Public Enemy's It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (33 1/3) (11 page)

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.”
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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.”
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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.

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 Candidat
e-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.