What does it sound like?:
It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back is the best Rap ever made. More than that, it is one of the greatest albums of any kind. Released in 1988, during Rap’s first golden age, it is stunning both sonically and in the challenge it laid down to its listeners. Driven by rage but sustained by belief, Chuck D’s booming raps are punctuated by Flavor Fav’s waspish buzzing, together painting a picture of life in America for black youth that is still as dispiriting and as vivid today. The imagery is military and incendiary, extending to the stage uniforms and their cross-hair logo, but there isn’t any of the uzi fetishism or misogyny of their debut. This is serious business, tackling real-life issues such as crack addiction, conscientious objection, a loaded justice system, black self sufficiency and junk TV. However, the real revolution is in the sonic assault. Hank and Keith Shocklee, Chuck D and Eric Sadler, otherwise known as The Bomb Squad, create a dense thicket of sound full of barbs, interweaving multiple samples from a breathtaking array of sources, from political speeches, forgotten James Brown’s rhythms to a Slayer thrash metal riff. They provide the thunderous artillery to support the infantry at the microphone.
This 35 year anniversary reissue is vinyl. At 56 minutes long, every second of which counts, it was always a tough ask to fit it all on one LP. You can choose a double LP of just the album or a four vinyl set with all the bonus tracks included on the 2014 reissue, bar Fight The Power. The bonus material should not be overlooked. Twelve inch mixes were as important to Rap in the eighties as much as Disco. The No Noise version of Bring The Noise is arguably better, the Anti-High Blood Pressure Encounter Mixx of Night Of The Living Baseheads is epic and B-side Wins Again faces up to its A side, Black Steel In The Hour Of Chaos, and doesn’t back down. However, the four vinyl package is for major enthusiasts only.
It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back set the agenda, marking a Rap high point for others to follow. Fear Of A Black Planet confirmed their genius. Many used the multi-sample technique until a 1991 judgement against Biz Markie rendered the authorisation of samples obligatory. Overnight, it became too difficult to create a collage as rich as The Bomb Squad’s. Meanwhile, Public Enemy struggled to satisfactorily resolve their ‘minister of information’, Professor Griff’s controversial statements about Jews. Unsurprisingly, the politics got ugly. Nevertheless, the group survived and are still a going concern more than thirty-five years later, enjoying a range of influence that goes far beyond Rap. Check out their 2020 anti-Trump song State Of The Union (STFU).
We will never hear its like again but A Nation Of Millions resonates just as powerfully today as it did in 1988.
What does it all *mean*?
“I have a right to be hostile, man. My people are being persecuted.”
Goes well with…
A record player. Every self respecting record collection should include a copy. If your collection is vinyl, now’s your chance.
Release Date:
10th November 2023
Might suit people who like…
Thrilling, exciting music.
Night Of The Living Baseheads – Anti-High Blood Pressure Encounter Mixx
Great stuff, it’s a terrific record, and it’s easy to forget that for the last few years of the 80s they were the most exciting musical act out there.
I have the (slightly) heretical view that they actually peaked between Yo Bum Rush and It Takes a Nation of Millions – I think Rebel Without a Pause is their masterpiece.
This album also has one of music’s lost opportunities. She Watch Channel Zero shows what could have been possible if Heavy Metal and Hip Hop could could have really come together beyond the PE-Anthrax Bromance. Instead we ended up with Limp Bizkit. Harrumph.
Aside from 12″ singles, I’m not sure about 80s Hip Hop on vinyl. I had these albums on cassette. Surely if there’s any album that fits perfectly with the cassette revival, it’s this one.
You have a point on cassettes. Fits nicely on a C60. Silver side and Black side as I recall.
The peak, for me, is Right The Power on the Do The Right Thing soundtrack. The extended outro with Marsalis doing his (right) thing is bliss, proving, beyond doubt, that Jazz and Rap are blood brothers.
My abiding memory of this record is standing at the bottom of the stairs and shouting “Turn that down!” as the house shook to its very core. Both my teenage sons were obsessed with Public Enemy so I had to keep my admiration under wraps.
I took them both to Brixton Academy to see PE in concert. It is to my eternal regret that in no way could they countenance their uncool dad attending. Whilst the musical world was changing I was in Pizza Express.
I had a similar experience with a 50 Cent concert at Manchester Arena. I consoled myself with the thought that he was nowhere near the same league as Public Enemy. He was playing a massive arena, though.
This and a (hopefully forthcoming) double Fear Of A Black Planet have been on my wishlist for years.
I slightly prefer FOABP, possibly because it reminds me of time spent with friends during my final year at university as our ears were opened beyond White Boy Indie Rock (we were at Reading, the epicentre of Shoegaze at the time).
But every time I play ITANOMTHUB I am reminded how good it is. And, invariably, give FOABP another spin, which sounds dreadful on single LP vinyl.
I don’t know if it’s only on vinyl that Fear of a Black Planet sounds dreadful. Having listened to it on all available formats when it came out – I was in a circle of friends who were all over Public Enemy at the time – I don’t think it sounded particularly strong on anything.
I listened to it again over the weekend and at low to moderate volumes, it’s a dense and muddy listen. At high volumes and with a subwoofer, the bass is more pronounced and there’s a little more clarity to it. But I’ve always been disappointed by how it sounds. It’s my favourite PE album but it doesn’t half need a bit of volume to sound good.
Nice review.
I always have mixed feelings on this album. On the one hand, it’s definitely PE’s best, it was a favourite growing up, it contains some timeless bangers and the live elements are brilliant. It really does hang together as a cohesive whole.
On the other hand, I rarely listen to it and I sometimes feel like it’s a bit of a dead end. I’m not convinced it particularly set a template others followed en masse; it was released the same year as Straight Outta Compton and, although that’s a weaker record, Dre’s production set the tone for the future far more than that of the Bomb Squad. That’s partly due to the Biz Markie judgement, but it’s also because the maximalism of PE’s sound was both difficult to recreate, and left little room for an MC to breathe.
Ultimately, this record is a bridge between Hip Hop and Rock, which is why it’s the favourite Hip Hop album of so many people who rarely listen to Hip Hop. It defined what a lot of people outside the genre still believe the genre should be; music performed by what are recognizably bands, bemoaning the African American experience/doing the Black CNN thing, and producing tonally and thematically coherent albums with a soundbed that features a lot of sampling, and ideally incorporates lots of Jazz elements. Hip Hop squeezed into the shape of other, more readily understandable, genres. I sometimes think that’s a bit limiting; much of the best Rap music ever made (particularly in recent years) is nowhere near Rock or Jazz, and all the better for it.
Hip Hop is still fundamentally party music, and it’s never really been about albums. Most artists in the genre would take a song that blows up and defines a Summer over an album which stands the test of time. It’s a restless genre. From that perspective, debates around which is the greatest album in the form don’t make all that much sense (although it’s almost certainly Illmatic), and PE – a band remembered far more for their albums than their singles – lose a lot of shine.
No one really sounds like Public Enemy now, and they’d be considered dated if they did. Nor are many acts aping their other innovations in stagecraft and branding. And very few MCs attempt to sound like Chuck D. I still love PE, but I love them as a glorious and worthwhile detour, and I see them as an adjunct to Hip Hop history, rather than core to the form. Their spiritual successors are probably Run The Jewels, and particularly Killer Mike, along with maybe Dead Prez and Immortal Technique, which is a pretty decent legacy. But even then we’re generally talking thematics rather than sonics.
What I will say for them is that they looked absolutely fucking fantastic in their prime. One of the best styled Rap groups there’s ever been.
“PE’s sound…left little room for an MC to breathe”. Yes, Chuck isn’t so much rapping as urgently HOLLERING, which suits the material (another reason why PE tend not to be copied – Gin and Juice this ain’t).
In fact, the most obvious homage of recent years was those press conferences Trump did standing in front of a still whirring helicopter, which allowed him to bark out his nonsense at 11 while simultaneously drowning out any questions that might annoy..
On dear. I seem to be a stereotype. I lean towards jazzy hip hop, though.
Long form Rap is still a viable artistic endeavour. Individual Earl Sweatshirt tracks work less well for me, for example, than allowing him to take over my life for an ‘album’.s worth. DAMN. is a fantastic piece of work as a whole and the likes of Dave create a whole narrative arc across a dozen or so tracks. Is Masego a Rap artist? Where does Grime fit in? In the end, it doesn’t matter. Public Enemy made a noise that remains astonishing today just as it did 35 years ago.
Interesting…there’s a lot packed in there.
I would conclude the same thing about Public Enemy but come to that same conclusion by a different path.
Looking back at the press around PE at the time – music and national – as well as some of the excerpts of radio press that appeared on their albums, such as Incident at 66.6 FM, the difficulty in following up PE and their legacy is the difficulty in being PE. The storm of stories around PE at the time were Griff’s antisemitism, comments by Sister Souljah that were picked up by Clinton’s campaign office and then an assault charge on Flav. All the while, there’s also the controversy around their use of the S1Ws and accusations of black-on-white violence, which is not helped by Souljah.
To be in that position requires you to be really clever. Genuinely smart, on top of your politics, statements made by and on behalf on the band and be ruthless at getting to the message and, at times, having to cut people out of the organisation. It’s easy to say that no one was as smart as Chuck D in hip hop…but I don’t think there has been anyone as smart as Chuck D in any kind of politicised rock, hip hop, folk, whatever. It’s enormously difficult to do all that – and to run a store for PE merchandise, license and remix your songs for movies, make great videos – and be a spokesman on a national stage and record albums that, over 30 years on, are still highly regarded.
In addition to promoting his band, he was defending those in PE, the films and the politics of Spike Lee and the Nation of Islam. I think no one took up PE’s mantle of dense, hectoring, politicised music because you only have to look at Chuck in this period to realise that’s an impossible task. Was so then and remains so now.
Musically, it was noted at the time that after FOABP, there really wasn’t any possibility of hip hop going any further into such a dense collage of samples and noise. I wish I had it to hand but I seem to remember Lloyd Bradley in his review of the album in Q saying as much. I’m paraphrasing – and don’t have a Rock’s Backpages sub to check it – but his point at the time of FOABP’s release was to say that it was a musical dead end. As Tiggerlion says, it became too difficult to create a collage as rich as The Bomb Squad’s.
Still, we did get Repeat (Stars and Stripes) out of it by the Manic Street Preachers…what more legacy do you want?
You’re certainly right in rock’s influence on PE – and their influence on rock – and you could point to Chuck’s appearance on the Kool Thing and their re-recording of Bring the Noise with Anthrax. How You Sell Soul to a Soulless People Who Sold Their Soul? is an explicitly rock-influenced album. How much of this was secondary to the embracing of PE by a rock audience or Chuck’s own interest, who knows?
As for ITANOMTHUB, it’s a fantastic album. It’s not a short album but whereas it’s easy to start to get lost about 3/4 of the way through FOABP, you never do with this album. Every song stands out against those either side of it and, from the view of flow, it should have been a 2xLP set all along. There are natural breaks between Cold Lampin With Flavor and Terminator X To The Edge Of Panic and between Black Steel In The Hour Of Chaos and Security Of The First World. Each quarter of the album would make a great EP had they been released as such. Show Em Whatcha Got, Channel Zero?!, Living Baseheads and Black Steel just works as a distinct run of four songs.
And all that out of an album that starts with an intro by ‘Dangerous’ Dave Pearce?
For a while, forget any arguments to the contrary, PE were the most exciting band in the world and who can sustain that for a whole career.
Great post.
I definitely agree with most of that, although I would note that a few of PE’s problems were definitely of their own making.
I should be clear that what I was trying to get at above wasn’t so much an artistic criticism of PE as a reflection on the difficulty of saying that this is the greatest Rap album ever made. It’s certainly a notion that would be met with bewilderment by the people I know who spend the most time listening to Rap.
I guess my knee jerk prejudice here is that there’s potentially a paternalistic implication (inadvertent, obviously) that Rap is something that needs to be understood through the filter, and according to the criteria, of Rock, rather than an entirely standalone form which has arguably eclipsed Rock at this stage and which has its own criteria.
None of which changes the fact that Show Em Watcha Got, Rebel Without a Pause and Black Steel In The Hour of Chaos still slap.
Sorry, reading this back I realise it sounds like I’m accusing Tigger of being paternalistic, which is just me being clumsy.
I’m talking about the general trend for this album to be described as the greatest Rap album of all time in more Rock-oriented quarters.
I’m grateful to Tigger for his very good review and this interesting thread.
I get your thinking…I was considering this recently flicking through Sonic Life and wondering if, as a rock fan, am I hardwired to think the album is the ultimate expression of music because that’s how it is in classic rock circles.
And that, if the old Smash Hits articles on ‘Here’s How Record Companies Make Their Money’ were true, is all about the money to be made off albums rather than singles.
Whereas, outside of those classic rock ideas of importance, the single, the EP or just the one 3:45 song is as valid a display of talent. And maybe it’s us rock fans that keep It Takes… in the best hip hop albums of all time on account of it being something we can understand.
No worries, Bingo. I’m delighted you posted. You are always considered, well reasoned and articulate. I didn’t feel you were accusing me of anything. I was fessing up to being a white middle class, middle aged man in the UK being amazed & serially slapped by Public Enemy, De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest and the usual Rap suspects liked by the likes of me. You make a fair point.
Millions is still my favourite (said in a Bruce Forsyth voice). 😉
You can add ‘broadcaster’ to Chuck D’s list of talents, see this excellent series:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/p0dj6ysm/fight-the-power-how-hip-hop-changed-the-world
I forgot about that. Even though I did watch it at the time. Although found it somewhat disappointing after Of Mics and Men.
Both this and Fear of a Black Planet sound like the most fire breathing Free Jazz with Clyde Stubblefield and Jabbo Starks on drums (this is very much a good thing)
Ah, one of the seminal records of Popular Music attracts a smattering of comments . Mention a Stephen Wilson remix of (insert boring old name here) and the forum is alive. Same as it ever was, same as…
The pool table is free – anyone ?
Sorry, too busy playing it now to type.
Seem to be some lengthy and thoughtful contributions on this thread – and exactly how many constitutes a “smattering”?
It’s still sounds like the future 35 years on. Absolutely brilliant, I’m going to put it on now
Given the approval above, I shall check this out; I liked go-go and funk in the 80s, and this seemed a bit ‘shouty’.
I remember buying the cassette in ’88. Having all of the lyrics on the insert made the thing rather unwieldy as I tried to read along on the school bus. I’d never seen so many words before, probably remember most of them now when I listen to the album. Not sure if I need it on record (I’ve got the CD, Spotify etc) but it is truly a brilliant album and a rare one over 45 minutes that does not outstay it’s welcome.
Great review as always Tiggs
Great review of a great record. I think I might play it on the way into work this morning.
As I’m listening to With The Beatles and some 50s rock n roll at the moment I can’t help doing some mortality maths here. 25 years between With The Beatles and Public Enemy. It’s now 35 years between Public Enemy and The Beatles. Now and then, then and now…
With The Beatles is the first LP I ever heard. At the age of five, before I started school, I knew every word. (Songs For Swinging Lovers and a Fats Waller Best Of are the only others where that is the case, all three obsessed over before the age of seven.) Millions came out when I was thirty, a responsible adult with a proper job, a family and a mortgage. My life bears no resemblance to a black man in Chicago but I related very much to the rage. I was boiling inside. Listening to Now And Then is difficult for me at sixty-five years old, in the twilight of my career, family grown up. It fills me with an overwhelming sense of loss, of what might-have or could-have been.
What a lovely, bittersweet post, Tigger. It’s simultaneously a comfort and a curse the way that music proves to be the meter of our lives.
For what it’s worth, it took me a very long time to learn that there really is no what might have been; all the doors we never opened were hiding only empty rooms. There is only ever the path we took, and the key to life is to drink in all the beauty of that path, to explore fully its byways, and to remain ever inquisitive about what the next mile might hold.
It’s as they say; it’s OK to look back, but it’s rude to stare. Hope that whatever melancholy Now And Then brought upon you is fleeting and ultimately additive to the ride.
Thank you. I wish I was so zen.
Our strengths are our weaknesses. Since childhood, I’ve always been taught to strive for excellence and felt I disappointed if I fell short. In my job, this characteristic has helped me ‘succeed’ but that success has been to the detriment of my home life. Unfortunately, it also means that I only remember the stuff that went wrong, the times when I failed. Now, I’ve reached a point in life when there is less ahead of me than behind me. I try very hard to live in the present and suppress that part of my skill set that anticipates future problems. After a lifetime, it isn’t so easy.
Well, you’re further ahead than me, but this is definitely something I’ve had to grapple with at times.
Success at work is pretty simple – it’s spelled out for you in clear terms, wins are usually wins and you can generally tell who’s doing well and is worth learning from. Home life doesn’t really function that way – it’s a lot more amorphous. I feel like it taught me to adapt myself to an environment where there is no concrete “win” – there are just events, some of which are positive and some negative, many of which were never really within my locus of control. In particular, I’ve tried to avoid forcing my kids into some sort of alt-version of my office life, where they need to behave in certain ways that validate me as a good parent, rather than just learning to be actual human beings.
The above process was intimidating at times, and occasionally quite confusing, but – although I’d stress it remains a work in progress – it’s also something that’s taught me a huge amount.
I had to let go of the view of life I had (which was pretty Manichean when it came to success or failure, and pretty austere when it came to the demands I placed on myself), calm some of my inner voices, embrace a whole ton of shades of grey and recognize that my family members are people, with all the flaws and complexities that entails, rather than a challenge at which I can excel. In short: they get to fuck up. So do I. Because we all will.
I don’t know the details of the past events that went wrong for you, but I would imagine that at least some of them are well within the course of normal family life. Which is to say: sporadically dysfunctional. That’s not your fault and you almost certainly had less control than you’re crediting yourself with.
The family I grew up in very nearly burned itself to the ground a couple of times, and it was quite scary. But on each occasion we crawled from the wreckage, still loving one another, finding a way to forgive and move on. For a lot of people, I think that’s simply how it works, and the key metric is probably not whether you can completely steer around those tough moments, but whether you can manufacture enough collective love and trust to get you through them as and when they occur.
Zadie Smith once wrote something that has always stayed with me: “It’s my sense that no matter how many rooms you have, and however many books and songs and movies declaim the wholesome beauty of family life, the truth is that “the family” is always an event of some violence. It’s only years later, in that retrospective swirl, that you work out who was hurt, in what way, and how badly”.
The above was certainly true of my upbringing. I have no doubt it will prove to be true of my own kids’ upbringing, no matter how hard I might try, how much I might worry. And my chances of spotting the true threat on the horizon are so very slim – I think of all the things that worried me in 2019, when I should really have been thinking of pangolins and loo roll. Life is sometimes quite comical in its sheer unpredictability, and that’s scary, but it’s also liberating.
No idea how much of the above applies to you, rather than being particular to me. Suffice it to say, I wish you all the best with the struggle – you’ll get there, I’m sure. Just be kind to yourself along the way, and don’t be afraid to let go. I’m sure you’ve earned the right to do so.
Everything you say is true. I think I need some Acceptance Therapy.