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

  This was battle music made by a band that was feeling abandoned by the industry and frustrated by record-label politics. They felt ignored by other musicians because of the stigma of their being DJs instead of dudes who caressed instruments, as well as ignored by hip-hip because they were from Long Island and not from Queens or the boogie-down Bronx.

  More important, Public Enemy were feeling like public enemy No. 1, men in the crosshairs as mid-’80s New York exploded with incidents of racial violence. In the four months leading up to the recording of “Rebel without a Pause,” the Big Apple poured salt on old wounds and opened some fresh ones:

  • New York was boiling over the Howard Beach incident of December 1986, when three African-American men were brutally assaulted by a gang of white teenagers. In April 1987, Police Commissioner Benjamin Ward warned that racial violence could erupt throughout the summer. A group of 400 African-Americans marched through a Hassidic neighborhood in Brooklyn, claiming harassment by the local community.

  • In 1984, 66-year-old mentally ill African-American woman Eleanor Bumpers was reluctant to be evicted from her Bronx apartment, arming herself with a 10-inch kitchen knife and lunging at a policeman. In an attempt to subdue her, white officer Stephen Sullivan ended up killing her with two shotgun blasts. In February 1987, the officer was acquitted of all charges.

  • In 1983, 25-year-old African-American graffiti artist Michael Stewart was arrested on charges of tagging the Union Square subway station. Stewart was punched and kicked by the officers, according to conflicting reports. He lapsed into a coma while in custody and died 13 days later. The six officers charged with his death were acquitted. In March 1987, despite much public outcry, the Metropolitan Transit Authority decided that ten of the 11 transit police involved wouldn’t face any departmental charges.

  • In 1985, white electrician Bernhard Goetz shot four African-American teenagers with a .38 revolver, paralyzing one, after they approached him on the subway. In the weeks leading up to April 1987, the state supreme court was assembling the predominately white jury that would eventually acquit him.

  • Bronx resident Larry Davis wounded six white police officers that came to arrest him on suspicion of the murders of four suspected drug dealers. After Davis slid out a back window and eluded capture for 17 days, The New York Times reported that he was regarded as a local “folk hero” in a climate of police brutality. When he was finally captured, “tenants who had lain low during an all-night police siege threw open their windows and erupted into cheers: ‘Lar-ry! Lar-ry!’”10

  Public Enemy’s iconic black-man-as-target logo was born out of these chilling realities. Design fiend Chuck D originally created the crosshairs logo in art class for the fictional group Funky Frank and the Street Force. Using the same cut-and-paste technique the Bomb Squad used on their records, Chuck X-Acto-knifed a picture of LL Cool J’s buddy E Love from an issue of tweenie rap rag Right On! and fit it with crosshairs. When the group came up with their name in 1986, Chuck placed the logo next to some stenciled letters that were influenced by a gangster move he had seen on TV and broke it up with a Run-DMC-style horizontal crossbar. The logo alone was a stark, perfect symbol of how Public Enemy perceived racial anxiety in the late ’80s, the seemingly endless long, hot summer that received its most lyrical interpretation in Spike Lee’s P.E.-scored Do the Right Thing.

  Dissed by rappers, dismissed by radio, pissed at the world — Public Enemy were ready to fight back. And their choices for samples were perfect.

  BEEP — BEEP — BEEP: Three horn stabs borrowed from James Brown’s 1976 single “Get Up Offa That Thing” spurt out of the gates like a drummer clicking off a rock song. Hip-hop fans knew this sound better as the staccato punch that kicked off Boogie Down Productions’ already-classic 1986 “South Bronx.” Public Enemy using this sound was a false start, a red herring, a crafty “fuck you” to anyone who thought Public Enemy was still stuck in ’86.

  They were saying goodbye to the old school, opening with a blast from the last James Brown track to crack the Top 50 in the ’70s. In 1976, Brown was feeling low and defeated. He was still reeling from the death of his son three years earlier. He was pinched for $4.5 million in back taxes. He hated his deal with Polydor; his wife, Dee Dee, wanted him to stay home with his daughters; his radio stations and Future Shock TV show weren’t getting the ad dollars they needed; and he considered himself in semi-retirement. He played a show at Bachelor’s III in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, a bar owned by Joe Namath. The audience was sitting down, being polite, listening instead of dancing. Says Brown in his autobiography: “I had worked hard and dehydrated myself and was feeling depressed. I looked at all these people sitting there, and because I was depressed, they looked depressed. I yelled, ‘Get up offa that thing and dance ’til you feel better!’ I probably meant until I feel better.”11

  In the third verse of “Rebel,” Chuck shouts, “Soul, rock ’n’ roll comin’ like a rhino.” As if to make the track extra heavy by osmosis, he and Hank had picked not one but two songs with the word “rock” in the title. First up, the drums from Jefferson Starship’s “Rock Music,” a relatively vacant, proto-“We Built This City” celebration of rock’s endurance. Like P.E., Jefferson Starship circa 1979 were regrouping after taking a few hits. After a handful of Top 20 hits, vets Grace Slick and Marty Balin left the band at different points of the same tour. Drummer John Barbata was in a car accident and had to depart as well. The remaining members retreated to San Francisco and turned Jefferson Starship from glossy, power-ballad AOR band into a hard-rock avalanche. The title of the resulting album, Freedom at Point Zero, could have just as easily been the name of a P.E. song, even if the grooves it housed were mostly Foreigner-aping arena rock. For the start of “Rock Music,” new drummer Aynsley Dunbar (ex-Journey) laid down a hard-hitting boom-thwack with much joy and volume. These drums are the only time “Rebel without a Pause” gasps for air, a break in the horrific chaos.

  For the “Rock ’n’ roll!” scratch, Terminator scratched in Chubb Rock’s “Rock & Roll Dude.” At the time, Terminator was eager to prove himself to the guys, who were seconds away from phoning Public Enemy’s trusted ghost-scratcher DJ Johnny Juice. Listening to Terminator’s talk about his ideas, Hank had been expecting a monumental feat of turntable pyrotechnics. However, Terminator wound up using the most minimal of hand motions to scuttle out a tense transformer rhythm. Hank thought it was just terrible, a bass-heavy blurble that muddied their track, a messy scramble in which all the frequencies had been carefully considered. He had engineer Steve Ett pull the bass out of it — and all of a sudden it popped and crawled, quickly becoming one of his favorite scratches ever, and possibly the most important scratch solo in history.

  The track he slices, Chubb Rock’s “Rock & Roll Dude” is a celebratory if prickly assessment of rock history. By 1986, Def Jam/Rush Management’s double-attack of the Beastie Boys and Run-DMC had pushed the boundaries of what “rocked” in suburbia, with the two rap groups storming the lily-white play-lists of rock radio and MTV. Radio-station callers and frightened parents bubbled with racist comments. But the press didn’t really latch on to the Hip-Hop Menace until August 17, 1986, when an isolated incident of gang violence in Long Beach, California, brought a Run-DMC show to a hasty close. It would only get worse from there: When it came time for Run-DMC to tour again, in the summer of 1987, nothing would drive home the racist response to rap music like the police response to this tour. An article in The Cincinnati Enquirer quoted the chief of police saying the Beasties were garbage, and ran with the provocative headline “It’s the Neo-Nasty Era.” A show in Seattle was canceled out of fear of race wars. A Portland, Oregon, paper described the possibility of gang fights.

  To confront the silliness of hip-hop phobia in 1987, Chubb Rock playfully rapped over the sound white dudes considered their home turf: the chugging heavy metal riff. Chuck would do a similar trick with the title of “Rebel without a Pause,” a mutation of the title of Rebel without
a Cause, the archetypal rebellious-white-dude non-conformist hipstersploitation flick. More than a pun, “Without a Pause” reveals the skulking nihilism of James Dean’s James Stark to be lazy, selfish and reactionary, especially in the face of Chuck D’s tireless, pointed aggression.

  Over wailing guitars, Chubb questioned racist myths about rap and rock. They include the one about how rock is white-people music (African-Americans invented the stuff, duh), the one about how black people don’t listen to rock (“I’m not Jackie Gleason and he’s not Art Carney / But you know who’s hard? Hmm . . . Paul McCartney!”), and the one about how rap is dangerous (“What they said about rap and violence last year / Could be said about rock ’n’ roll yesteryear”). At the time, Chuck D was especially upset that people weren’t considering rap music “music.” He recalled a radio interview during which George Harrison called rap “computerized rot”: “If it were Lennon or McCartney, I would have felt dissed.”12 But despite Chubb Rock’s ironic surfer drawl on the chorus, “Rock & Roll Dude” asserts that rap audiences and rock audiences have more in common than people think. It would be a few more years before Public Enemy would drive that point home through their tours with Anthrax, Gang of Four and U2. Public Enemy’s “Bring the Noise” — which would get its own Anthrax-assisted rock remake in 1991 — would confront the racial divide head on. Chuck D, who lists Chubb Rock as one of his all-time most underrated rappers, said in his guide Lyrics of a Rap Revolutionary, “In ‘Bring The Noise,’ I was specifically talking about how people at the time considered all rap music ‘noise’ . . . If you’re calling that noise, we have some noise for your ass. This will throttle you to the edge.”13 The noise in this track would be supplied by tenor saxophonist Robert McCullough, wailing over and over again. This sound is from “The Grunt,” the debut single from the James Brown band the JB’s, when they too were just a group of guys still figuring things out.

  Underneath the JB’s, between the Jefferson Starship, anchoring the Chubb Rock, beside a little bit of Joeski Love’s “Pee-Wee’s Dance,” the perpetual-motion machine constantly pushing everything forward was Clyde Stubblefield, the funky drummer, a never-ending cartwheel of funk in its purest form.

  Stubblefield’s journey back onto hit records began a decade after he recorded “Funky Drummer” in the mid-’70s. He had left Brown’s band some time ago. Brown, on the wane commercially, was incensed, whinging that disco had sanitized the funk, diluted it, made it repetitive and nonsensical. Ironically, the non-stop, double-sided James Brown vamps like “Funky Drummer” had set the stage for disco’s extended 12-inches. Even worse: The Godfather eventually got his hustle on with The Original Disco Man LP. But somewhere in the West Bronx, classic funk was still spinning.

  Starting in the first-floor community room at 1520 Sedgwick Ave. in 1973 and eventually trickling out into parks for monster jams, Jamaican transplant Kool Herc was resurrecting all the old grooves in his DJ sets. Uninterested in the glossy dance music that chic Manhattanites were snorting behind velvet-roped fences, Herc created a new canon smelted from old material: forgotten records, both classic and obscure, stuff that he found best resonated with his predominantly black and Hispanic audiences. He tried reggae at first, but when that didn’t move the crowd, he pushed on to funk and soul: James Brown, Jimmy Castor, Baby Huey.

  Watching the dancers get down every night, Herc saw that their limbs were loosest during the “breaks,” or isolated drum parts, when the band pulled out and gave the drummer some. He wondered: Could you prolong the break? Could you make an endless break? By cutting the audio back and forth between two records during the critical drum solo, Herc inadvertently invented the “breakbeat” — two seconds of feverish climax looped eternally, the point where Steve Miller turns into Steve Reich, a limitless pulse to make B-boys go ga-ga night after night. This became the foundation for hip-hop music. Brown and Stubblefield may have slid off the Billboard charts, but Herc was keeping them alive with all the energy he could borrow from local streetlamps, recontextualizing gritty drum breaks pushed out of the spotlight by blinding glitter balls. Looking for the perfect beat, he played rock bands like Rare Earth (“Get Ready”), disco groups like Mandrill (“Fencewalk”) and Latin-tinged funk bands like the Incredible Bongo Band (“Apache”). And no one could deny the transformative power of a Clyde Stubblefield break like Herc’s break of choice: “Give It Up or Turnit a Loose.” It’s uncertain when or how the “Funky Drummer” break entered the picture, but its rollicking presence is felt on any number of vintage party tapes by DJs like Grandmaster Flash. By 1979, it was so engrained in break lexicon that it was immortalized as the lead track on Super Disco Brakes Vol. 2. White-label bootlegs of popular breakbeat records were popping up underneath the counters of Manhattan record hot spots. Capitalizing on the trend, New York label owner Paul Winley made the two lo-fi Super Disco Brakes comps (all pressings of the first one had a scratch in it) which allowed new DJs to ensnare bonkers beats without having to peek over Herc’s or Afrika Bambaataa’s hulking shoulders, attempting to guess what artist and song title was written on the record before they had steamed off the label.

  When rappers started recording their own records in 1979, live bands played most of the music. When James Brown joined Bambaataa for the “Unity” 12-inch in 1984, the track was a mix of drum machines and tireless session dudes like Sugarhill’s house rhythm section Doug Wimbish and Keith LeBlanc playing through a leaden version of Brown’s “Get Up Offa That Thing.” Around that time, a few mavericks started “sampling” James and Stubblefield, but only through incredibly cumbersome, time-consuming tape edits. In 1984, audio collage artists Steinski and Double Dee set about making a compilation of Brown’s greatest grunts, and ended up with their “Lesson 2 (James Brown Mix),” a mastermix of a whole buncha Brown absurdly gyrating against Bugs Bunny, “Double Dutch Bus” and kitschy dance instructional records. “Funky Drummer” appeared on another mysterious bootleg tape-edit record floating around in 1986, “Feelin’ James” (on TD Records), a six-minute track that squeezed a sizable chunk of Brown’s discography into one monstrous mush-up. Brown felt that disco was just “bits and pieces from everybody, including me, made very simple,”14 but this was pieces of Brown made very, very complex.

  With the birth of the E-Mu SP-12 sampler in 1985, sampling became sport. Marley Marl discovered the power of sampling drums by accident during a Captain Rock session and soon, as rap journalist Chairman Mao wrote, “magically enabling funky drummers from his scratchy record collection to cross decades and sit in on his own productions.”15 The Clyde Stubblefield breaks that had been rocking parties for the past 12 years were being used to elevate a new generation of songs. In 1986, Ultramagnetic MC Ced Gee chopped and flipped a James Brown break on Boogie Down Productions’ epochal “South Bronx” (“Get Up Offa That Thing”), and Marley and Eric B would soon follow with Eric B and Rakim’s “Eric B for President” (“Funky President” — a track Rakim rhymed on back in the day).

  The Ultimate Breaks and Beats series of records appeared almost immediately. UBB pulled back the Wizard of Oz curtain shrouding hip-hop’s building blocks, exposing all the classic head-knocker loops that DJs had been hiding in their arsenals for years. No longer did aspiring wax technicians have to play “guess the label.” This revealed the magician’s secrets in 25 volumes of vinyl, making a decade of tricks available to anyone with one turntable, let alone two. Combine these Cliff’s Notes with the new digital samplers and you’ve got the tools for any producer to quickly loop time-tested body movers. By the time “Funky Drummer” was etched to Volume 12 — either the last UBB record to be released in 1986 or the first one to be released in 1987 — it was already floating around on the Marley Marl-produced “It’s a Demo” 12-inch by Kool G Rap and DJ Polo. Marley sampled Stubblefield off a record Polo brought with him when they met for the first time — literally to make a demo. “Demo” got a uniquely funky “Funky Drummer” treatment when Marley stuttered Stubblefield’s licks. Produce
r Herbie Luv Bug used a slowed-down “Funky Drummer” for Sweet Tee and Jazzy Joyce’s end-of-year hit “It’s My Beat.”

  Seeing Brown’s music voraciously mined by hip-hoppers, Polydor issued a compilation album, In the Jungle Groove, full of 1969–71-era Brown, ready for looping and scratching (and probably, years later, some angry phone calls from lawyers). A three-minute “Funky Drummer (Bonus Beat Reprise)” closed out Side A, looping the soon-to-be-epochal break for anyone who couldn’t afford a sampler. Still, “Funky Drummer” wasn’t totally in vogue when the Bomb Squad jacked it. They were sick of the stock snares of the DMX drum machine, which Hank Shocklee said were in everything from Midnight Starr to the Thompson Twins. To get the snare sound they wanted for “Rebel without a Pause,” they just went to the record they loved the most.

  It was a beat that Stubblefield himself couldn’t figure out the science behind, as it was so instinctual and immediate. And this is something Hank stressed in his own music: Don’t think it; feel it. Hank and consummate musician Eric Sadler would bicker in the studio when one of Hank’s layered tracks was out of key or rhythm, the unease perking up Sadler’s classically trained ears. Sadler remembered, “They were teachin’ me at the same time: Fuck all that technical shit. Do what’s funky. Do what feels good.”16 Another time, when an engineer told Hank that two of his samples clashed in a way that wasn’t exactly musical, he reportedly shot back, “Fuck music!” The “Funky Drummer” break was all about feel — a natural fit for the Bomb Squad . . .