Public Enemy's It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (33 1/3) (2 page)

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!”
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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.”
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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.’”
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Hank Shocklee was what his bandmates called “the mastermind, the con man, the talker, the brain.”
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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 drum 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.”
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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!’”
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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.”
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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.