Album of the Day — August 11

Public Enemy — It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back

Aug 11, 2020

Public Enemy — It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back

10.August.2020
Public Enemy
It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back
1988

Attempting to categorize It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back’s cultural significance would be like wrangling 1,000 cats.

Public Enemy may not have been the first to bring socially conscious and politically charged lyrics to rap and hip-hop, but they did blow the door wide open.

In the beginning, it was just two students who met at Adelphi University — Chuck D (Carlton Ridenhour) and Flavor Flav (William Drayton). The band they formed was then known as Chuck D, and Spectrum City, and they released a record called “Check Out the Radio.”

At the time, Chuck D was working at WBAU and created a tape called Public Enemy #1, which caught the ear of Bill Stephney (ex-Program Director at WBAU then at Def Jam Records) who helped Chuck D gather forces to create Public Enemy. Chuck then tapped former Spectrum City alum’s Hank Shocklee, his brother Keith Shocklee, and Eric “Vietnam” Sadler, AKA the Bomb Squad, to be his production team.

The band name originates from the Howard Beach incident of 1986, the acts of subway vigilante Bernhard Goetz and the death of Michael Stewart at the hands of the NYC Transit Police. It would be Hank Shocklee and Bill Stephany, who realized that “the Black man is definitely the public enemy.”

Thus Public Enemy was born.

Public Enemy’s first album Yo! Bum Rush the Show was released in 1987 to wide acclaim. The record failed to resonate with R&B and rock audiences, in the same way, their label mates LL Cool J and Beastie Boys had. Public Enemy set about touring the album as the support act for Beastie Boys, who were then riding high from License to Ill.

When the band returned from the road to record a follow-up, they gathered The Bomb Squad and set about recording a rap album that would be an updated version of Marvin Gaye’s Whats Goin’ On.

As the sonic architect and ring leader, it was Hank Shocklee who began to develop a sound that relied as much on funk as it did on avant-garde noise. This exciting mix helped create a dense, almost chaotic sound to Public Enemy …and would be a signature sound of The Bomb Squad.

As the principal songwriter, Chuck D’s lyrics on It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back are narratives peppered with black nationalist rhetoric, self-empowerment, critiques of white supremacy, and exploitation in the music industry.

In 1988, this was a type of blatant lyricism that was revolutionary.

The closest analogy to the impact of Public Enemy is the punk movement that took place a decade earlier. Some of the social criticism espoused by Chuck D is in line with the message The Clash was delivering. The bands were so culturally aligned that in 2019, Chuck D hosted a podcast on Spotify called “The Story of The Clash.”

When asked about the similarities between the scene that birthed to The Clash and the one that launched Public Enemy, Chuck D. said:

“There was a voice that needed to be heard and a band that played notes to the words alongside that angst.”

In 1988, critic Robert Hilburn wrote that Chuck D “isn’t afraid of being labeled an extremist, and it’s that fearless bite — or game plan — that helps infuse his black-consciousness raps with the anger and assault of punk pioneers like the Sex Pistols and The Clash.”

It’s in “Bring the Noise” that Chuck D. nods to their connection to rock and roll (or heavy metal). In the early days of rock and roll, radio stations wouldn’t play it, and here Public Enemy calls out Black radio stations:

Radio stations I question their blackness
They call themselves black, but we’ll see if they’ll play this
Turn it up! Bring the noise!
Turn it up! Bring the noise!

Later in the song, Chuck D. gives a couple of unusual shout out’s and then some to his contemporaries:

You call ’em demos, but we ride limos, too
Whatcha gonna do? Rap is not afraid of you
Beat is for Sonny Bono, beat is for Yoko Ono
Run-DMC first said a deejay could be a band
Stand on its feet, get you out your seat
Beat is for Eric B. and LL as well, hell
Wax is for Anthrax, still, it can rock bells
Ever forever, universal, it will sell

Hoping to score a similar hit as Run-DMC and Aerosmith did with “Walk this Way,” Anthrax would collaborate with Chuck D and cover “Bring the Noise” on their Attack of the Killer Bees and Public Enemy’s Apocalypse 91… The Enemy Strikes Black, both from 1991.

It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back’s first single “Rebel Without A Pause,” a high energy song that was a crowd favorite when the band played live. However, it would be the second single, “Don’t Believe the Hype,” that announced the arrival of the group and the genre:

Don’t Believe the Hype

Back
Caught you lookin’ for the same thing
It’s a new thing, check out this I bring
Uh Oh the roll below the level
’Cause I’m livin’ low next to the bass, c’mon
Turn up the radio
They claim that I’m a criminal
By now I wonder how
Some people never know
The enemy could be their friend, guardian
I’m not a hooligan
I rock the party and
Clear all the madness, I’m not a racist
Preach to teach to all
’Cause some they never had this
Number one, not born to run
About the gun
I wasn’t licensed to have one
The minute they see me, fear me
I’m the epitome, a public enemy
Used, abused without clues
I refused to blow a fuse
They even had it on the news
Don’t believe the hype

Yes
Was the start of my last jam
So here it is again, another def jam
But since I gave you all a little something
That we knew you lacked
They still consider me a new jack
All the critics you can hang ‘em
I’ll hold the rope
But they hope to the pope
And pray it ain’t dope
The follower of Farrakhan
Don’t tell me that you understand
Until you hear the man
The book of the new school rap game
Writers treat me like Coltrane, insane
Yes to them, but to me I’m a different kind
We’re brothers of the same mind, unblind
Caught in the middle and
Not surrenderin’
I don’t rhyme for the sake of riddlin’
Some claim that I’m a smuggler
Some say I never heard of ‘ya
A rap burglar, false media
We don’t need it, do we?
It’s fake that’s what it be to ‘ya, dig me?
Don’t believe the hype

Don’t believe the hype, its a sequel
As an equal, can I get this through to you
My 98’s boomin’ with a trunk of funk
All the jealous punks can’t stop the dunk
Comin’ from the school of hard knocks
Some perpetrate, they drink Clorox
Attack the black, ’cause I know they lack exact
The cold facts, and still they try to Xerox
Leader of the new school, uncool
Never played the fool, just made the rules
Remember there’s a need to get alarmed
Again I said I was a timebomb
In the daytime, the radio’s scared of me
’Cause I’m mad, plus I’m the enemy
They can’t c’mon and play with me in primetime
’Cause I know the time, plus I’m gettin’ mine
I get on the mix late in the night
They know I’m livin’ right, so here go the mike, sike
Before I let it go, don’t rush my show
You try to reach and grab and get elbowed
Word to herb, yo if you can’t swing this
Just a little bit of the taste of the bass for you
As you get up and dance at the LQ
When some deny it, defy if I swing bolos
Then they clear the lane I go solo
The meaning of all of that
Some media is the whack
You believe it’s true, it blows me through the roof
Suckers, liars get me a shovel
Some writers I know are damn devils
For them, I say don’t believe the hype
Yo Chuck, they must be on a pipe, right?
Their pens and pads I’ll snatch
’Cause I’ve had it
I’m not an addict fiendin’ for static
I’ll see their tape recorder and grab it
No, you can’t have it back silly rabbit
I’m going’ to my media assassin
Harry Allen, I gotta ask him
Yo Harry, you’re a writer, are we that type?
Don’t believe the hype
I got flavor and all those things you know
Yeah boy, part two bum rush and show
Yo Griff, get the green black red and
Gold down countdown to Armageddon
88 you wait the S1Ws will
Rock the hard jams, treat it like a seminar
Teach the bourgeois, and rock the boulevard
Some say I’m negative
But they’re not positive
But what I got to give
The media says this

It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back was, and still is, regarded as a benchmark in not only rap history, but music history. When released, the album was universally lauded by virtually every music outlet.

CRITICS:

David Fricke in Rolling Stone wrote that the album was a: “Molotov cocktail of nuclear scratching, gnarly minimalist electronics, and revolution rhyme” and complimented its “abrupt sequencing and violent sonic compression of rapid-fire samples, slamming-jail-door percussion, DJ Terminator X’s tornado turntable work, and Chuck D’s outraged oratory.”
Robert Christgau gave the album an A+ saying: “These dense, hard grooves are powered by respect: musically, no pop in years has reached so far while compromising so little…the shit never stops abrading and exploding. Yet it holds fast, a revolutionary message D’s raps have yet to live up to — which isn’t to say that isn’t a lot to ask or that they don’t sometimes come close.”
Jon Pareles of The New York Times: “Where most rappers present themselves as funky individualists, beating the odds of the status quo, Public Enemy suggests that rap listeners can become an active community, not just an audience.”
The UK’s Mojo Magazine said: “ “Responsible for the angriest polemic since The Last Poets….[Public Enemy] revolutionized the music, using up to 80 backing tracks in the sonic assault …to these ears Public Enemy sound like the greatest rock’n’roll band in history.”
German music magazine Spex named It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back the second best album of the 20th century …ahead of Nirvana and The Sex Pistols (The Beach Boys, Pet Sounds was number one).

It would be negligent not to acknowledge how influential this album was with its use of samples and sounds. Public Enemy and The Bomb Squad would set a sonic template that continues to be used. However, a deep dive into that would require a separate entry.

Suffice it to say, Public Enemy was revolutionary.

The album would go on to sell well over a million copies in the US and stayed on the Billboard album chart for 47 weeks (peaking at #42) and is considered by most to be “one of the influential albums of all time.”

It turns out; It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back wasn’t just an album title; it was a political and cultural statement as well Public Enemy’s philosophy.

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