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

by Weingarten, Christopher R.

  Released in April 1988, Nation of Millions would leave its larger-than-life impression almost immediately. Rhymes got faster, African medallions replaced gold chains, music magazines explored nationalist politics, producers sprayed tracks with increasingly dense splinters of vinyl. Since Public Enemy had succeeded in making themselves part of the legacies of the artists they sampled, rappers started to sample Public Enemy, attempting to align themselves with this sea change of mature, argument-provoking hip-hop. From 1988 to 1991, sampling Chuck D’s voice was the hip-hop equivalent of using a Super Fuzz pedal after Jimi Hendrix. One “Bass!” and your record wore a black-and-gold armband in solidarity.

  De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising and the Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique were 1989’s twin totems of copyright-fudging collage, and both generously plucked sounds from Nation of Millions, their sampledelic heir. Madonna, attempting to push her bad-girl image into Parental Advisory Sticker territory, borrowed the S1W theme song, “Security of the First World,” for her steamy single “Justify My Love.” When Yo! MTV Raps debuted in August of 1988, there was a snippet of Flav — or a Flav soundalike — in the theme song to register a resonant “Yes!” Chuck’s attack on black radio — “Radio . . . suckers never play me” — was effective in pushing the negative dissent of Ice-T (“Radio Suckers”), but was just as good when it was chopped and twisted to extol the positive virtues of radio play by Run-DMC (“Radio Station”) and Eazy-E (“Radio”). In a more unfortunate twisting of Chuck’s sampled words, malt-liquor company St. Ides borrowed a sound bite of the unrepentant teetotaler saying “the incredible” for a radio ad — making it sound like Chuck endorsed a company notorious for its high-alcohol content and aggressive marketing to the black community. Chuck ended up suing St. Ides for $5 million dollars.

  Public Enemy’s sampling legacy went well beyond audio: Fellow Long Island rap group Leaders of the New School took their name from one of Chuck’s lines in “Don’t Believe the Hype.” Politically minded funk-metal band Follow for Now took theirs from “Bring the Noise.” The JVC Force cult hit “Strong Island” was based on a term Chuck helped popularize.

  By the early ’90s, sampling Nation of Millions was an instant badge of hip rebellion among noisy college rock bands, and snippets started popping up on records by Pussy Galore, Naked City, Manic Street Preachers and My Bloody Valentine. By the end of the decade, Nation of Millions was regarded as canonical, an indelible symbol of hip-hop itself. Sampling the album became the quickest way for late-’90s alt-rock bands like Space Monkeys, Sublime and Everclear to show that they were somewhat more eclectic than their peers. In the ’00s, sampling Nation of Millions was how mainstream and underground rappers positioned themselves as legends who had been down since the days of shell-toe Adidas, with Chuck and Flav’s sampled voices creating hit choruses for everyone from Jay-Z (“Show Me What You Got”) to Jurassic 5 (“What’s Golden”). As for the future? When you buy popular vinyl-emulation computer software Serato Scratch Live, the first vocal sample on the test-scratch sentence is Chuck D bellowing “Bass!” An updated version of their hit called “Bring the Noise 20XX” has already found a new generation of fans via its placement in the video game DJ Hero and Guitar Hero 5.

  * * *

  To celebrate the 20th anniversary of Nation of Millions, Public Enemy hit the road in the summer of 2008, playing the album in its entirety. They naturally started where the album did, in London. And while the Hammersmith Odeon audience of 1987 was certainly hyped to witness a revolution, the sold-out Brixton Academy audience in 2008 was a rowdy, red-faced pile of nearly 5,000 bodies slamdancing, stage diving and screaming all the words. Flav said, “This right here is the livest show that I’ve ever done in my motherfuckin’ life.” For these shows, part of Public Enemy’s 61st tour, the Bomb Squad joined P.E. as performers for the first time ever. Now just the Shocklee brothers, the Bomb Squad opened the show with a set of skull-cracking, oppressively loud dubstep. The crowd filling Union Park for Chicago’s Pitchfork Fest wasn’t nearly as boisterous, but Public Enemy’s performance was no less muscular.

  The 20th anniversary celebration spilled over into Year 21, and the Nation of Millions shows were intended to culminate at the Roots Picnic in Philadelphia, the annual party held on a steaming piece of tarmac next to the Delaware River, this time backed by the tireless geekazoids in the Roots and Brooklyn’s Antibalas Afrobeat Orchestra. Public Enemy churned out what was probably their loudest, most chaotic set in history, an exercise in pure mayhem. The lineup was huge: five Antibalas horn players, the Roots’ own Damon “Tuba Gooding, Jr.” Bryson, two guitarists, bass, two percussionists, keyboards, P.E.’s virtuosic DJ Lord,? uestlove on drums, Chuck, Flav, Griff, Roots MC Black Thought and some feedback when the sound fucked up — the sheer amount of noise was the perfect tribute to the original manic Bomb Squad cluster bombs. Extra tension and unease was thrown in when Chuck’s martial delivery and Black Thought’s funky feel delivered the same lines at different times. DJ Lord dutifully scratched through the record’s various tributes to Terminator X. The Roots were clearly beyond pumped: Their arrangement of “Bring the Noise” dorkily added measures to the Marva Whitney vamp that weren’t even sampled in the original version. Flavor Flav asked everyone if they would vote for him if he ran for president.

  Public Enemy played a surprise Nation of Millions set at the Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival one week later and their scepter loomed large over the four-day event. Old tourmates the Beastie Boys rapped over “The Grunt” break; Erykah Badu dominated the main stage in a Public Enemy hoodie; Bruce Springsteen’s optimistic post-Obama victory lap “Working On a Dream” included a promise to “bring the noise”; people called for Iowa blues crooner William Elliott Whitmore to perform his assuredly P.E.-influenced “Who Stole the Soul”; dudes dotted the field all weekend long clad in Flav’s oversized clock, sunglasses and Viking helmet.

  The 12:30 a.m. performance was accordingly intense. Chuck and Flav stopped after “Show ’Em” to have a spirited back-and-forth. On the original record, the Bomb Squad had sampled Flav’s voice, but that night he breathlessly recreated it live in front of the sweaty, muddy Tennessee crowd.

  “Yo, you sound just like the record, my brother.”

  “Ayo, Chuck, you be sounding just like the record too.”

  “No, you sound like they should sample you.”

  “No, you sound like the way they sampled you.”

  “No, you sound like the way that they sampled you.”

  The veteran MCs bounded around the stage, testing out their most famous sound bites: “Yeah, boyyyyy!” and “Yo, Chuck, run a power move on ’em!” and “Bass! How low can you go?!” and “Rock that shit, homie!” The lines were all spoken with 20 years behind them, but they were mostly indistinguishable from the thousands of times those lines have been replayed by artists sampling Public Enemy.

  Chuck, appropriately, added, “Here we go again.”

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