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

by Weingarten, Christopher R.

  Run and DMC (without Jam-Master Jay in tow) took the 15-minute ride from Hollis, Queens, to do their first interview ever, live on WBAU with Stephney. Their 12-inch came heavier than a steamroller, giving hip-hop’s disco phase a black leather beatdown, coming pavement-hard with metronomic concussion beats and shouted boasts. But ironically, the group, still in their teens, were a little shy and nervous in the presence of the Adelphi radio crew. They clammed up and didn’t have much to say, forcing the radio crew to joke that you could learn more about the group on the grooves of a record that began, “Two years ago, a friend of mine . . .”

  However, Run-DMC would return, never forgetting the Adelphi crew that gave them their start. They appeared on the show well after becoming globetrotting superstars, and forged a friendship with the Spectrum Crew that would last for decades. Run-DMC listened to cassettes of the Super Spectrum Mix Hour, and they influenced the group when they made records like Raising Hell. Raising Hell’s album-length cohesion and booming 808s would, in turn, influence Public Enemy. Chuck cites it as his favorite album of all time. “To me, that album was like Wilt Chamberlain’s 100 point game,” said Chuck in the Run-DMC reissue liner notes “What next? How do you top that? You don’t. Instead, you go another direction.”90

  Jam-Master Jay would be the catalyst for bringing Public Enemy’s demo tape to the attention of Rick Rubin. As Public Enemy progressed, Run gave the thumbs up to “Rebel without a Pause” in Russell Simmons’ absence, DMC gave “Don’t Believe the Hype” approval after the group had abandoned it. By the time Run-DMC were making their fourth album, Tougher Than Leather, in 1988, DMC was scooping up Chuck’s rhyme styles and producers Jam-Master Jay and Davy D were borrowing Public Enemy’s sample library — copping both Bobby Byrd and Joeski Love in similar ways. They opened tracks with recordings of speeches and copiously sampled “Bring the Noise.” Chuck’s omnipresent “Bass!” makes a very 1988 appearance in the hectic “I’m Not Going Out Like That.” Chuck was downright honored to donate the sampled hook of “Radio Station.”

  When Chuck was still on the fence about quitting his messenger job, it was Jam-Master Jay who talked him into a rap career. Chuck said that after hearing Raising Hell, he was convinced rap had grown up, and made the decision to make emceeing his adult career in 1986. Chuck owed a lot to Run-DMC and, fittingly, Public Enemy sampled “Sucker MCs,” the track where the two teenage MCs were at a similar crossroads. In 1982, Joseph “Run” Simmons and Darryl “DMC” McDaniels were fresh out of high school and unsure about their paths in life. DMC was attending St. John’s University, unhappy with his choice of major in business management. Run said, “I thought I was gonna get a job at Woolworth’s . . . Come home, do my little homework and not know what the fuck I’m gonna do.”91 Jam-Master Jay, not yet part of the group, had dropped out of high school and was attending to his ill father.

  After having much success with Kurtis Blow, budding guru Russell Simmons was trying to break into the punk/dance/hip-hop crossover realm that Fab 5 Freddy had helped usher in. Simmons and producer Larry Smith were covering all their bases, flirting with the idea of street-conscious rap like the critical smash “The Message” over a beat like Afrika Bambaataa’s Kraftwerk-twurking robo-bop “Planet Rock.” Simmons recruited his younger brother Run, who insisted — like the initial meetings between Def Jam and Chuck D — that the upcoming project be a group. He wanted something with the feel of the Cold Crush Brothers, the heavy stuff he’d been batting around in his attic with his stage-shy, bespectacled buddy, Easy D. Without D, Run didn’t want to make a record.

  Simmons didn’t like D’s voice but put him on anyway. D filled up 15 notebook pages of matter-of-fact rhymes about poverty, wage inequity, prejudice and clock-punching morass. Or in brief: “Disillusioned is the word.” The team met in Smith’s attic in Jamaica, Queens. D, who had an overprotective mom, had to sneak out of the house and return undetected at 1 a.m. Simmons wanted the duo to have a Kurtis Blow feel, but D wanted it to be loud, abrasive and booming like their attic jam sessions. Once Simmons was out of the room, they did a take with the bellowing, hard-rocking feel of “Planet Rock,” cementing the sound of Run and the rapper soon renamed DMC. They recorded the final version of “It’s Like That” at Greene Street Studios, where Simmons had laid down “Christmas Rappin’.” For a B-side, Smith had tapped out an aggro version of his band Orange Krush’s “Action,” a dance hit that had taken new life as a popular breakbeat. The duo rapped the entire song without stopping — which is why Run sounds so breathless when he blurts out the “first come, first served basis” line used in “Night of the Living Baseheads.”

  The track, “Sucker MCs (Krush Groove 1),” was unlike anything on earth, a two-ton revelation, a line ferociously drawn in the sand separating the old school from the new school. Said Simmons in his autobiography: “No one could even imagine what the fuck it was. No melody. No harmony. No keyboards. Just a beat, some fake-sounding handclaps and these n----- from Queens yelling over the track.”92 Originally, Simmons and Smith wanted to add a melody onto it, but the group balked. No music, DMC insisted, since they wanted the feel of a park jam. Going against Simmons’ instincts would clearly pay off for Run-DMC — and it paid off for Public Enemy as well.

  When WBAU alumnus and future Yo! MTV Raps host Dr. Dre played Public Enemy to Simmons for the first time in 1986, Simmons rolled off a mattress and threw the tape out of a window in disgust. When Rick Rubin scouted the group for Def Jam, Simmons said, “Rick, I don’t even know why you’re wasting your time with this garbage. No one’s ever going to like this. This is like black punk rock.”93 He added, “You make records with the Bangles. Why do you care about this?”94 As Hank Shocklee has been quick to say in interviews, “Russell Simmons hated our records. He didn’t like our records. I mean, he liked the records after they started selling.”95 Once Simmons started getting serious about pushing R&B acts like Oran “Juice” Jones, Newkirk and Alyson Williams, Hank figured that a hit Public Enemy record would be the one that Simmons hated on first listen.

  But of course, Russell Simmons is only half of the Def Jam story, since the label didn’t coalesce until he hooked up with NYU film student, headbanger, aspiring DJ and hip-hop fanatic Rick Rubin in 1984. Rubin had thrown the original, self-designed Def Jam logo on the sleeve of an EP by his art-fuck band, Hose. Rubin picked up a copy of “Sucker MCs” and was instantly blown away — and energized to try and top it.

  Rubin had been hanging around Club Negril, a New York reggae hot spot that had warmed up to hip-hop shows. He became fast friends with DJ Jazzy Jay, a Bronx DJ and protégé of Afrika Bambaataa’s. Jazzy taught Rubin how to use a drum machine and was willing to help with his idea: creating a drum machine-based rap with the feel of the steamy club shows he went to in Manhattan. Rubin’s hopes to record Kool Moe Dee of the mighty Treacherous Three were dashed almost immediately. Dee was under contract with Sugar Hill, as was his partner Special K. But they hooked Rubin up with K’s brother T La Rock.

  T La Rock was a hip-hop diehard, having emceed, deejayed and b-boyed his way throughout the Bronx for nine years. After Rubin learned how to use a drum machine, he cooked up a headache-inducing 808 thump in his dorm room. Some of the fills in the middle were courtesy of some fooling around by fellow punk turned hip-hop fan Adam “Ad-Rock” Horowitz of the Beastie Boys. After the demo was finished, T La Rock’s DJ Louie Lou and Special K got into a screaming match over who should take home the cassette. Since Special K didn’t want Louie coming back to the sessions, T La Rock had to find a new DJ to do the scratching. Rubin suggested his friend Jazzy Jay, who would give the song aggressive, jabbing scratches that sounded like someone digging into a guitar pickup with a screwdriver. Beyond the crunching scratch-riffs, “It’s Yours” would gain its reputation as the heaviest hip-hop single of the time because of its trunk-exploding 808s. “We were in the studio mixing down,” says T La Rock. “And I just kept on saying, ‘More bass! More bass! More bass!’”96

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nbsp; The single was released on Arthur Baker’s Party Time Records, but Rubin insisted he put a Def Jam logo on it. A smash hit, “It’s Yours” gave Rubin the boost to make more records, and he gained loads of credibility when a stunned Russell Simmons learned that an aggro new hip-hop single was rocketing up playlists without his helping hand. Once they met, Simmons told Rubin it was his favorite record. The two men soon teamed up in Rubin’s messy dorm room to create the label that would launch the Beastie Boys, LL Cool J and Public Enemy. With Def Jam, a close-knit family of artists who toured together, collaborated and bonded, Public Enemy was sure to capture the game-changing element of Def Jam’s watershed moment, scratching in T La Rock’s immortal cry “It’s Yours!” in “Louder Than a Bomb.”

  Chuck had blindly purchased the single in a Queens record store back when it was released in 1984. He was taken aback by Rubin’s arresting tone-arm logo on the sleeve and correctly figured that “Def Jam” meant a hip-hop label. The Spectrum Crew gave the song crazy spins, doing their part in helping it thrive. Behind the scenes, just like Rubin had set out to top “Sucker MCs,” the Spectrum Crew were secretly scheming to best “It’s Yours.” This resulted in an early version of “Public Enemy No. 1.” Sampling “It’s Yours” in 1988 was a tribute to the record that energized them and the label that funded them. Chuck would change his tune by the end of the ’90s (“A lot of people said, ‘It seems strange that you’re not on Def Jam anymore. How do you feel?’ I say that I feel like a black man in 1866, trying to figure out what the fuck I do with my freedom”97), but in 1988, Chuck was proud to be a part.

  Of course, the Bomb Squad didn’t ignore Def Jam’s then cash cow: the Beastie Boys’ 1986 crossover snot-rocket “(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (to Party!).” Irresistibly catchy, its opening bellow — “yeeeeah!” — appears in two Nation of Millions tracks. Also irresistibly stoopid, the song was completely re-edited and re-thought to fit the Public Enemy dogma of “Party for Your Right to Fight.” The Beasties’ track was intended as a beer-goggled parody of “all the ‘Smokin’ in the Boys Room’/‘I Wanna Rock’-type songs in the world.”98 Yet the Def Jam-era Beasties are best remembered as skirt-flipping fratboy party-animal dickheads who defenestrated hotel furniture, poured beers on girls and attempted to call their album Don’t Be a Faggot. Despite the fact that the Beasties were poking fun of cheeseball party rock, the track became an instant dunderhead rallying cry. Chuck flipped the track on “Party for Your Right to Fight” to show that Public Enemy were the antithesis of the Beastie Boys. But this wasn’t a move made out of derision — it was a way of distancing P.E. from the pull-my-finger element of Def Jam while still showing love. Public Enemy were good friends with the Beasties, and the Beasties loved Public Enemy. The Beasties’ MCA had been singing P.E.’s praises well before the crew landed at Def Jam, rapping along to their early Spectrum tapes with DMC. MCA’s early endorsement was one of the reasons that Rubin gave Public Enemy so much attention. At the Grammys in February 1987, the Beasties and DJ Hurricane dragged out a boombox playing Public Enemy’s “Timebomb,” hopping around like caffeinated goons before presenting an award to a befuddled Robert Palmer. In April 1987, P.E. tagged along on the Beasties’ Licensed to Ill tour, which was not only their first tour ever but their invaluable opportunity to reach kids in places like Passaic, New Jersey; Bethlehem, Philadelphia and Troy, New York. On that tour they encountered the same suburban kids that had hefted the Beasties to the top of the Billboard charts.

  Speaking of the secret soundtrack to suburbia, Rick Rubin’s fave rave in 1986 was Slayer, a band of thrash-metal mutants who pushed the thresholds of both speed and taste. At the time, Slayer seemed like an odd signing for a hip-hop label, but the Rubin-produced 29-minute megablast Reign in Blood was as bold a reaction to the Reagan era as Nation of Millions. Public Enemy were a rebellion to how the government ravaged urban areas — the failure of trickle-down economics, the one in three African-Americans living below the poverty line in 1987, the anti-discrimination bills that were vetoed by the administration. Slayer’s vivid tales of mutilated bodies and satanic rituals targeted the resentment of suburbia — the hypocrisy of the religious right, the oppression of the Parent’s Music Resource Center thought police and, of course, mom and dad. Chuck respected metal for its speed and attitude, something Slayer had in droves on Reign in Blood. During the recording, Rubin had supplied drummer Dave Lombardo with an endless stash of Gatorade and candy, fueling the inhuman double kick-drum flurries that would define a generation of headbanger sticksmen.

  When he was laying down the track for “She Watch Channel Zero?!” Hank Shocklee had originally used the chug-and-punch riff from “Re-Ignition” by hardcore heroes Bad Brains. Bill Stephney suggested that he spin the Slayer record, and the riff from “Angel of Death,” not even two minutes in, popped out. The most headbanging track on Nation of Millions was born, an anomaly for an album that’s widely regarded as the first commercially viable rap album that didn’t constantly drape itself in rock riffs. Hank was no stranger to metal, having worked alongside the longhairs at New York’s Record World where he acquired a love of Rush and Judas Priest. Chuck and Hank admired the consistency of Iron Maiden and Megadeth albums — “Kept the same font, the same logo, the same skeleton holding something”99 — as a way to build long-term careers. Like Iron Maiden’s Eddie or Megadeth’s Vic Rattlehead, the Public Enemy crosshairs logo was almost always certain to make an appearance, showing up on 11 of their 12 studio albums.

  Many Public Enemy songs don’t have a bass line because Hank admired the abrasiveness and urgency in guitar — and the Rubin-damaged guitar sound on Reign in Blood was the most abrasive around, a dry, stark chug like tinder sticks being rubbed to start a fire, an oppressive, reverb-free grind that made Metallica sound like Journey. Slayer’s lyrics dwelled in the ugliest realities, creating comic-book panels out of the evil that men do. To this day, “Angel of Death” is their most notorious song. Guitarist Jeff Hanneman had grown up with a curiosity about the memorabilia his WWII-veteran father had plucked off the bodies of dead Nazis, later reading books on the Third Reich. His lyrics to “Angel of Death” were a mix of documentary and splatter flick, a narrative about the horrors of Nazi physician Josef Mengele’s human experiments. The band started their leanest, meanest, fastest album with the haunting line, “Auschwitz, the meaning of pain / The way that I want you to die.”

  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.

  Chapter Eight –

  “Here we go again�
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  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.