Public Enemy's It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (33 1/3) (7 page)

But Public Enemy balked at Friedman’s idea from the beginning, saying it was too conceptual. They asked him to do a simpler shot of the two MCs in a cell. The shot they eventually chose was not Friedman’s favorite (he even threatened to scratch the negative), but it was picked because they thought thick bars would look stark and compelling even under a tiny cassette tray. The photo of Chuck knocking out the surveillance camera would later turn up as the cover of the “Don’t Believe the Hype” single. And the cover of
Nation
— despite Freidman’s complaint that you can’t see Chuck’s eyes — is one of pop music’s most enduring images, overshadowing its forebear,
Revolution of the Mind
.

Around the release of
Revolution
, James Brown started noticing that radio was being segregated and formatted by genre. Despite the fact that he sold tons of records (he would have two No. 1 R&B singles in 1971, the year
Revolution
was released), he said that rock stations stopped playing him: “I was making some of my strongest music during that period, and I think most whites have been deprived of it.”
⁴²
“The radio’s scared of me,” echoes Chuck on “Hype.” “’Cause I’m mad, plus I’m the enemy.” It didn’t end there: Public Enemy would sample
Revolution of the Mind
throughout their career. MC Danny Ray’s intro (“Are you really ready for some super dynamite
soul
?”) would turn up on
Nation
’s 1990 follow-up
Fear of a Black Planet
. The rapturous screams from the audience in “Soul Power” would be transformed into whistling missiles in the bridge of “Caught, Can I Get a Witness.”

And the JB’s would find even more session work on “Don’t Believe the Hype”: Some guitar (either by Cheese Martin or Robert Coleman) from Brown’s 1971 single “I Got Ants in My Pants, Pt. 1” is sliced in under the verses. One of Chuck D’s unheralded roles as a Bomb Squad member was doing light scratching and turntable manipulation, and this song features his handiwork.

“‘Don’t Believe the Hype,’ it’s a sequel,” begins Chuck in the third verse, still mulling over the can of worms he opened in “Rebel without a Pause.” His line “They claim that I’m a criminal” is in the same
vein as “Rebel’s” “Designed to scatter a line of suckers that claim I do crime” — consecutive songs in a row that put racist cops on blast. Fittingly, Public Enemy borrow from Whodini’s “Fugitive” for that paranoid “hu-ahh-AHH-ahhhm-yah” vocal ejaculation. “Fugitive,” a hard-rocking track off Whodini’s 1986 album
Back in Black
is also about being wrongly accused.

But this time, Chuck had music critics in his scope, most notably writer John Leland. Much like radio stations, American critics weren’t too receptive to
Yo! Bum Rush the Show
, and Leland was especially vicious in his
Village Voice
review titled after the Buzzcocks song “Noise Annoys.” Chuck later told
NME
that he attended a
Spin
party looking to fuck Leland up. Chuck heard he was hiding. When Public Enemy were cornered, they would bite back. Here was a band that not only read their press but would call writers out on it. In a
Spin
interview in 1988, they had a comically tense exchange: “Your last single, ‘Bring The Noise,’ was basically about what other people are saying about you.” . . . “Oh, yeah, that was about you. I was talking right at you.”
⁴³

“White media were terrified of these guys,”
⁴⁴
said Public Enemy publicist Leyla Turkkan at a panel in New York City. She told a story about how one prominent rock critic cowered in fear during the drive to a face-to-face interview with Chuck.

Def Jam co-founder Rick Rubin spent his summer vacation in L.A., recording metal bands Danzig and
Slayer for the Def Jam helmed soundtrack to
Less Than Zero
, the chilly, druggy, cult flick loosely based on the Bret Easton Ellis book. When Rubin returned to New York in August, he wanted a Public Enemy track to top the soundtrack off, and they submitted “Don’t Believe the Hype.” Rubin didn’t think the song fit. Hank Shocklee was never the biggest fan of it, and the rest of the group agreed they wanted to make something “turbulent, not funky.”
⁴⁵
Ultimately, the song was scrapped for the punkier “Bring the Noise.” The group put “Don’t Believe the Hype” on the shelf and forgot about it.

“Don’t Believe the Hype,” the true “sequel” to “Rebel without a Pause,” became more of a Part 3, since it didn’t see the light of day until later. Like with “Rebel,” Chuck’s heroes Run-DMC were integral in giving the song the go-ahead. Since tapes were easy to get in the Def Jam office, DMC had gotten a copy of “Don’t Believe the Hype” after mastering.

Hank later stumbled across DMC blasting the track from his Bronco on a Saturday night — on the Lower East Side or in Harlem depending on whom you ask. The entire block was grooving along. Public Enemy changed their opinion on the track immediately and, once May 1988 rolled around, wrapped tightly under Friedman’s surveillance-camera cover, it became
Nation of Millions
’ third single.

While James Brown, Fred Wesley and the JB’s were picking up the pieces in 1971, space cadet Bootsy Collins and his brother Catfish had run away to join George Clinton’s P-Funk circus. Over the next decade, Parliament and Funkadelic would leave an acid-soaked trail that ushered in the second wave of funk, providing hip-hop with enough low-end theories to wear out a generation of woofers. (Old George would be sampled so reliably in the ’90s that he eventually released his own series of snatchable snippets called
Sample Some of Disc, Sample Some of D.A.T
.) But before Digital Underground and Dr. Dre made their Mothership Connection, the Bomb Squad was borrowing Funkadelic’s gnarliest transmissions.

Funkadelic was the hard-rock branch of the Clinton legislature. Evolving from a ’60s doo-wop band,
Funkadelic turned into a fuzzed-out monster after borrowing Vanilla Fudge’s Marshall stacks at a college show. From then on out, Parliament were smooth and Funkadelic (same members, different label) were crunchy — a band synonymous with swirling clouds of feedback, Black Cheer crunge, cartoon voices and infectious chants. Like the Bomb Squad, Clinton produced Funkadelic records for maximum headfuck: “You turned on a Funkadelic record with earphones on, drums running across your head, panning the foot, we panned everything . . . We went to colleges where they wasn’t taking anything, but they was tripping on the records.”
⁴⁶

But Funkadelic were Public Enemy’s forefathers for reasons well beyond their affinity for noise and hard rock. They had a visual aesthetic that spoke as loud as their message, something Chuck would allude to in a London interview when he talked about Public Enemy’s bold stage presence. “We wanted to be identified visually because we knew sonically a lot of music would not be understood . . . We knew that when people came to a concert, the No. 1 reaction was based on what they saw, and what they heard second.”
⁴⁷
Public Enemy surrounded themselves with arresting gold and black banners, one of the highest-visibility color combinations available. The unforgettable Instamatic icon of Flavor Flav’s clock pendant was a signifier at once simple and loaded with meaning, something that evolved naturally from Funkadelic stage wear like
Bootsy’s sparkling star glasses or Gary Shider’s diaper. P-Funk did it all first. They would flank themselves with a logo onstage: a massive skull that would, at show’s climax, smoke a six-and-a-half-foot joint. And hey, there were guns onstage too, even if the kitschy, strobe-lit “bop gun” held by Shider wasn’t exactly the Uzis toted by the S1Ws. Years after Alice Cooper and Kiss started packing semi trucks with explosives and guillotines and fake blood, this may not seem like a big deal, but remember that the only black groups with huge production budgets for theatrical stage shows in the mid-’70s were P-Funk, the Commodores and Earth, Wind and Fire. And only P-Funk had their own spaceship.

Funkadelic paid attention to album art, which surely drew in Chuck, who had studied graphic design at Adelphi University. While there, Chuck drew a comic for the school paper called “Tales of the Skind” — short for “Takes of the Spectrum Kind.” Every day in the cartoon, Chuckie D and the members of the mobile DJ crew Spectrum Crew would assume the role of superheroes from outer space that battled Ronald Reagan or drug dealers or whomever from their Funkadelic-styled spaceship. Keith Shocklee credits the use of characters in the group’s aesthetic — from the Spectrum days all the way through Terminator X, who “speaks with his hands” — with the group’s love of cartoons, television and comic books. The closest antecedent to “Skind” was Pedro Bell’s artwork on
the Funkadelic albums, a busy Technicolor world of Afro’d Amazons, cyborg warriors and space warfare. By the ’90s, cultural critics were retroactively calling Bell’s cosmic slop and the P-Funk intergalactic mythos a defining moment in “Afrofuturism,” a way to explore the black experience via tales of encountering alien worlds and fantastic technologies. Essayist Greg Tate wrote, “Black people live the estrangement that science-fiction writers imagine.”
⁴⁸
George Clinton took it even deeper: “I knew I had to find another place for black people to be. And space was that place.”
⁴⁹

“African-American culture is Afrofuturist at its heart,” wrote critic Mark Dery in the definitive essay on the topic. “With trickster élan, it retrofits, refunctions and willfully misuses the technocommodities and science fictions generated by a dominant culture that has always been not only white but a wielder, as well, of instrumental technologies.” In Bell’s version of Afrofuturism, his “zeep-speak” slanguage transmutes the English language into P-Funk’s cosmic-beatnik universe, an alternate land of the “epizootic,” the “foxative,” of “baby-masturbating nixonharpies” and the “neegroid protoplasm of cherrybustative dimensions.” Classic sci-fi tropes got pushed through the Funkadelic particle demobilizer: the sexy robot from
Metropolis
gets a funky overhaul for the cover of 1976’s
Tales of Kidd Funkadelic
; “Ratman and Robinlee” hide from the flagrant, filthy, flastic forces of Funkadelia on the back of
Hardcore Jollies
; a Kubrickian star-child relaxes in the
corner of
Cosmic Slop
. Bell’s felt-tip recontextualizations were Funkadelic’s version of sampling.

While most agree that the crowded covers of
Hardcore Jollies
and
Cosmic Slop
are classics, Bell looks back at the austere cover of 1975’s
Let’s Take It to the Stage
with some criticism — “a little too much mutant science on that one.”
⁵⁰
The cover is almost a prototype for heavy metal album art, with a green autopsy subject who’s a mix of Linda Blair in
The Exorcist
and Iron Maiden’s as-yet-unborn mascot Eddie. This is the album from which the Bomb Squad took the most crucial noise in “Bring the Noise.” The album was driven by the same competitive spirit that drove Public Enemy to be overachievers, its lyrics full of jocular jibes at Funkadelic’s competition: “Slufus,” “Earth Hot Air and No Fire,” “Fool and the Gang,” “the Godmother,” etc. The title
Let’s Take It to the Stage
was a battle cry that said no one could defeat them onstage, something that Chuck D pressed upon his own troops when he saw rock bands outhustling his group.

Like the JB’s in 1971, P-Funk in 1974 were going through some changes that altered the band’s chemistry. Funkadelic’s signature guitar magician, Eddie “Maggot Brain” Hazel, had a habit of disappearing and returning to the lineup in erratic bursts — he was locked up in a correctional institution in California after attacking a female flight attendant and punching an air marshal. Hazel appears sporadically on
Stage
— he’s listed in the liner notes as “Alumni
Funkadelic” — which allows new guitarist Michael Hampton to shine. P-Funk found Hampton fresh out of high school, jamming at a Cleveland house party. Pressured by his friends, Hampton played Funkadelic’s signature “Maggot Brain” in the living room, sitting on a tiny Fender amp. “I knew Mike was gonna be with the group then,” remembers Gary Shider, “’cause he played it note for note. Eddie couldn’t even play it note for note.”
⁵¹
In addition to the lineup shift, Bootsy Collins had his star-shaped goggles dead set on being a star and started singing on “Be My Beach,” eventually stealing the spotlight, a turn that would result in his own Rubber Band two years later. In the following years, money issues would tear Funkadelic even further apart.

It’s not certain who plays the opening acid-flashback ambulance siren on “Get Off Your Ass and Jam” — probably Hampton. It ended up as the main riff on “Bring the Noise” because it’s noisy as all hell, a stabbing wheedle-throb like the inside of a calliope. Three disparate noises appear in 10 seconds, perhaps tape-spliced together. The riff devolves into a syncopated skritch-scratch like the sound of a DJ cutting up a trumpet, and concludes with a funky, incredulous, “
Gawwwd
, I’m trippin’ on
that
,” as if even Funkadelic were shocked by this mysterious haunted-house monster mashup of noises.

* * *

Chuck’s first reaction to hearing the instrumental of “Bring the Noise”: “What am I supposed to do with this?”
⁵²
“Rebel without a Pause” was already Public Enemy’s punk-rock gambit. Says Chuck: “It was our statement to say, ‘Hey, we can make the records that everybody is making right now and even make them faster.’”
⁵³
“Rebel” was a rebellious 100 beats per minute, but “Bring the Noise” was a dervish at 109 — “damn near disco.”
⁵⁴
Like “Don’t Believe the Hype,” this track began as a beat tape that Chuck received while on the Def Jam tour. “Bring the Noise” would eventually introduce a new frontier in how fast a rap record could be, but on the tour bus, Chuck found the speed daunting. Using the working title “Countdown to Armageddon,” he spent the summer trying to tackle it, writing four or five verses in Rakim’s “break-up” style, doing quick bursts of speedy rap with dramatic pauses. It would help usher in the break-neck speed that would be
Nation of Millions
’ calling card. Chuck felt that rappers were “victimized” by their slow tempos — if rock bands could play their songs faster to match the energy of their crowds, why shouldn’t rappers play their records faster? Sometimes Public Enemy would have Terminator speed up the records when they performed, but you can only pitch up a record so much. “We made a fast record for the days of crack,” said Chuck. “That was the speed that we took it to, which matched the drug at the time.”
⁵⁵