Public Enemy's It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (33 1/3) (14 page)

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.

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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