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

by Weingarten, Christopher R.

  Essentially, pretty much anyone who said a word, played a note or danced in the bleachers at Wattstax was a participant in history. Public Enemy pulled a series of spoken-word vignettes from the 1973 soundtrack for Nation of Millions. The speeches and announcements peppered throughout the soundtrack LP inspired the Bomb Squad to fill Public Enemy’s album with similar off-the-cuff live material from their December U.K. concert, giving their own album the same sense of weight and cohesion. They used Wattstax dialogue on at least five occasions, pulling not only the Bar-Kays’ “Freedom is a road” speech, but also their cry of “We’re gonna get on down now” for “Night of the Living Baseheads.” Public Enemy used a harried Rufus Thomas going, “Now wait a . . . minute” for “Baseheads” and added his “Now here’s what I want you all to do for me” for “Don’t Believe the Hype.” They got Jesse Jackson saying he doesn’t know what this world is coming to for the opening of “Rebel.” Chuck told Michael Kelly, the archivist who restored the Wattstax film, in Wax Poetics magazine:

  “Because you’re talking about all those thousands of people assembling in the Los Angeles Coliseum, a majority of Black people from the ’hood. Those voices, the voices speaking to 100,000 people, had to have soul riding with it. It was the soul in the voices, that’s what we were after. The soul in the voices gets the groove ready . . . Back when we made those first Public Enemy records . . . black music was hurting for soul. All the soul had been smoothed out. It was all champagne and caviar, so you couldn’t get any soul out of R&B, which wasn’t really rhythm and blues anyway. It was just homogenized record company drivel. So by using Rufus Thomas’s voice from Wattstax to intro a record — by some kind of science of the soul-da-funk — it brought connection to that soul. There was some kind of intangible feeling in there we could somehow transfer to our audience.”73

  Rufus Thomas may have had more soul in his voice than anyone at Wattstax because, at 55 years old, he was the history of popular music. At the start of the 1970s, he was entering his fifth decade in show business and had dabbled in every form of music available. He was an irresistible force and consummate showman who made comeback after comeback. Thomas’ career dates back to the pre-soul era; he cut his teeth in 1936 as a tap dancer in Mississippi’s all-black revue, the Rabbit’s Foot Minstrels. He was briefly a blues crooner in the ’40s with the release of a 78 called “I’ll Be a Good Boy.” His 3 p.m. slot as a DJ at Memphis’ highly influential radio station WDIA, the first all-black-programmed station in the country, was full of unfiltered energy and his unique language. He opened every show with his trademark rap: “I’m loose as a goose and full of juice / I’ve got the goose, so what’s the use.” Probably listening was Elvis Presley, an avowed fan of the station. Definitely listening was Memphis’ young Isaac Hayes. Thomas gave rock ’n’ roll label Sun Records its first hit in 1953 with “Bear Cat.” With daughter Carla, he gave Memphis’ Satellite Records its first hit in 1960 with “’Cause I Love You,” a song that gave founder James Stewart his first taste of success — inspiring him to turn the fledgling imprint into an R&B label, which was renamed Stax.

  Rufus Thomas performed at Wattstax with second billing under Isaac Hayes. He was in the middle of one of his many comebacks, thanks to his funk-era smash “Do the Funky Chicken.” Much like what Clyde Stubblefield said about his drums in “Funky Drummer,” Thomas said the lyrics to the cluckin’ dance sensation simply generated inside of him without thought. “The words just started to come,” he said. “I don’t know how; they just came out of the blue.”74 The night before he performed “Chicken” at Wattstax, the L.A. Rams were busy blowing out the Oakland Raiders in a 34–9 pre-season game at the Coliseum. The staff had to assemble the stage in the wee hours, starting at 2:30 a.m. and toiling until the morning. There was a hefty insurance policy against Stax if something should happen to the grass. The fans would be relegated to the stands, and the grass was off-limits.

  Once Thomas came out — stomping around the stage in shin-high white boots, pink hot pants and a cape while the sun set in the distance — people started scaling the fence and storming the football field. Once “Funky Chicken” played at a breakneck tempo, it was pandemonium. The Raiders’ playground turned into the Land of 1,000 Dances. Embodying Chuck D’s idea of “individuality and collectiveness,” everyone was freaking in their own style, from the Funky Chicken to ebullient bursts of whatever. With the insurance policy looming and the grass being stomped upon by thousands of feet, Bell started to panic. Thomas had to come to the rescue. “He was the last of that era of people that came out of that minstrel period. He knew how to work a crowd because he came from that era where you walked out without a microphone, and you had to get that crowd and work ’em up,” said Bell. “The only way that we’re gonna get these people off the field is with Rufus Thomas.”75

  Thomas’ voice was authoritative enough to burrow through the bedlam: “Now wait a minute. Wait aaaaa minute.” The line, of course, was employed to usher in the bridge of Public Enemy’s “Night of the Living Baseheads.” And like Thomas’ plea, it was used to break the tension, leading to the few moments in “Baseheads” in which the honking sax and uneasy shaker could take five. Professor Griff knocks down the door with sermonizing: “Succotash is a means for kids to make cash / Selling drugs to the brother man instead of the other man.” Meanwhile, back in 1972, Thomas had some political-style rhetoric of his own with an improv speech that mirrored the language of protest at the time: “More power to the folks, let’s go up to the stands / Don’t jump the fence / Because it don’t make sense.”

  “Now here’s what I want you all to do for me,” added Thomas, which ended up as the intro to “Don’t Believe the Hype.” “Rufus Thomas has more soul in that statement to get you ready for a rap joint,” Chuck said. “’Cause you know Rufus Thomas must have introduced a whole lot of funky records back when he was a DJ.”76 Chuck, once a DJ himself, understood the power of voice. At 12 years old, he was too young to get into the theater and see Wattstax when it came out. But he frequently saw ads for the soundtrack in Jet magazine — at one point he even wondered if it were even possible for the 100,000 people on the album cover to be all black. Since Chuck wouldn’t be able to see Thomas’ flashy Wattstax performance until he was adult, he could only hear the record and be influenced by Thomas’ voice, a force that was at once authoritative and avuncular.

  One of the most important voices on the Wattstax record belonged to a young Jesse Jackson, who kicked off the festival with an invocation that ended with his legendary “I Am Somebody” speech. When Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis four years earlier, Jackson had been standing even closer to King than Isaac Hayes — he was in the courtyard at the Lorraine Motel, close enough to hear the rifle clap. Jackson’s ascension as a public figure soon followed, occurring in the same post-Malcolm, post-King void of leadership that also gave rise to the Black Panthers and James Brown’s political singles. Charismatic, ambitious and tireless, Jackson was the champion of television sound bites. As a bridge between MLK’s messages of economic empowerment and the Panthers’ calls for immediate revolution, Jackson was the perfect complement to the rise of Stax Records — one of the largest black-owned businesses in the country that worked with an integrated staff, a company who’s biggest recording artist oozed black power after charting a record made up of white pop hits.

  Heading up the Chicago chapter of Operation Breadbasket, Jackson turned a campaign to improve economic conditions into an aggressive agent of change. With tactics like picketing chain stores and threatening boycotts if they didn’t carry enough black products or hire enough black employees, Breadbasket’s efforts resulted in what a 1971 Life magazine article claimed was 4,000 jobs for Chicago’s black residents, plus 10,000 more jobs that were created indirectly. By 1974, black entrepreneurs in Chicago had a more extensive financial stronghold than in any other city in the country. With these efforts, Jackson got the attention and adoration of Stax Records and Al Bell. I
saac Hayes started showing up to Jackson’s three-hour Breadbasket service meetings, get-togethers that treated protest and community organization as a spiritual, inspirational event. Bell signed Jackson as the first artist on Stax’s consciousness-heavy daughter label, Respect Records, and released his album I Am Somebody under the name the Country Preacher: The Rev. Jesse Jackson.

  To this day, “I Am Somebody” is regarded as Jackson’s most famous speech. An intense work of call-and-response that follows Christian litanies and anticipates hip-hop, “Somebody” also makes use of sampling. The familiar refrain — “I am . . . somebody” was used by Jackson’s father figure, Martin Luther King, Jr., in a speech delivered in Mississippi during the summer of 1964. But the way Jackson flipped the line turned it into an unforgettable chorus, something that worked with the unique chemistry of a chart-topping pop song. It was something uncomplicated enough to resonate when Jackson said it on a 1971 episode of Sesame Street but deep enough to inspire the masses at Wattstax. Bell had seen Jackson deliver the speech in Chicago, and he said being on the Wattstax stage for Jackson’s sweaty, passionate, fist-heavenward reading was “a highlight in my life on planet earth.”77

  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.”78 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.”79 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.

  Chapter Seven –

  “Def Jam tells you who I am”

  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 Candidate-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 conjun
ction 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