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  IT TAKES A NATION OF MILLIONS

  TO HOLD US BACK

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  We . . . aren’t naive enough to think that we’re your only source for reading about music (but if we had our way . . . watch out). For those of you who really like to know everything there is to know about an album, you’d do well to check out Continuum’s “33 1/3” series of books—Pitchfork

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  For a complete list of books in this series, see the back of this book

  It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back

  Christopher R. Weingarten

  2010

  The Continuum International Publishing Group Inc

  80 Maiden Lane, New York, NY 10038

  The Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd

  The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX

  www.continuumbooks.com

  Copyright © 2010 by Christopher R. Weingarten

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publishers.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Weingarten, Christopher R.

  It takes a nation of millions to hold us back / Christopher R.

  Weingarten.

  p. cm. —(33 1/3)

  Includes bibliographical references.

  eISBN-13: 978-1-4411-4284-9

  1. Public Enemy

  (Musicalgroup). It takes a nation of millions to hold us back. I.

  Title. II.

  Series.

  ML421.P82W45 2010

  782.421649092’2—dc22

  Typeset by Pindar NZ, Auckland, New Zealand

  Printed in the United States of America

  Table of Contents

  1. “Yes . . . The rhythm, the rebel”

  2. “This is a sampling sport”

  3. “Back . . . Caught you looking for the same thing”

  4. “Beat is the father of your rock ’n’ roll”

  5. “Consider yourselves warned”

  6. “All in, we’re gonna win”

  7. “Def Jam tells you who I am”

  8. “Here we go again”

  Works cited

  Special Thanks

  Notes

  Chapter One –

  “Yes . . . The rhythm, the rebel”

  The greatest anti-government record ever made was kicked into funky gear by a military parade. The heartbeat of Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back was officially defibrillated around 1951, within earshot of martial feet clomping on the Tennessee tarmac. At about 8 or 9 years old, Chattanooga native Clyde Stubblefield attended an Armed Forces parade after school. He heard the snapping, popping snares and was hooked. As he marched home to beat on boxes and tin cans, he took the first steps in changing America’s booty muscles and brain tissue.

  By 1965, Stubblefield was the percolating rhythm technician backing the Godfather himself, James Brown, tip-tapping along the equator of the most rhythmically adventurous band around. Stubblefield wasn’t the backbone of the James Brown Orchestra; he was more like its circulatory system. His grooves didn’t drive the band so much as they floated between the percussive horn stabs with a delicate interweave, filling in the gaps between the grooves, a style no drummer has come close to duplicating. “We all know how to jam,” said Stubblefield, “but to keep from getting up on somebody else’s pattern, that’s hard to do.”1 Two decades later, when Public Enemy were layering sample after sample on top of his beats, they had to adopt the same philosophy, lining up complementary frequencies so their frenetic collages never got muddy. “We didn’t just put something in there to put it in there,” said co-producer Keith Shocklee. “Ours had a science to it.”2

  By the late ’60s, every James Brown single graced by Stubblefield introduced a tricky new contraption: the fluid yet jerky waves and crests of “Cold Sweat,” his favorite beat; the hyperkinetic drum-’n’-bass jackhammering of “I Got the Feeling”; the labyrinthine stutter step of “Give It Up or Turnit a Loose.” They were beats that were works of architecture, calculated with the same meticulous planning used to erect beams in a curvy Frank Gehry building. Before each session, Stubblefield would construct patterns in his head, trying to invent a unique rhythm for each song. But ask him to play his most famous drum break, and he probably couldn’t do it.

  Born on November 20, 1969, in a studio in Cincinnati, “Funky Drummer” was never really about a drummer, as it’s mostly a tenor sax solo and lots of Brown’s unheralded organ work. It was essentially a jam session, an extended riff that Brown and his band would bang out as a stopgap between the big singles. For the recording “Funky Drummer,” they gathered at King Studios for a session of “not playing.” As Stubblefield said, “You just go into the studio and start up a groove and that’s it.”3 Play a groove, split it between two sides of vinyl, see if it sticks. Brown spends this particular session of “not playing” by ad-libbing and shouting. Being Brown, pretty much everything he said — from band directions to winded exhalations — has since been regarded as funky gospel.

  Brown opens with “Pull back the cover . . . The shades . . . Good God, it’s a raid.” As Public Enemy tracks like “Party for Your Right to Fight” teach, the FBI and local police were routinely raiding the California Black Panther Party in 1969, encouraged by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and his disruptive covert operations program COINTELPRO. Two weeks after “Funky Drummer” was recorded, the Chicago Police Department would raid the Black Panthers’ Chicago chapter, killing Fred Hampton and Mark Clark at point-blank range.

  Brown continues: “Honky Tonk Women . . . is all I need . . .” — a nod to his good friends the Rolling Stones. They had topped the pop charts with “Honky Tonk Women” a few months earlier — the same time that Brown and Stubblefield were topping the R&B chart with “Mother Popcorn,” twin totems of youth culture circa 1969, ruling a nation bursting with Vietnam paranoia. Two songs from men claiming to like their women bold and proud, strong enough to heave you over their shoulder. Coincidentally, the Stones’ “Honky Tonk Women,” like Brown/Stubblefield songs of the era, opens with a drum break that would be appropriated by hip-hop producers in the 1980s.

  About four and a half minutes into “Funky Drummer,” Brown give
s listeners a quick and dirty primer on Stubblefield’s many achievements. “Fellas! One more time, I wanna give the drummer some of this funky soul we got here.” The “one more time” is because Brown had already given the drummer some on the chart-topping “Cold Sweat” two summers earlier. “You don’t have to do any soloing, brother, just keep what you got. Don’t turn it loose” — as in “Give It Up or . . .” — “‘cause it’s a mother” — as in “Mother Popcorn.” “When I count to four, I want everybody to lay out and let the drummer go . . . A-ONE-TWO-THREE-FOUR-GETTIT.”

  Stubblefield, on his own, tumbles along with the same beat he’s been kicking downhill for five and a half minutes. “I didn’t actually care about the beat,” he later said. “People ask me to play ‘Funky Drummer’ all the time, and I really don’t know how it goes. It was just something I put together at that moment.”4 This wasn’t a painstakingly crafted Stubblefield Beat created through heavy brainstorming but an effortless rhythm that just came naturally. It was what he was feeling in his body that particular day, what he felt while “not playing,” caught a little off guard. The now famous syncopated pulse-gallop rattles like the sounds Stubblefield absorbed during his childhood in Chattanooga: the compressed air he would hear boom-banging from the smokestack of the local factory, the locomotives he would hear rumbling around the bowl-shaped city. Ticka-ticka-takk.

  * * *

  “Y’all suck, get the fuck off the stage!”

  Public Enemy were onstage at the Latin Quarter in New York in March of 1987 — the group’s first time performing in Manhattan. Between 1984 and 1988, the Latin Quarter was a Times Square club that served as the incubator for hip-hop’s golden era. On any given night, the place would be packed to the gills with famous MCs, hungry record-label reps and the future pioneers of hip-hop, swarming together from every borough. Public Enemy had driven from Long Island stuffed inside the unreliable, smoke-belching yellow-and-white Chevy that frontman Chuck D had borrowed from his dad. This was the very first promotional show for Public Enemy’s debut album, Yo! Bum Rush the Show, and no one in the crowd was really ready for what they were seeing: big beats, a throttling baritone and a bunch of guys parading around onstage with plastic Uzis. “Get them clowns off the stage,” the voice boomed.

  The heckler was first-wave hip-hopper Grandmaster Melle Mel of the Furious Five, the “Message”-belting pioneer of political rhymes and one of Chuck’s all-time favorite rappers. According to Latin Quarter manager DJ Paradise, Melle Mel saw the guns and freaked out: “We’re supposed to be stopping the violence! That shit ain’t hip-hop!”5 According to Chuck, Melle Mel thought that Public Enemy was somehow entangled in Bronx belter KRS-One’s beef with the Queens-based Juice Crew. Either way, Chuck had always admired the power of Melle Mel’s voice — and right now it was carrying some less-than-complimentary words all the way from the back of the room.

  This wasn’t the first time they got dissed. A month earlier, the influential radio DJ Mr. Magic famously heckled their loping, droning, head-blowing debut single, “Public Enemy No. 1.” He played the record on NYC station WBLS exactly once, adding his own commentary about how the beat was dope, but the rap was wack. “I guarantee you, no more music by these suckers,” he said, punctuating his statement by smashing the record on the air. Public Enemy MC/hypeman Flavor Flav had been primed to hear his song on the radio with has tape recorder at the ready. He ended up capturing the rant, and P.E. would immortalize Magic’s ill communications on the opening of Nation of Millions track “Cold Lampin’ with Flavor.” Their “pro-black radical mix” was being snubbed by black radio.

  Beyond that, Bum Rush was kind of dated. Columbia was distributing their label, Def Jam, and Public Enemy had fallen into the gears of the major-label machine. Bruce Springsteen’s live box set pushed back the Beastie Boys, and the Beastie Boys pushed back Public Enemy. Meanwhile, hip-hop wasn’t going to wait for anyone. It was reinventing itself every six months, and by spring of 1987 it had made quantum leaps since P.E. recorded the album way back in August 1986. Digital samplers, which could capture a few seconds of sound off an existing record, were becoming commonplace. Producer Marley Marl was already the undisputed king, snatching a few essential milliseconds off the Honey Drippers’ soul classic “Impeach the President” for MC Shan’s “The Bridge.” He chopped up the individual drum hits on his E-Mu synthesizer, replayed them back on the sample pads and layered the spacious break with storm clouds of noise and echo. In 1987, soul and funk samples became the new building blocks for rap music. Tempos became quicker and peppy drum licks zipped around the sluggish elephant stomps of 1986’s DMX drum machines. Public Enemy were a throwback before they had a chance.

  Bum Rush lurched out of the gate to sell about 100,000 copies that year — the least successful album at the time for a label pulling platinum plaques with the Beasties and LL Cool J. Chuck D and Hank Shocklee, leader of Public Enemy production crew the Bomb Squad, went to a throwdown at Old Westbury University in New York and heard the tides change without them. They heard Eric B and Rakim’s “I Know You Got Soul,” a lean monorail of a track featuring a Funkadelic break and a spindly Bobby Byrd sample, which were both totally dominated by the “serious as cancer” tone of MC Rakim. He juggled his syllables with a goldsmith’s attention to detail, spilling out a rhythmic complexity that left competitors gasping for air. Sure, Bum Rush rocked bells harder than LL, but it was still a time capsule from 1986, a lumbering rock record based around booming beats and fanciful boasts. Rakim on “I Know You Got Soul” was Ali gracefully dancing around the ring, while Bum Rush tracks like “Miuzi Weighs a Ton” were like body slams from a professional wrestler. “It was frightening,” recounted Chuck. “I looked at Hank, he looked back at me, and the DJ must’ve played this record 60 times. I was like, ‘Hank, that’s the greatest record.’ We was fuckin’ mad. We left Old Westbury University pissed.”6 Indeed, nothing changed the dynamic of hip-hop that year like Marley’s production on “I Know You Got Soul.” Planet Rock was ready to abandon ye olde boom-bap for the sleek stick-and-move of funk breaks. Everyone wanted to have soul. Said Chuck in his autobiography: “‘I Know You Got Soul’ . . . was the most incredible rap record I ever heard. I was fanatical being a rap fan and pissed by being a competitor, because I knew we didn’t have anything to go up against that. And it was coming from the same camp that was dissing me, saying I sounded old. Hank and I got together and said, ‘We have to do some wild shit.’”7

  Hank Shocklee was what his bandmates called “the mastermind, the con man, the talker, the brain.”8 He had hundreds of theories about frequencies and sound and recording, when to create consonance and when to revel in dissonance. He had knowledge of how acoustics work. He had no trouble telling you that you were wack. And so he aligned his troops, preparing to hunker down at 510 South Franklin St. in Hempstead, Long Island. This had been Chuck and Hank’s recording studio and war room since 1982, the days when the duo were making mixes to play on the Super Spectrum Mix Hour, their pioneering radio show on Adelphi University station WBAU.

  Hank’s brother Keith was the record vulture of the group. Their studio was basically two rooms of records, and Keith could navigate them better than anyone. Back in 1981, Hank, Keith and the MC known as “Chuckie D” were a mobile Long Island DJ crew known as Spectrum City. The crew was involved in the Intermetro Record Pool, a club that helped DJs get the latest records. Being a lesser-known crew and on one of the lower rungs on the totem pole, they would usually get armloads of wack “post-disco disco” records. It was Keith’s job to listen to those records and separate the party-starting wheat from the floor-clearing chaff. They would catalog the albums using a Dewey Decimal-style system that Chuck invented, including labels by artist, title, label, beats per minute and crowd reaction. By the time the crew started making bold sample collages in 1987, Keith could point to all the right records in this more-than-10,000-slab-deep library, each one occupying a distinct part of his memory bank like guitar chords or dru
m rudiments.

  The third member of the Squad was Eric “Vietnam” Sadler — nicknamed so because he would always be spotted wearing fatigues and sunglasses. Sadler was the musician, a veteran of Long Island funk bands who wound up downstairs at 510 South Franklin after his mom kicked his band out of her basement. After Public Enemy moved in, Sadler ended up joining the crew, playing synths and programming tricky drum patterns as if they were live drums. Sadler played the mediator who would translate the group’s expressionist ideas into language that a tech-minded studio engineer could understand. As Hank chipped away at the line between music and noise, it was Sadler who always spoke up when two samples were out of tune, a bass line wasn’t in the right key or a beat was too far beyond rhythm. Accordingly, the two would spar over Hank’s methods, which often reveled in the sounds, vibrations and tensions of dissonance.

  The fourth and final member of the Bomb Squad was listed in the liner notes as Carl Ryder. “Ryder” was Chuck himself, sporting a play on his God-given name Carlton Ridenhour. It was a pseudonym he’d used since his days of doing sports reporting on WBAU. Chuck felt that giving “Chuck D” an extra credit on an album’s liner notes would be too self-serving. Plus, an additional name made their posse look even thicker.

  However, by all accounts, the song they were about to unleash was Chuck and Hank’s baby. A month after Bum Rush dropped, right after “I Know You Got Soul” set everything in motion, they were on the defensive, ready to create something people couldn’t ignore. Marley Marl treated his sampler like a well-oiled machine, full of crisp breaks and sharp, jabbing riffs. But with “Rebel without a Pause,” the Bomb Squad were out to make organized chaos, dog-piling samples into a mind-rattling mess. Hank and Keith had lived next to musicians when they were kids on Long Island, and every day they would wait outside their garage waiting for them to play. Hank said this ritual helped him learn the intricacies of what made a good band work. In turn, he would have the members of the Bomb Squad tap their samples in by hand. While Marley let his sampler do the heavy lifting, Public Enemy jammed in the studio like James Brown’s band, creating natural tensions and queasiness when things didn’t line up perfectly, a push-and-pull that by comparison made most hip-hop sound clinical and safe. Hank’s vision demanded layers and layers until you couldn’t tell what was a sample and what was a drum machine. “We never would have the ‘Impeach the President’ snare laid out there all naked,” said Hank. “Marley Marl would have that snare butt-naked.”9