool J and Public Enemy. With Def Jam, a close-knit
family of artists who toured together, collaborated and bonded, Public
Enemy was sure to capture the game-changing element of Def Jam’s
watershed moment, scratching in T La Rock’s immortal cry “It’s Yours!” in
“Louder Than a Bomb.”
Chuck had blindly purchased the single in a Queens record store back
when it was released in 1984. He was taken aback by Rubin’s arresting
tone-arm logo on the sleeve and correctly figured that “Def Jam” meant a
hip-hop label. The Spectrum Crew gave the song crazy spins, doing their
part in helping it thrive. Behind the scenes, just like Rubin had set out to top
“Sucker MCs,” the Spectrum Crew were secretly scheming to best “It’s
Yours.” This resulted in an early version of “Public Enemy No. 1.”
Sampling “It’s Yours” in 1988 was a tribute to the record that energized
them and the label that funded them. Chuck would change his tune by the
end of the ’90s (“A lot of people said, ‘It seems strange that you’re not on
Def Jam anymore. How do you feel?’ I say that I feel like a black man in
1866, trying to figure out what the fuck I do with my freedom”97), but in
1988, Chuck was proud to be a part.
Of course, the Bomb Squad didn’t ignore Def Jam’s then cash cow: the
Beastie Boys’ 1986 crossover snot-rocket “(You Gotta) Fight for Your
Right (to Party!).” Irresistibly catchy, its opening bellow — “yeeeeah!” —
appears in two Nation of Millions tracks. Also irresistibly stoopid, the song
was completely re-edited and re-thought to fit the Public Enemy dogma of
“Party for Your Right to Fight.” The Beasties’ track was intended as a beer-
goggled parody of “all the ‘Smokin’ in the Boys Room’/‘I Wanna Rock’-
type songs in the world.”98 Yet the Def Jam-era Beasties are best
remembered as skirt-flipping fratboy party-animal dickheads who
defenestrated hotel furniture, poured beers on girls and attempted to call
their album Don’t Be a Faggot. Despite the fact that the Beasties were
poking fun of cheeseball party rock, the track became an instant dunderhead
rallying cry. Chuck flipped the track on “Party for Your Right to Fight” to
show that Public Enemy were the antithesis of the Beastie Boys. But this
wasn’t a move made out of derision — it was a way of distancing P.E. from
the pull-my-finger element of Def Jam while still showing love. Public
Enemy were good friends with the Beasties, and the Beasties loved Public
Enemy. The Beasties’ MCA had been singing P.E.’s praises well before the
crew landed at Def Jam, rapping along to their early Spectrum tapes with
DMC. MCA’s early endorsement was one of the reasons that Rubin gave
Public Enemy so much attention. At the Grammys in February 1987, the
Beasties and DJ Hurricane dragged out a boombox playing Public Enemy’s
“Timebomb,” hopping around like caffeinated goons before presenting an
award to a befuddled Robert Palmer. In April 1987, P.E. tagged along on the
Beasties’ Licensed to Ill tour, which was not only their first tour ever but
their invaluable opportunity to reach kids in places like Passaic, New
Jersey; Bethlehem, Philadelphia and Troy, New York. On that tour they
encountered the same suburban kids that had hefted the Beasties to the top
of the Billboard charts.
Speaking of the secret soundtrack to suburbia, Rick Rubin’s fave rave in
1986 was Slayer, a band of thrash-metal mutants who pushed the thresholds
of both speed and taste. At the time, Slayer seemed like an odd signing for a
hip-hop label, but the Rubin-produced 29-minute megablast Reign in Blood
was as bold a reaction to the Reagan era as Nation of Millions. Public
Enemy were a rebellion to how the government ravaged urban areas — the
failure of trickle-down economics, the one in three African-Americans
living below the poverty line in 1987, the anti-discrimination bills that were
vetoed by the administration. Slayer’s vivid tales of mutilated bodies and
satanic rituals targeted the resentment of suburbia — the hypocrisy of the
religious right, the oppression of the Parent’s Music Resource Center
thought police and, of course, mom and dad. Chuck respected metal for its
speed and attitude, something Slayer had in droves on Reign in Blood.
During the recording, Rubin had supplied drummer Dave Lombardo with
an endless stash of Gatorade and candy, fueling the inhuman double kick-
drum flurries that would define a generation of headbanger sticksmen.
When he was laying down the track for “She Watch Channel Zero?!”
Hank Shocklee had originally used the chug-and-punch riff from “Re-
Ignition” by hardcore heroes Bad Brains. Bill Stephney suggested that he
spin the Slayer record, and the riff from “Angel of Death,” not even two
minutes in, popped out. The most headbanging track on Nation of Millions
was born, an anomaly for an album that’s widely regarded as the first
commercially viable rap album that didn’t constantly drape itself in rock
riffs. Hank was no stranger to metal, having worked alongside the longhairs
at New York’s Record World where he acquired a love of Rush and Judas
Priest. Chuck and Hank admired the consistency of Iron Maiden and
Megadeth albums — “Kept the same font, the same logo, the same skeleton
holding something”99 — as a way to build long-term careers. Like Iron
Maiden’s Eddie or Megadeth’s Vic Rattlehead, the Public Enemy crosshairs
logo was almost always certain to make an appearance, showing up on 11
of their 12 studio albums.
Many Public Enemy songs don’t have a bass line because Hank admired
the abrasiveness and urgency in guitar — and the Rubin-damaged guitar
sound on Reign in Blood was the most abrasive around, a dry, stark chug
like tinder sticks being rubbed to start a fire, an oppressive, reverb-free
grind that made Metallica sound like Journey. Slayer’s lyrics dwelled in the
ugliest realities, creating comic-book panels out of the evil that men do. To
this day, “Angel of Death” is their most notorious song. Guitarist Jeff
Hanneman had grown up with a curiosity about the memorabilia his WWII-
veteran father had plucked off the bodies of dead Nazis, later reading books
on the Third Reich. His lyrics to “Angel of Death” were a mix of
documentary and splatter flick, a narrative about the horrors of Nazi
physician Josef Mengele’s human experiments. The band started their
leanest, meanest, fastest album with the haunting line, “Auschwitz, the
meaning of pain / The way that I want you to die.”
Top brass at Def Jam parent label Columbia were not pleased. Columbia
president Al Teller, whose parents died in the Holocaust, was reportedly
horrified. CBS president Walter Yetnikoff protested as well — though he
would stick up for Public Enemy after the group were labeled anti-Semitic
following Professor Griff’s infamous post-Nation interviews. Rubin
shuffled Slayer’s record off to Geffen. With a hole in his roster, he had to
quickly sign another group to fulfill his contract with Columbia. As the next
band to join Def Jam in 1986, Slayer’s loss was Public Enemy’s gain.

***

Having exhausted the Def Jam catalog on Nation of Millions, P.E. turned
their samplers inward, cannibalizing their own records. “Terminator X to
the Edge of Panic” got its unique, slurping, caffeinated backing track by the
Bomb Squad’s playing “Rebel without a Pause” backward. The minute-and-
21-second interlude “Mind Terrorist” gets a hook from various Flavor Flav
rants that were chopped and looped. The beeping rhythm in “Security of the
First World” may not have been from a record, but from the wristwatch of
engineer Chris Shaw. Chuck’s “Bass!” and “Power of the people say!” from
“Bring the Noise” were peppered across the album. Even the title It Takes a
Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back was borrowed from their Bum Rush-era
party jam “Raise the Roof.” Chuck embraced the power of his old line after
he saw it recycled as a headline for a P.E. article in a Toronto paper. It all
forecasted Nation of Millions’ unique legacy: One of the most sample-crazy
records in rap history would also be one of the most sampled.
 Chapter Eight –
“Here we go again”

The final song Public Enemy completed was “Caught, Can I Get a
Witness,” a track they had originally tossed but resurrected moments before
they turned in the tapes. Before Hank Shocklee submitted the record for
mastering, he switched the sides — leading with the dramatic intro of
“Countdown to Armageddon” and “Bring the Noise” instead of “Show ’Em
Whatcha Got,” mainly so the album would have more bass in the
beginning. More important, Hank reportedly sped up the entire album a
little bit, giving it the same chaotic, frenetic feel of their live show. At the
mastering house, every track had the meters pinned in the red. With the
whole thing recorded a few decibels louder than usual, Hank and engineer
Steve Ett were hoping to saturate the master tape with sound, hitting extra
hard and leaving no room for tape hiss. The last thing a good engineer
wants is distortion, but Hank treated peaking, blown-out tracks as an end-
goal instead of a setback.
At Def Jam, Rick Rubin and Russell Simmons’ relationship was at its
breaking point. Rubin was going back to Cali — if legend is to be believed,
for the last time. As a farewell gift, Chuck gave him an advance copy of
Nation of Millions to listen to on the plane. Somewhere on that plane ride,
in the middle of his first listen, Rubin burst into tears. He beamed with
pride, awed that the band he had signed two years earlier had advanced hip-
hip culture with one 55-minute masterstroke. He was also depressed
because he knew that the simple days of party rhymes and skeletal 808s
would be gone forever.
Released in April 1988, Nation of Millions would leave its larger-than-
life impression almost immediately. Rhymes got faster, African medallions
replaced gold chains, music magazines explored nationalist politics,
producers sprayed tracks with increasingly dense splinters of vinyl. Since
Public Enemy had succeeded in making themselves part of the legacies of
the artists they sampled, rappers started to sample Public Enemy, attempting
to align themselves with this sea change of mature, argument-provoking
hip-hop. From 1988 to 1991, sampling Chuck D’s voice was the hip-hop
equivalent of using a Super Fuzz pedal after Jimi Hendrix. One “Bass!” and
your record wore a black-and-gold armband in solidarity.
De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising and the Beastie Boys’ Paul’s
Boutique were 1989’s twin totems of copyright-fudging collage, and both
generously plucked sounds from Nation of Millions, their sampledelic heir.
Madonna, attempting to push her bad-girl image into Parental Advisory
Sticker territory, borrowed the S1W theme song, “Security of the First
World,” for her steamy single “Justify My Love.” When Yo! MTV Raps
debuted in August of 1988, there was a snippet of Flav — or a Flav
soundalike — in the theme song to register a resonant “Yes!” Chuck’s
attack on black radio — “Radio . . . suckers never play me” — was
effective in pushing the negative dissent of Ice-T (“Radio Suckers”), but
was just as good when it was chopped and twisted to extol the positive
virtues of radio play by Run-DMC (“Radio Station”) and Eazy-E (“Radio”).
In a more unfortunate twisting of Chuck’s sampled words, malt-liquor
company St. Ides borrowed a sound bite of the unrepentant teetotaler saying
“the incredible” for a radio ad — making it sound like Chuck endorsed a
company notorious for its high-alcohol content and aggressive marketing to
the black community. Chuck ended up suing St. Ides for $5 million dollars.
Public Enemy’s sampling legacy went well beyond audio: Fellow Long
Island rap group Leaders of the New School took their name from one of
Chuck’s lines in “Don’t Believe the Hype.” Politically minded funk-metal
band Follow for Now took theirs from “Bring the Noise.” The JVC Force
cult hit “Strong Island” was based on a term Chuck helped popularize.
By the early ’90s, sampling Nation of Millions was an instant badge of
hip rebellion among noisy college rock bands, and snippets started popping
up on records by Pussy Galore, Naked City, Manic Street Preachers and My
Bloody Valentine. By the end of the decade, Nation of Millions was
regarded as canonical, an indelible symbol of hip-hop itself. Sampling the
album became the quickest way for late-’90s alt-rock bands like Space
Monkeys, Sublime and Everclear to show that they were somewhat more
eclectic than their peers. In the ’00s, sampling Nation of Millions was how
mainstream and underground rappers positioned themselves as legends who
had been down since the days of shell-toe Adidas, with Chuck and Flav’s
sampled voices creating hit choruses for everyone from Jay-Z (“Show Me
What You Got”) to Jurassic 5 (“What’s Golden”). As for the future? When
you buy popular vinyl-emulation computer software Serato Scratch Live,
the first vocal sample on the test-scratch sentence is Chuck D bellowing
“Bass!” An updated version of their hit called “Bring the Noise 20XX” has
already found a new generation of fans via its placement in the video game
DJ Hero and Guitar Hero 5.

***

To celebrate the 20th anniversary of Nation of Millions, Public Enemy hit

the road in the summer of 2008, playing the album in its entirety. They
naturally started where the album did, in London. And while the
Hammersmith Odeon audience of 1987 was certainly hyped to witness a
revolution, the sold-out Brixton Academy audience in 2008 was a rowdy,
red-faced pile of nearly 5,000 bodies slamdancing, stage diving and
screaming all the words. Flav said, “This right here is the livest show that
I’ve ever done in my motherfuckin’ life.” For these shows, part of Public
Enemy’s 61st tour, the Bomb Squad joined P.E. as performers for the first
time ever. Now just the Shocklee brothers, the Bomb Squad opened the
show with a set of skull-cracking, oppressively loud dubstep. The crowd
filling Union Park for Chicago’s Pitchfork Fest wasn’t nearly as boisterous,
but Public Enemy’s performance was no less muscular.
The 20th anniversary celebration spilled over into Year 21, and the
Nation of Millions shows were intended to culminate at the Roots Picnic in
Philadelphia, the annual party held on a steaming piece of tarmac next to
the Delaware River, this time backed by the tireless geekazoids in the Roots
and Brooklyn’s Antibalas Afrobeat Orchestra. Public Enemy churned out
what was probably their loudest, most chaotic set in history, an exercise in
pure mayhem. The lineup was huge: five Antibalas horn players, the Roots’
own Damon “Tuba Gooding, Jr.” Bryson, two guitarists, bass, two
percussionists, keyboards, P.E.’s virtuosic DJ Lord,? uestlove on drums,
Chuck, Flav, Griff, Roots MC Black Thought and some feedback when the
sound fucked up — the sheer amount of noise was the perfect tribute to the
original manic Bomb Squad cluster bombs. Extra tension and unease was
thrown in when Chuck’s martial delivery and Black Thought’s funky feel
delivered the same lines at different times. DJ Lord dutifully scratched
through the record’s various tributes to Terminator X. The Roots were
clearly beyond pumped: Their arrangement of “Bring the Noise” dorkily
added measures to the Marva Whitney vamp that weren’t even sampled in
the original version. Flavor Flav asked everyone if they would vote for him
if he ran for president.
Public Enemy played a surprise Nation of Millions set at the Bonnaroo
Music and Arts Festival one week later and their scepter loomed large over
the four-day event. Old tourmates the Beastie Boys rapped over “The
Grunt” break; Erykah Badu dominated the main stage in a Public Enemy
hoodie; Bruce Springsteen’s optimistic post-Obama victory lap “Working
On a Dream” included a promise to “bring the noise”; people called for
Iowa blues crooner William Elliott Whitmore to perform his assuredly P.E.-
influenced “Who Stole the Soul”; dudes dotted the field all weekend long
clad in Flav’s oversized clock, sunglasses and Viking helmet.
The 12:30 a.m. performance was accordingly intense. Chuck and Flav
stopped after “Show ’Em” to have a spirited back-and-forth. On the original
record, the Bomb Squad had sampled Flav’s voice, but that night he
breathlessly recreated it live in front of the sweaty, muddy Tennessee
crowd.
“Yo, you sound just like the record, my brother.”
“Ayo, Chuck, you be sounding just like the record too.”
“No, you sound like they should sample you.”
“No, you sound like the way they sampled you.”
“No, you sound like the way that they sampled you.”
The veteran MCs bounded around the stage, testing out their most
famous sound bites: “Yeah, boyyyyy!” and “Yo, Chuck, run a power move
on ’em!” and “Bass! How low can you go?!” and “Rock that shit, homie!”
The lines were all spoken with 20 years behind them, but they were mostly
indistinguishable from the thousands of times those lines have been
replayed by artists sampling Public Enemy.
Chuck, appropriately, added, “Here we go again.”
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Radio interviews and panels

Breakdown FM W/ Davey D. “The History of the Latin Quarters Pt. 1.”

November 3, 2006. Online: http://www.odeo.com/episodes/ 11192363-
Breakdown- FM-The-History-of-the-Latin-Quaters-pt1
Chicago Cultural Center’s Claudia Cassidy Theater, Future of Music
Coalition and Pitchfork Music Festival Present: “It Takes a Nation of
Millions to Hold Us Back.” July 17, 2008, Chicago.
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July 20, 2008.
Chuck D Moving Lecture Session at Red Bull Music Academy. 2008
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Hank Shocklee Moving Lecture Session at Red Bull Music Academy.
2006. Online: http://www.redbullmusicacademy.com/video-
archive/lectures/uidcall/188/
Speaking Freely with Ken Paulson. May 18, 2001.
Online: http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/about.aspx?id=12288&
printer-friendly=y

DVD

George Clinton/Parliament-Funkadelic: The Mothership Connection.

DVD. Pioneer, 2001.
Public Enemy — It Takes a Nation: London Invasion 1987. DVD. MVD,
2005.
Wattstax. Dir. Mel Stuart. DVD. Warner Bros., 2004.
 Special Thanks
Courtney Harris

Security of the First Read

Kory Grow, PappaWheelie

Too Much Posse

Thanks: Jeff Chang, Maura Johnston, Michaelangelo Matos, Jessica
Suarez, Katie Hasty, Tim Blaszka, Bruce Livingstone, Gerry Hart, Caryn
Brooks, David Hornbuckle, Marie Mundaca, Scott Plagenhoef, Amy
Phillips, Jake Friedman, Tom Mallon, Dave Barker, Mom, Dad and the
Brooklyn Public Library.
 Notes

1 Cohen.
2 Chicago Cultural Center, et al.
3 Payne, 73.
4 Aldave, 30.
5 Breakdown FM W/ Davey D.
6 Chicago Cultural Center, et al.
7 Chuck D, Fight the Power, 90.
8 Lapeyre, 130.
9 Shocklee at Red Bull Music Academy.
10 McFadden.
11 Brown and Tucker, 245.
12 Speaking Freely with Ken Paulson.
13 Chuck D, Lyrics of a Rap Revolutionary, 50.
14 Brown and Tucker, 222.
15 Chairman Mao, “The Legacy of Marley Marl,” 88.
16 Lapeyre, 128.
17 Brackett, 86.
18 Brown, I Feel Good, 216.
19 Red Bull Music Academy.
20 Ellis, 105.
21 Ibid.
22 Ibid.
23 Stevenson, 32.
24 Speaking Freely with Ken Paulson.
25 Chicago Cultural Center, et al.
26 Ibid.
27 George, Post-Soul Nation, 167.
28 Grand Upright Music, Ltd. v. Warner Bros. Records Inc.
29 McLeod, 23.
30 Davis.
31 Leland.
32 Chuck D, Fight the Power, 27.
33 Vincent, 48.
34 Brown and Tucker, 189.
35 White and Weinger, 36.
36 Chang, ColorLines.
37 Chuck D, Lyrics of a Rap Revolutionary, 91.
38 Leland.
39 Brown and Tucker, 200.
40 Chuck D, Fight the Power, 27.
41 White and Weinger, 41.
42 Brown and Tucker, 224.
43 Leland.
44 Bainer.
45 Coleman, 355.
46 Marsh, 37.
47 It Takes a Nation: London Invasion 1987 DVD commentary.
48 Dery.
49 Marsh, 97.
50 Ibid., 85.
51 Ibid., 95.
52 Coleman, 355.
53 Berrios.
54 “Still Takes a Nation of Millions . . .”
55 Chuck D Moving Lecture Session at Red Bull Music Academy.
56 Coleman, 355.
57 Fricke, TK.
58 Pareles.
59 Chuck D, Fight the Power, 92.
60 Ibid., 94.
61 It Takes a Nation: London Invasion 1987 DVD commentary.
62 Guralinick, 355.
63 Bowman, 181.
64 Pigballs.
65 Zulaica.
66 Wattstax DVD commentary.
67 Ibid.
68 Ibid.
69 It Takes a Nation: London Invasion 1987 DVD commentary.
70 Bowman, 268.
71 Maycock.
72 Perkins.
73 Kelly, “The Living Word [Wattstax Part Two],” 59.
74 Greenberg.
75 Wattstax DVD commentary.
76 Kelly, “The Living Word [Wattstax Part Two],” 63.
77 Wattstax DVD commentary.
78 Serrin.
79 Frady, 249.
80 Myrie, 116.
81 Rose, 115.
82 Ibid., 119.
83 Leland.
84 Chicago Cultural Center, et al.
85 Chuck D, On the Real radio show.
86 Iverem.
87 Ahearn, 125.
88 Chuck D, “Run-DMC,” Rolling Stone.
89 Chuck D, Fight the Power, 63.
90 Chuck D, Tougher Than Leather.
91 Weiner.
92 Simmons, 65.
93 Ro, 192.
94 Rabin.
95 Pigballs.
96 Robbie Ettelson, “T La Rock Interview Pt. 1.”
97 Gross.
98 Odell.
99 Chicago Cultural Center, et al.
 Also available in the series:

1. Dusty in Memphis by Warren Zanes

2. Forever Changes by Andrew Hultkrans
3. Harvest by Sam Inglis
4. The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society by Andy Miller
5. Meat Is Murder by Joe Pernice
6. The Piper at the Gates of Dawn by John Cavanagh
7. Abba Gold by Elisabeth Vincentelli
8. Electric Ladyland by John Perry
9. Unknown Pleasures by Chris Ott
10. Sign ‘O’ the Times by Michaelangelo Matos
11. The Velvet Underground and Nico by Joe Harvard
12. Let It Be by Steve Matteo
13. Live at the Apollo by Douglas Wolk
14. Aqualung by Allan Moore
15. OK Computer by Dai Griffiths
16. Let It Be by Colin Meloy
17. Led Zeppelin IV by Erik Davis
18. Exile on Main St. by Bill Janovitz
19. Pet Sounds by Jim Fusilli
20. Ramones by Nicholas Rombes
21. Armed Forces by Franklin Bruno
22. Murmur by J. Niimi
23. Grace by Daphne Brooks
24. Endtroducing . . . by Eliot Wilder
25. Kick Out the Jams by Don McLeese
26. Low by Hugo Wilcken
27. Born in the U.S.A. by Geoffrey Himes
28. Music from Big Pink by John Niven
29. In the Aeroplane Over the Sea by Kim Cooper
30. Paul’s Boutique by Dan LeRoy
31. Doolittle by Ben Sisario
32. There’s a Riot Goin’ On by Miles Marshall Lewis
33. The Stone Roses by Alex Green
34. In Utero by Gillian G. Gaar
35. Highway 61 Revisited by Mark Polizzotti
36. Loveless by Mike McGonigal
37. The Who Sell Out by John Dougan
38. Bee Thousand by Marc Woodworth
39. Daydream Nation by Matthew Stearns
40. Court and Spark by Sean Nelson
41. Use Your Illusion Vols 1 and 2 by Eric Weisbard
42. Songs in the Key of Life by Zeth Lundy
43. The Notorious Byrd Brothers by Ric Menck
44. Trout Mask Replica by Kevin Courrier
45. Double Nickels on the Dime by Michael T. Fournier
46. Aja by Don Breithaupt
47. People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm by Shawn Taylor
48. Rid of Me by Kate Schatz
49. Achtung Baby by Stephen Catanzarite
50. If You’re Feeling Sinister by Scott Plagenhoef
51. Pink Moon by Amanda Petrusich
52. Let’s Talk About Love by Carl Wilson
53. Swordfishtrombones by David Smay
54. 20 Jazz Funk Greats by Drew Daniel
55. Horses by Philip Shaw
56. Master of Reality by John Darnielle
57. Reign in Blood by D. X. Ferris
58. Shoot Out the Lights by Hayden Childs
59. Gentlemen by Bob Gendron
60. Rum, Sodomy & the Lash by Jeffery T. Roesgen
61. The Gilded Palace of Sin by Bob Proehl
62. Pink Flag by Wilson Neate
63. XO by Matthew LeMay
64. Illmatic by Matthew Gasteier
65. Radio City by Bruce Eaton
66. One Step Beyond . . . by Terry Edwards
67. Another Green World by Geeta Dayal
68. Zaireeka by Mark Richardson
69. 69 Love Songs by L. D. Beghtol
70. Facing Future by Dan Kois
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