Public Enemy – Live From Metropolis Studios

Live From Metropolis Studios

Public EnemyLive From Metropolis Studios Universal 00602547228819 (2015)


If Public Enemy seemed to shun major labels in their later years, then Live From Metropolis Studios is an about-face.  Still, it’s a pretty strong album, recorded live in a studio before an audience of about 125, and is helped by a “greatest hits live” format (like, ahem, Fight the Power! Greatest Hits Live!; there is nothing from their recent studio album Man Plans God Laughs) and hi-fidelity made possible by the “studio” setting.  If live hip-hop usually only makes sense in person, with the energy of the interaction between the performers and the crowd fueling the experience, then live hip-hop recordings are often simply weak approximations of studio counterparts.  Of course, DJ scratching can take on a bigger, or at least different, role in a live setting.  But the real promise of recordings of live hip-hop is the use of a live backing band.  With Public Enemy, that means The baNNed, featuring Khari Wynn on guitar, Davy DMX on bass, and T-Bone Motta on drums.  Those guys lend some pretty tough punk/metal shadings to renditions of classics like “Black Steel in the Hour [of Chaos]” (which is performed sort of as a medley with snippets of songs like “MKLVFKWR” and “Do You Wanna Go Our Way???” worked in), “Shut Em Down” and “Harder Than You Think.”

Recorded in London in 2014, only part of the PE group is present.  Professor Griff is absent, and only Pop Diesel and James Bomb from S1Ws made the trip.  Although Terminator X reappeared on Man Plans God Laughs (his first recordings with the group in over 15 years), only DJ Lord appears here.

London is a special place for PE.  In the late 1980s they toured there, before they really broke to wide audiences, and snippets from London concerts were prominently featured on their classic It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back.

This album is a nice opportunity for old PW fans to catch up with the band, and hear a select few of their newer tunes of the last decade or so that they may have missed, and maybe there’s an off chance that younger listeners might tune in to one of hip-hop’s greatest acts for the first time.

Public Enemy – Revolverlution

Revolverlution

Public EnemyRevolverlution SLAMjamz/Koch 238 388-2 (2002)


The year 1999 was pivotal for Public Enemy.  That was when they committed themselves to being an independent act, releasing music on Chuck D‘s own SLAMjamz label (distributed by Koch).  Yet, the price paid for independence from corporate media is the near total critical/radio/etc. indifference that goes with a minuscule marketing budget.  Their sound changed a bit too, gravitating toward more live instrumentation — they had done that before but now it was a leaner, guitar-driven approach — and using rhythm rather than shrieking noise to create a sense of aggression and urgency.

This starts off strong.  “Revolverlution” and “Gotta Give the Peeps What They Need” are some of the best offerings of the new material.  But the nagging thing about this album is that it isn’t all new material, exactly.  There are live tracks, old interviews and radio announcements, and remixes.  All these things are intermingled.  Now, some of the miscellaneous live and remix material is quite decent. (“Welcome to the Terrordome (LIVE Winterthur Switzerland 1992),” “B Side Wins Again (Scattershot Remix)”).  But there are only a handful of really compelling cuts across the whole album, and there is plenty of rather dubious filler.

Revolverlution is perhaps the group’s album with the most input from “minister of information” Professor Griff.  He is the lead MC on “Now A’Daze” and the rather good metal/hip-hop hybrid “What Good Is a Bomb” with 7th Octave.  In the past it was somewhat hard to tell what Griff contributed to recordings, specifically, but here his contributions are unmistakable.

Neil Young gave an interview talking about Living With War, his album indicting war in Iraq and President George W. Bush’s global “war on terror”.  He said he wondered where people like Bob Dylan were on those issues and felt like he had to do it himself.  Well, if old Neil was listening (he probably wasn’t) he might have noticed that Public Enemy was already making songs about just those topics (“Son of a Bush”).  The philosopher Hannah Arendt famously wrote about the trial of a Nazi officer Adolph Eichmann after WWII by coining the phrase “the banality of evil.”  As Judith Butler summed up Arendt’s concept, “that for which she faulted Eichmann was his failure to be critical of positive law, that is, a failure to take distance from the requirements that law and policy imposed upon him; in other words, she faults him for his obedience, his lack of critical distance, or his failure to think.”  If there is one characteristic that would define Public Enemy in their later years, it was that they tried harder than before to be the band that didn’t let things go, but did what they could to step outside the machinations of a music industry that they felt was going in the wrong direction, despite the commercial price they paid for their integrity.

The Chuck D has been a vocal proponent of remixes, emphasizing how it is part of an ongoing process of reinterpretation that is really an extension of sampling in hip-hop.  He has claimed that the album format was declining in relevance as digital downloads shifted interest to individual songs — something the group took seriously as the first major act to release an album (There’s a Poison Goin On….) for download online.  Yet, the cynical might take another view and say that the way old raps remain over new beats in these remixes could be a way for Chuck to lionize his own contributions while undermining the legacy of classic beats from producer Hank Shocklee, who acrimoniously split from the group years earlier and was at the center of a disastrous reunion attempt making a soundtrack album.  Anyway, the group had a contest for fans to remix classic PE tracks and the six “winners” are here on this album.  No one will confuse them with classic PE material, though there is at least one successful remix (“B Side Wins Again (Scattershot Remix)”).

Greatest Misses was a kind of precedent for an album like this, with a blend of unreleased material plus remixes and such.  But the former was a much stronger set of remixes, still coming from the band’s peak and involving some of the original (and now legendary) producers.  Revolverlution is one of the band’s weakest albums.  Now, if the group had taken the best new material here used it in place of the weakest stuff on New Whirl Odor or How You Sell Soul to a Soulless People Who Sold Their Soul??? (or merging the best selections from all three albums), now that would have been a killer album.  But it is still a good idea to check out a few of the best individual songs here, because they are great.

Power to the People and Beats: The Best of Public Enemy Mix

Public EnemyA virtual playlist of the best of Public Enemy, configured to fit on four CDs.  These aren’t just the obvious choices, though most of those are here too.

 

 

Disc 1

It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (1988) (the album in its entirety)

Disc 2

Fear of a Black Planet (1990) (the album in its entirety)

Disc 3
  1. “Can’t Truss It” from Apocalypse 91…The Enemy Strikes Black (1991)
  2. “Hazy Shade of Criminal” from Greatest Misses (1992)
  3. “By the Time I Get to Arizona” from Apocalypse 91…The Enemy Strikes Black (1991)
  4. “I Don’t Wanna Be Called Yo Niga” from Apocalypse 91…The Enemy Strikes Black (1991)
  5. “Nighttrain” from Apocalypse 91…The Enemy Strikes Black (1991)
  6. “Whole Lotta Love Goin on in the Middle of Hell” from Muse Sick-n-Hour Mess Age (1994)
  7. “Live and Undrugged Part 1 & 2” from Muse Sick-n-Hour Mess Age (1994)
  8. “Bedlam 13:13” from Muse Sick-n-Hour Mess Age (1994)
  9. “Revolverlution” from Revolverlution (2002)
  10. “Say It Like It Really Is” from The Evil Empire of Everything (2012)
  11. “World Tour Sessions” from There’s a Poison Goin On…. (1998)
  12. “Shut Em Down (Pe-te Rock Mixx)” (1991) (single)
  13. “He Got Game” from He Got Game (1998)
  14. “Give It Up” from Muse Sick-n-Hour Mess Age (1994)
  15. “Harder Than You Think” from How You Sell Soul to a Soulless People Who Sold Their Soul??? (2007)
  16. “I Shall Not Be Moved” from Most of My Heroes Still Don’t Appear on No Stamp (2012)
  17. “Don’t Give Up the Fight” from The Evil Empire of Everything (2012)
  18. “Electric Slave” from Beats and Places (2006)
Disc 4
  1. “Me to We” from Man Plans God Laughs
    (2015)
  2. “Gotta Do What I Gotta Do” from Greatest Misses (1992)
  3. “I” from There’s a Poison Goin On…. (1998)
  4. “Escapism” from How You Sell Soul to a Soulless People Who Sold Their Soul??? (2007)
  5. “See Something, Say Something” from How You Sell Soul to a Soulless People Who Sold Their Soul??? (2007)
  6. “… Everything” from The Evil Empire of Everything (2012)
  7. “Watch the Door (Warhammer on Watch Mixx)” from Bring That Beat Back: The Public Enemy Remix Project (2006)
  8. “As Long As the People Got Something to Say” from New Whirl Odor (2005)
  9. “Yo! Bum Rush the Show” from Yo! Bum Rush the Show (1987)
  10. “Public Enemy No. 1” from Yo! Bum Rush the Show (1987)
  11. “Catch the Thrown” from Most of My Heroes Still Don’t Appear on No Stamp (2012)
  12. “Truth Decay” from Most of My Heroes Still Don’t Appear on No Stamp (2012)
  13. “Hoovermusic” from Most of My Heroes Still Don’t Appear on No Stamp (2012)
  14. “Black Steel in the Hour” from Live From Metropolis Studios (2015)
  15. “What Good Is a Bomb” from Revolverlution (2002)
  16. “Honky Talk Rules” from Man Plans God Laughs
    (2015)
  17. “Like It Is” from Beats and Places (2006)

Public Enemy – Muse Sick-N-Hour Mess Age

Muse Sick‐N‐Hour Mess Age

Public EnemyMuse Sick-N-Hour Mess Age Def Jam 523 362-2 (1994)


The demise of Public Enemy?  Hardly.  Muse Sick-N-Hour Mess Age certainly heads in a different direction than earlier PE albums, but it still is a worthy album from this seminal group.  It does, however, go on far too long, with a few total duds (“I Ain’t Mad at All”) and more than a few songs that are simply mediocre filler (“Thin Line Between Law & Rape,” the commercials).  Yet the best cuts (“Whole Lotta Love Goin on in the Middle of Hell,” “Live and Undrugged, Parts 1 & 2,” “Give It Up”) are still killer and Chuck D delivers one of his finest performances at album length as a pure rapper.  And, more often than not, the political statements are actually more convincing here than before.  The group had experienced much turmoil in the preceding years.  Significantly, the great crackdown on sampling in hip-hop had begun, creating insurmountable legal barriers to making an album like It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back or even Fear of a Black Planet.  So the beats here rely more on newly-recorded live instruments and something closer to an R&B groove than the early records.  The complaints that this lacks the “sense of unstoppable purpose” the group once had are fair, but really that sense of unstoppable purpose is in the album, just inconsistently and sometimes struggling to find its way past all the barriers put in its path over the prior years.  To put a finger on one of the culprits, you could identify the sameness of some of the bass-heavy grooves as being more stagnant than the unsettling, constantly changing sampled beats of four to six years previous.  Fans of the classic early albums should definitely seek this one out, but the unconverted will probably see it as merely a good album that stops well short of blowing their minds.  If it had been trimmed back ten minutes or so, maybe that would be a different story.

King Geedorah – Take Me to Your Leader

Take Me To Your Leader

King GeedorahTake Me to Your Leader Big Dada BDCD051 (2003)


Take Me to Your Leader is an unusual hip-hop album. Rapping from the assortment of guest MCs isn’t the focus. Instead, MF Doom (a/k/a Daniel Dumile, the man behind the mask, the curtain, and this album) floats monster movie sound clips across a gently flowing mix of cartoonish pop samples. This creates a dense soundscape that is more cinematic than average b-boy fronting.

When lyrics are present, the theme of a three-headed monster from outer space definitely emerges, among resolute sentiments of hope, determination, and wonder recalling Curtis Mayfield. The abundance of the orchestral strings samples only reinforces the likenesses to Curtis Mayfield. Move on up! Hostile tyrants, attackers, and outright monsters won’t stop the good and determined ones. This triumph over adversity is palpable.

MF Doom uses lethargic tempos to his advantage. Placing easy listening schmaltz — complete with mushy strings and syrupy guitars — on an indistinct bed of murky beats takes the music out of the typical rap battle arena.  Take Me to Your Leader is a fight where all elements conspire together, as one amorphous mass. I wanted to reach out, place my finger on this album. To have control over how a single part of it makes me feel. Instead it stupefied me: “Take that.” I almost expected to hear that spoken.

If I weren’t a decayed, empty being, I might love comic books, video games, and monster movies. Whatever is missing in me, replaced by dead matter, I can still recognize that King Geedorah, or MF Doom, has his own loves to champion. Recurrent obstacles won’t dog him too much. He will save this planet! Or at least will he convince me to save someone myself?  Or just save myself?

Public Enemy – Most of My Heroes Still Don’t Appear on No Stamp

Most of My Heroes Still Don’t Appear on No Stamp

Public EnemyMost of My Heroes Still Don’t Appear on No Stamp Enemy Records ERSD002LC (2012)


It would be easy to write off Public Enemy as a hip-hop group long past its time of relevance, but that would be a mistake.  Most of My Heroes Still Don’t Appear on No Stamp, released in the group’s third decade (and 25 years after their debut album), is about as relevant as anything in hip hop.  There is only one dud (“Rltk”).  The rest might not feature anything as powerfully catchy as their biggest hits of their early days.  Still, the simple, utilitarian beats get the job done.  The group isn’t innovating when it comes to beats — if anything, they are looking backwards somewhat, more so than on The Evil Empire of Everything released the same summer.  Yet these are the sorts of beats that made hip-hop what it is, providing a hardness that provides momentum, and most importantly are ones that fit the talents of the MCs and the message they have to offer.  Chuck D is still one of the smartest and most compelling lyricists in the genre.  On “Truth Decay” he raps, “The truth dies while lies make a living.”  And on “”I Shall Not Be Moved” he goes on about the “senior circuit” in a funny way.  Sure, it might help if he (and the rest of PE) was a little more of a feminist and less prone to advocate for the Nation of Islam, but those are petty quibbles.  On the interludes that talk about “heroes” that should be on stamps, as referenced in the album title (which quotes a lyric from their iconic 1989 song “Fight the Power”), that statement has to be qualified quite a bit.  Without speaking for S1W James Bomb, who wrote and performs the spoken parts, he has to concede that Malcolm X was on a U.S. stamp issued in 1999 (Chuck D cites Malcolm X as a hero on some notes to the album).  When Elijah Muhammad is mentioned on “…Don’t Appear on No Stamps (Part I)” as “one of the great ones,” well, it is hard to agree agree — Elijah Muhammad deserves that honor as much as Richard Nixon, which is to say not at all.  But this is really the wrong way to look at the album title, and the interludes of the same name.  The point is that there are a lot of heroes out there and they aren’t all celebrities.  Chuck D raps, “To some of my heroes/ be most of y’all’s foes,” going on to mention “Belafontes to Bikos / some dying incognegro / Che, Chávezes and Castros.”  Flavor Flav name-checks Huey P. Newton, H. Rap Brown, Marcus Garvey, Angela Davis, C. Delores Tucker, Cynthia McKinney. And those are just a few.  Harvey Milk, John Brown, Leonard Peltier, Subcomandante Marcos and others are mentioned too.

Future president Jimmy Carter gave a speech to a room full of lawyers on “law day” (an occasion created as a rebuttal to the international workers holiday May Day) in 1974 where he sharply criticized what lawyers do, and how they resisted Martin Luther King, Jr.‘s reforms, and concluded by discussing Leo Tolstoy‘s novel War and Peace:

“And the point of the book is that the course of human events, even the greatest historical events, are not determined by the leaders of a nation or a state, like Presidents or governors or senators.  They are controlled by the combined wisdom and courage and commitment and discernment and unselfishness and compassion and love and idealism of the common ordinary people.”

Public Enemy is saying something similar.  They are all over the Occupy Wall Street slogan the 1% vs. the 99%.  As they put it, “Never have so many been screwed by so few.”  As Chuck D said, “While I like artists like JAYZ and KANYE WEST and consider them giants who are afforded to project their opinion through culture, Its been difficult for me to like and respect their viewpoint in theses times. . I must fight for the balanced art projection of the real side of life as opposed to the fantasy world which most likely cannot be attained by many.”  The liner notes to the album, too, are a history of PE’s efforts to use alternative and independent media, and to escape the clutches of greedy entertainment corporations.

It is great that PE is still around, still making music, and just as committed as ever — maybe more so — to making music that matters.  The group’s heart is in the right place, and just as often their heads and fists are in the right place too.

Kanye West – My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy

My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy

Kanye WestMy Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy Roc-a-Fella B0014695-02 (2010)


Let’s take the title of Kanye’s album My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy at face value.  This isn’t the kind of fantasy that involves wizards, leprechauns, fairies and ogres.  It references the sort of real-world arena of desires that drive human beings in one direction or another.  Psychology tells us that pleasure often comes from transgressing rules and boundaries.  So the question then becomes one of what transgressions we desire, and how we engage in those transgressions.  This is what makes Kanye’s album so interesting.  The song “Runaway” is sort of a centerpiece of the album.  Opening with a stark, rhythmic melody played with single notes on a piano, it then bursts out with groovy hip-hop drums and sustained synthesizer chords that imply a forward movement.  Then Kanye starts rapping.  There is sort of a tipping point here.  Look at this from the standpoint of the searing return of morality.  The political landscape of 2010 was pretty bleak in the Western world.  There was a financial crash and a “jobless” recovery that only benefited a few elites — there are graphs that show the rich cannibalizing the wealth of the poor in this period.  But then, people had enough.  Just a few weeks after My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy was released the Arab Spring happened in Egypt. Is Kanye’s “Runaway” a condemnation of any of this?  No.  It is a confessional song.  He describes womanizing, and conveys that he is a douchebag, an asshole, scumbag, jerkoff.  But, but, but, that isn’t all he’s doing.  In one of the most memorable choruses of the era, he raps:

“Let’s have a toast for the douchebags,
Let’s have a toast for the assholes,
Let’s have a toast for the scumbags,
Every one of them that I know
Let’s have a toast to the jerkoffs
That’ll never take work off
Baby, I got a plan
Run away fast as you can”

These lowlifes still get a toast.  If you agree, as the song invites you to do, this means there must be compassion for even the worst.  This is the sort of thing that religions like christianity have been preaching — with varying success — for millennia.  It implies a sense of solidarity, that everybody matters, not just the folks who work all the time to “gain wealth, forgetting all but self” as the Lowell Mills Girls used to say at the dawn of the second industrial revolution.  This “dark twisted fantasy” is dark and twisted from the sort of view that it is a refusal to obey and accept a “proper” place in society.  And yet, at the same time, “Runaway” is a plea from someone else to “run away” as the narrator sort of can’t completely break away.  This is really the brilliance of Kanye.  Bringing in a race relations component — as is appropriate — he kind of asserts the post-racial concept that a black man has the same right as a person of any privileged race to be a douchebag, asshole, etc., even as he acknowledges how those qualities are evil, in a way.  This, really, deserves a toast!

“Power” is another great one.  The lyrics “I was drinking earlier, now I’m driving” epitomize the recklessly gradiose vision of what happens across the entire album.  One reviewer wrote about Kanye’s style of self-important self-aggrandizing that “It’s like being in a bar stuck in a conversation with a stockbroker who tells you how much money he earns and tells you about his new Porsche and shows you a picture of his wife and kids and then suggests you go on to a Gentleman’s Club that he knows.”  Kanye’s use of such an attitude is commentary on the privileges of celebrity status, how it seems to objectively require this kind of self-aggrandizement, and yet the dude is kind of mocking it all at the same time.  Kanye is at his best implying these things, hitting them obliquely rather than talking about these issues explicitly.  His approach is to cartoonishly debase the role he’s in, drawing unsentimental connections to the structural underpinnings of how somebody becomes a “successful” musical star, and, crucially, refusing to create a separate context for celebrity as something that is beyond the “thug life” that in hip-hop is often portrayed as a way of paying dues in a system that allows its stars to escape that life.  Kanye paints them as inseparably part of the same system, without really coming out and crassly lecturing his listeners on that point.

But Kanye isn’t just about debasement.  “All of the Lights” is basically the pinnacle of all the big business manufactured pop that shows up on television-promoted “talent shows” and top 40 radio.  It has a minimalist melody — with an emphasis on melody more than what hip-hop is traditionally about.  But it is elusive.  The song lacks a clear interpersonal dynamics narrative like most of these songs.  It blurs the lines between ghetto life and stardom.  But it does so while beating the pop market at its own game, having as catchy and hummable a hook as anything in contemporary pop.  If he didn’t pull off catchy pop hooks like on “All of the Lights” it would be all too easy to dismiss everything else on the album.  Kanye doesn’t stand apart from that aspect of the music industry.  He wrestles with it as he also heads in other directions.

“Hell of a Life” raps to the melody of Black Sabbath‘s “Iron Man.”  Like a lot of the songs (“Blame Game” etc.) there are elements of misogyny and room to question why that is a part of what the protagonist is doing.  Kanye may be no feminist, but he lets the listener wonder why he isn’t.

Of course, the other thing about My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is that it sounds fantastic.  It is the absolute state-of-the-art of what hip-hop and pop music can do with modern recording technology.  And despite the bloat of an album that seems much longer than it needs to be, it hardly ever wavers and never seems to run out of material the way albums over 70 minutes usually do.  If Bob Dylan needed a huge ego to do what he did in the 1960s, and David Bowie succeeded precisely because of the pomposity of his glam rock pretensions in the early 1970s, then Kanye taps into some of that here for a new era.  This is a spectacle, a captivating one, and Kayne makes the most of capturing the audience’s attention to actually raise some worthwhile questions while you can’t seem to tear away.  So if you leave wondering why you bother being stuck listening to someone who sounds like an annoying stockbroker, that seems to be the point — to dissolve the specter of meaning of celebrity from the inside, dismantling the very frame of reference that intimately links celebrity status to all the off-putting “stockbroker” qualities.

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

It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back

Public EnemyIt Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back Def Jam BFW 44303 (1988)


No one could have expected It Takes A Nation of Millions. It was too much of an album to expect.  Chuck D packs thought provoking messages into a bomb he detonates before you. It Takes A Nation of Millions wakes listeners to a whole new level of consciousness.

Flavor Flav was out there. Complete with clock (though Chuck D still wore one too), he was the wild card that made Public Enemy work. His crazy rhymes kept coming. He injected a different sense of rhythm into the whole. It was an attack from many sides as long as Flavor Flav was there.

Terminator X, Professor Griff and the others tend to be forgotten, as they aren’t even on the album cover. They were critical. Terminator X’s (and Johnny Juice‘s) aggressive scratches and the hard beats of The Bomb Squad were relentless. Looping again and again, the most powerful elements were isolated. The push was overpowering. Public Enemy had a sound that might have been a lot of things, but it certainly could not be ignored. It Takes A Nation of Millions dominates as long as it is playing.

The density of what is on a Public Enemy record had roots, but this was a new kind of concentration. Miles DavisOn the Corner provided the layered street funk attitude. The harsh beats and fondness for raw noise resembled industrial music too (for instance, Mark Stewart‘s As the Veneer of Democracy Starts to Fade, Ministry).  As Michael Denning wrote in Noise Uprising about early sound recordings just before the Great Depression, “If noise is unwanted sound, interference, sound out of place, it is also a powerful human weapon, a violent breaking of the sonic order. *** In this frame, these musics represented the refusal of deference, the assertion of noise for noise’s sake, the singing of the subaltern . . . .”  This revolutionary attitude also — even if by chance — echoed punks like The Pop Group. Public Enemy sorted through every possibility to direct their efforts. They created chaos as needed, and could cut through it at will. Chuck D and his crew had control. That was the difference. They weren’t held back by the ordinary expectations of continuing to build on the past. It was more about striking out in the proper direction. Working with exactly the same sounds other musicians used, Public Enemy used them as ammunition to make sure their path was clear.

There is definitely a surplus of ideas here.  There is more in a single song here than in many artists’ whole careers.  Public Enemy works very hard to put so much across in every song.  It helped, perhaps, that the band was so large. There were many talents to draw on.

It is also obligatory to mention that this was a record made before the advent of sample clearing.  So no one makes them this way anymore.  Not that anyone really did at the time either.  When jazz pianist Cecil Taylor got started he did something unique, but it wasn’t long before he ratcheted up the speed and complexity by a factor of ten.  It is like that here.  Run-D.M.C. and the early hip-hop pioneers were no doubt influences and precedents, but It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back took all that and delivered it at hyperspeed.  If that weren’t enough, all the samples come at the listener in a barrage of noise, squawking repetition and booming thuds.  The samples draw on history, allusion and implied meaning, but also refuse to simply restate existing meaning, instead insisting on imposing further meaning.  Put another way, PE and the Bomb Squad didn’t just appropriate the proven appeal of the material they sampled, but took that as merely a starting point, a contextual reference point, to fashion something of their own that had significance beyond that of the sample.

The band uses the samples in a way that really creates a platform for the political messages.  Although the harshness and aggression of the beats seems like a way to frighten listeners, it was also a way to draw in the willing.  Like heavy metal?  Well, PE threw out some metal samples, but just shards and slivers, enough to make a listener who is into it find some common ground, but only enough to catch her attention and propose a deeper connection.  It is the same for the vintage soul and funk samples.  They provided some basis for their stance too.  There is rapping about not believing the hype, but they also include a snippet of a radio DJ calling them “suckers”.  And when building momentum, they play a live recording from a London show.  This wasn’t just a bunch of conclusory opinions.  This is an album that makes the effort to provide some evidence to contextualize its stances.  But what really made this band — and this album in particular — so special was that they built everything from very elemental concepts.  Chuck D and the Bomb Squad didn’t just present political programs, they built them up from more fundamental positions.  They get into deeper, abstract philosophical questions, and their political stance unfolds from them.

Public Enemy was self-aware of their own controversial status in the music industry.  This comes to a head on songs like “Don’t Believe the Hype.”  They engage this controversy, without defining themselves entirely by it or dismissing it outright.  They don’t get caught up in merely self-referential excess either.

One of the great albums of its day, or any, It Takes A Nation of Millions raised the bar. Public Enemy were an exceedingly intelligent group. It was the minds behind the music that made the album. They still focused all their attention on being levelheaded champions of their people. Fuck the finer points, it’s just good to listen to.