TIME MACHINE
JULY 23 This month, record shop owner Tommy Hammond of Alexander City, Alabama was charged with selling pornography – to wit, hip-hop albums including tapes by Florida smut-peddlers 2 Live Crew. Cue a moral panic which ended with a free-speech victory in court in 1990.
Rude rap debates apart, today something far more seditious, incendiary and threatening to civic order had arrived. Long Island hip-hop militants Public Enemy’s second album It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back had entered the US LP charts at Number 79; furthermore, in the UK the album was at Number 8, while its second single Don’t Believe The Hype – a frenetic broadside against the critics of the Village Voice and Spin – had gone Top 20. “I wanted something you could drive to and really wreck shit to,” lead rapper Chuck D later told MOJO of the single. “[The album is] 60 minutes exactly of a radio show experience, with no dead air.”
It was a moment of some satisfaction for the group. Their 1987 debut Yo! Bum Rush The Show was immense, but had peaked at Number 125. Bristling, no doubt, that their Def Jam labelmates the Beastie Boys and LL Cool J had both gone Top 5 with their last releases, PE regrouped. Initially entitled Countdown To Armageddon, the group envisaged an epic diagnosis of the state of America that would equate to a hip-hop What’s Going On. Accordingly, they decided to concentrate their firepower, to be more enraged and even faster, on their next transmission.
Any consideration of It Takes A Nation Of Millions… must begin with the sheer, heart-quickening density of its lyrical content and funk, jazz and rock-packed sonics. Work began in Long Island in February 1987, and continued at New York spaces including storied hip-hop spot Chung King Studios. Hank Shocklee of PE production team The Bomb Squad later recalled the experience to Billboard. It went back to his background in jazz, he said, recalling how, in records by Coltrane, Monk and Miles, “everybody was playing at different time signatures and even different key signatures… [they] made it all work together.” He added that he and Chuck D also drew on Pollock and Basquiat’s slap-it-on painting techniques and standing in the middle of competing hip-hop sound systems in Coney Island where, “all the frequencies gelled and became one sound.”
The producer would also admit to deliberately mistreating the vinyl he sampled to make it sound grittier and harder. The grit and tou
