Christopher R. Weingarten - "It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back"

Chuck D is quoted in Christopher R. Weingarten’s take on Public Enemy’s seismic album It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back as saying “Run-DMC were the Beatles of hip-hop ….”

I’d refine that thought. As Weingarten documents, Run-DMC were the first important band to have crossover success, which means white kids were buying black culture’s newest musical genre in significant numbers. Run-DMC put hip-hop on the map making them the Elvis Presley of hip-hop. (And Kurtis Blow, the Chuck Berry.) It is Public Enemy that are The Beatles of hip-hop: they’re the band that made hip-hop more than a nite klub phenomenon by saying something socially redeeming. (And The Beastie Boys are The Rolling Stones of hip-hop: the bad boys who were able to transcend their limitations and go on to make hip-hop records with their own creative, influential sheen.)

For a decade or so Public Enemy scared white America, intimidated critics, released singles that were analyzed like Beatles 45s were in the 1960s until copyright lawyers castrated them by making sampling cost-prohibitive.

You have to feel for the predicament Public Enemy finds itself in: unable to use the sampling techniques the formed the basis of their work, dropped by their label Def Jam, ignored by a black community for speaking out against gangsta rap: they deserved a better fate. Their self-released work over the last decade has included some important songs but they are a shadow of their former selves.

It all comes down to sampling and the courtroom decisions that make 10K the standard sample fee nowadays. Even more worrisome than the affect these rulings had on Public Enemy is the affect it had on an organic art form from the backstreets of urban America. Weingarten’s take takes you behind the curtains and into the The Bomb Squad’s laboratory as they assembled the samples and created backing tracks for Chuck D to declaim over. (And for his foil Flavor Flav to add his distinctive vocal flavor to.) He shows you the power behind the sample. He shows you how a drumbeat, an exclamation, an ambulance siren when used as a sample can either reveal intent missing in the original or how it can be redefined to take on greater depth. As The Bomb Squad’s Hank Shocklee says: “We use(d) samples like an artist would use paint.” And the fact is that now that every sonic color has a price tag attached to it, an art form has been stifled.

This is why Weingarten’s book is as much about the samples used on It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back as it is about Public Enemy’s recording. Weingarten goes into depth about James Brown’s drummer Clyde Stubblefield, The JB’s, Funkadelic, Issac Hayes, even Jesse Jackson’s emceeing at Wattstax: snippets of their work or speechifying forms the bedrock of the Public Enemy recording. You probably know about James Brown, but what you find out about Funkadelic and Issac Hayes in this book will probably make you more interested in seeking out their original recordings.

Weingarten lost my interest about 4/5ths of the way into his book by giving me chronological run-through of hip-hop’s rise. I know it’s important but I didn’t care. I didn’t pick up this book for a history lesson. What I wanted to know about was Public Enemy’s album, how they made it, the stories behind the samples. Up to this point he gives a good job of giving us Chuck D’s growth and emergence as spokesman for a generation for a decade by not doing it chronologically but by doing it in relation to Chuck D’s history with the sample.

Still, Weingarten regroups in time for the final chapter “Here We Go Again”. (I’m sure you can hear Chuck D saying that as you read it.) Weingarten powerfully recaptures Public Enemy concerts in 2008 and 2009 in London, Philadelphia, and at the Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival where they commemorated the 20th Anniversary of It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back by “playing the album in its entirety.” The exchange between Chuck D and Flavor Flav that ends the book gave me goose bumps. So much so that the next time Public Enemy hits my town, there won’t be anything holding me back from going.