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

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.”
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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.”
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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,”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”