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

by Weingarten, Christopher R.

  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 a
lienation. “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.”