It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back

*whimpers* MUST you invoke Satan like that.

And yes, Ned, as long as Satan shrilly screams "YOU CALL THIS JUSTICE???" and then hops up and down angrily, I shalt invoke he! Blargh!

I think PE's sonic attack is pretty much unreplicated and probably unreplicatable. On the other hand, I've read testimonials to PE from all sorts of people, from gangstas to Def Jux types -- just because they don't sound like "Black Steel" doesn't mean they didn't get juiced by PE at some point in their life. But PE was never mainstream hip-hop -- most significantly, they weren't particularly funky. They were the noisiest, rockiest great hip-hop band ever. They just happened to be amazing, which made them stand out way out of proportion to their place in the hip-hop spectrum. They were an anomaly, a branch off the main trunk, and they defined that branch so completely that it's no surprise not many other people have climbed out on it.

That said, my favorite PE story is from when I was in college. I was home at Christmas break, and my conservative (in all respects) grandma was visiting. I had "Nation of Millions" on in the background while I was doing dishes or something, and my grandmother was sitting at the kitchen table doing a crossword table. I noticed she was tapping her feet, and at a certain point she looked up and said, "They sure do have rhythm, don't they?" Taking into account the obvious racism of the comment (and the irony of the racism in that context), I still had to give a big nod to the Bomb Squad -- they reached my grandma.

I don't think their sonics were unreplicatable as much as you got the definite impression that basically no African-American hip hoppers (over or underground) seemed interested in following PE's lead. And the question which no one seems to be able to answer here (and no one really seems to want to try) is WHY?!?! What was it about a) their particular strand of Black Nationalism that fell out of favor and b) the idea of making in your face uncompromising radical music (whether they did or not isn't the question) that virtually no subsequent black hip hop act has even tried to follow in those footsteps?

There is an amazing interview with Chuck D and Hank Shocklee in the latest issue of Stay Free about their sampling method and why they gave it up. It's the first interview I've ever seen where they bring any of this shit up, and I can't believe this interview hasn't made more waves...

But to the other questions, I think those things were never exactly in favor or fashion, before or after PE. It's just that there was one great radical Black Nationalist sonically visionary hip-hop band, and they were it.

It's true that many producers have made a point of recording/engineering their own sounds and then sampling/arranging them. this is basically what timbaland's doing, first level sound design. but it's a different thing.

I dunno, those records sounded like doom when they came out and I couldn't believe they were popular, alex your basic point does ring true in that people could still be making ragingly dense wall-of-noise hip hop with other means, but they aren't, mainly because... people like their pop music easy going and pretty. we won't be seeing records quite like those early pe records anytime soon.

More like they were the one great radical Black Nationalist sonically visionary hip-hop band to find a large audience.

-- jess

i'm assuming you're talking about the studio primier works in?

Okay so yeah the beats are totally four down as opposed to yr. standard hip-hop swing, and even when they keep the emphasis in the right place there's a sort of quantization going on, with the pauses trimmed, and reinforced by the other samples overlayed on the drums and the emphasis with snare on hitting the the third beat rather than the first. But more than that you have to confront Chuck D's flow which is equally chunky. I never read SFJ's magnum opus on shifts in flow in hip-hop (& I'm dying to if someone knows where I can get it) but there's a definite transition in rythmic and rhyme patterns of MCs which I'm going to take a stab at.

Chuck D took the classic Run-DMC flow about as far as it could go, but he kept the opening syllables of his lines -- four at least -- hard and solid to the beat, as well as the couple of closing ones so if you concieve of the line as four parts (each half a bar -- the doubling of the spoken line to the beat was pretty unique to PE), there's only room for play in the third (better yet the time between the first and second snare hit on the downbeat in each two bar set). And Chuck pretty much kept his discursive unit complete in each line. All of which was formed a complex which didn't have anywhere else to go except more intensity, faster beats, harder sounds, etc. since disruption of any element would throw off the whole complex. And Nation of Millions is maybe about as far as it could go without losing the audience.

The vocal innovation of G-Funk (and Golden Age -- > underground too) was in lines which didn't just punch the beginning and end but rolled into one another, lines which necessitated a different rhythmic basis, one significantly more flexible. Bomb Squad Productions on the other had you could pretty much lay any drum track under any other PE track, match the beats, and the song would still sound pretty much the same.

Compare with the "rock" imports carried out by Jay-Z, Em, and Freeway lately in rhythmic composition.

Also PE always seemed to me to fall in the afro-futurist tradition, re-imagining the present in dystopian sci-fi terms rather than projecting it outwards to space. I like Jesse's quip about "a band imitating a social movement" in that regards. And for various reasons, its worth noting, there's never been a continuity between afro-futurist artists -- its a tradition of outliers.

and even when they keep the emphasis in the right place there's a sort of quantization going on, with the pauses trimmed, and reinforced by the other samples overlayed on the drums and the emphasis with snare on hitting the the third beat rather than the first

What kind of mumbo-jumbo are you trying to sell here Sterling? I like your writing in general, but "quantization"? Like the Bomb Squad were using Pro-Tools? And if you are talking about general breakbeat samples - the snare hits are on the two and the four. So as a listener I don't know what the fuck you're talking about. Also, this : better yet the time between the first and second snare hit on the downbeat in each two bar set. Dude, snare hits are on the upbeats. Christ.

And for various reasons, its worth noting, there's never been a continuity between afro-futurist artists -- its a tradition of outliers.

Sun Ra, Lee Perry, George Clinton - nothing in common? (cf. John Corbett's Extended Play bk)

And how fucking dumb do you have to be to read "no continuity" as "nothing in common"?

(ps i'm mainly pissed here coz yr. fucking with my man st for no good fucking reason)

Sterling, again, no offense intended but yr post is problematic that's all. No big deal, I do it all the time. You say Chuck D took the classic Run-DMC flow about as far as it could go (disagree - Beasties advanced it more on Paul's Boutique if anything; *gasp* white people shockah) then go on to say the doubling of the spoken line to the beat was pretty unique to PE: that was Run-DMC whole fucking thing!

Anyway I would like to contribute more myself, and I'm certainly not trying to come off like some expert on this shit. Specifically I really wanted to go back and listen to my X-Clan and Brand Nubian cds to directly address the political/lyrical bent of this thread, but i just haven't had time tonight.

I think the real headfuck really was Fear of a Black Planet, and thinking of that, I think this thread gets it.

Also, "She Watch Channel Zero" - nice conceit for the white kids (er, white critics) but why? Why is this cut on this record?

And that race baiting about the beasties is just petty. I find their stuff dull for the most part, and don't have any albums to refer to but all I know is that if they took it further then they forgot again by their later stuff.

I'll get back to you on the run-DMC stuff later (I actually sold my albums to a dj friend since she wanted the vinyl & i never rebought the cds, so I haven't listened properly in a while)

okay here's a question which i was talking about with alex last night...

so PE, along with Eric B, Pete Rock, Premier, BDP to some extent on the later stuff - just listing the Big Names now, mind - is hailed as being among the first hip-hop acts to link the genre with "soul" or "funk" mostly through the sampled breaks, supposedly engendering some sort of continuity between "Black Music" which wasn't there before (total bullshit of course, since it's mostly just that classical black musicians didn't want to be linked with guys shouting and out of tune drum machines going off, so they didn't - even begrudgingly acknowledge hip-hop - until you could drop a sax sample over a gently swining break recorded 25 years earlier.) but PE sounds so ANTI-soul now, mostly because of time and influence: the pounding looped breaks and squealing sirens/brass being turned into ahuman rave, techno-rock, whatever. PE NEVER sounded "funky" to me (one of the things i liked/hated most about "fear..." at age 12 was trying to play it to my mother - who is a big funk/soul/disco fan - and saying "look ma, they're talking about respecting women...hip-hop isnt all bad!" and her just not being able to get past the harshness of the production.) but could their "Datedness" also stem from the fact that the looped-break-and-Maceo-sample aesthetic mr. diamond talks about above has actually been revealed on only be a blip in the history of hip-hop rather than the Way, The Light, The Truth (cf. Sugarhill disco, early Def Jam drum machine rock, electro, booty, bass, bounce, the dancehall influence, right up to today with tim and the neptunes, etc etc.)

so can we move on to my old question as to why people think this is the greatest hip-hop album of all time? cuz, y'know, it's not.

You've got Chuck's politically / socially / historically conscious lyrics, bolstered by samples of black-power-themed oration; you've got the chopped and shredded and layered JB, funk and soul samples pushing the boundaries of the SP1200 as a compositional tool (and, as noted above, an explicit connection to a source-body of music that had fallen into relative obscurity at that point); plus there was Flav clowing on the sterotypes and realities of black performance simultaneously--his persona as complementary and contradictory to Chuck's kinda sealed the breadth complexity of what PE represented.

All these things were percolating in hip-hip at the time, and with Nation of Millions are presented at arguably the most fully-realized, well-formed degree up until then. I'm not suprised that the result wasn't emulated too much--who else could assemble such a complex package by design? Who would want to? PE were a group that was canonical not because they created a model or template for others to work with, but because they created something (of which music was just a part) that perfectly expressed and tied together what was happening at a particular moment in time.

Whether their work holds up for you now, particularly if you weren't following them back when Nation was released, is a different matter--but I think it still validates their inclusion in some kind of canon.

Greatest hip-hop album all time argument more to do with history than the music (not to say I still won't put Nations and 3 Feet High 1-2 on my list)

i still live and breathe music but not so much new music. i just don't seek it out as much. i don't have cable. i don't drive that much and that's usually where i'll hear new pop music. i'll check out stuff on youtube. but new cds and records are just too expensive to buy all the time and they don't really make singles anymore. so i end up buying old stuff. but i still live and breathe music.

but uh i don't write about music that much and i don't make a living doing it! so maybe i should shut up. i think about it all the time though.

In case anyone's wondering how Public Enemy gave way to Lester Bangs, you've got to scroll back about a hundred posts--there's an NPR intern in there somewhere, and it went from there.

What we need to resolve the Bangs question is for the dead Lester to interview...the dead Lester, like he did with Hendrix. I know what Levitt means about the all-consuming dividing line, but I just have to believe that Bangs was inevitably going to find his way back to the other side, although I'm not sure in what form. (He was in the process of setting out to write his first novel, right?) He was an obsessive--he seemed like such a different creature than Maslin and most of the other Stranded contributors. One development that seemed made-to-order for Bangs was file-sharing. He wrote that one thing once about wanting to own every record ever made--"catacombs" of them, I think he said. Depending upon how attached to the physical object he was--he did say he wanted to be surrounded by all these records, so maybe the digital equivalent was a non-starter--file-sharing would have been about the best chance he'd ever get.

I'm 50. Still cling to the old records, still hear a decent enough amount of new stuff that excites me to keep me semi-engaged. I try really hard to avoid concluding that the stupid pop music of today is any stupider than the stupid pop music I loved in 1972 or 1987. Not hearing too too much of it probably helps in that regard.

yeah i should say that my love for pop and rap and r&b and stuff like that on the radio hasn't diminished at all. i love lots of new stuff i've heard i just don't listen to it a LOT. whereas i will listen to hundreds and hundreds of old records (that i've never heard)every year.

i think writing about music every week or month for years though...yeah, i couldn't do it i don't think. not full-time. i would get burnt. i'm sure of it.

unless you are a he-man like charles nelson eddy.

that really should be his middle name...

my new neighbors' Wifi network is called Fear of a Black Planet

it takes a WPA2 password to hold us back

I don't write for a living, for better or worse. But an undeniable, welcome consequence of aging is I don't want to own every record or single ever produced; that appetite wanes every year. I'll still get jags though: on Thursday night I wanted to d/l every old Siouxsie album.

scott and clem, if you want to hear and write about new music without buying it I'd love to see you both contribute to the Singles Jukebox.

With few exceptions I have been behind the times my whole life on music, although digging backwards all the time I sometimes end up with a surprising affinity for the present. Mostly I'm out of it, and would make a befuddled, easily ridiculed current-music-reviewer.

Thanks, Alfred--Kogan mentioned the same about a year back. But, echoing Vic's post above, my out-of-touchness would be a problem. Even in my year-end ballot last year, I wrote something about some Canadian band being ninth-generation Beastie Boys that could only have been written by someone not paying close enough attention to realize they were in fact day-old LMFAO. Still love the song I was writing about, but six months later the botched comparison makes me roll my eyes.

Whenever I start thinking about this subject (not PE but current pop) I always end up asking myself the same question: how important is originality anymore?

on Seattle's KEXP tomorrow, streaming on KEXP.org, 12 hours of deconstructing Nation Of Millions: every song sampled, interviews with Chuck and Hank, commentary from Ish of Shabazz Palaces & Digable Planets, further commentary from Professor Daudi Abe.

Dave Segal at the Stranger:

Millions is a mind-boggling agglomeration of funk, rock, soul, old-school hiphop, impassioned passages from speeches (by Malcolm X, Jesse Jackson, Khalid Abdul Muhammad), mantric vocal loops, and motherfuckin' Slayer on "She Watch Channel Zero." People who dismiss sampling as "cheating" or not "real music"—these types still exist in 2018—need to understand that what the Bomb Squad did here is just as artful as any other approach to music-making.

The arranging and rhythmic skills that went into Millions are impressively intricate, and the Bomb Squad's action-packed tapestries involve much more than just looping beats and letting them run unaltered throughout entire tracks. Rather, they created mosaics of crate-diggers' secret (and not-so-secret) weapons that blossomed into catalytic jams that doubled as party-starters and sociopolitical manifestos. The Bomb Squad—along with Chuck D and Flavor Flav's penetrating lyrics, of course—optimized these disparate atoms of sound/noise into careening vehicles of excitement. We shan't hear its like again—mainly because of the punitive legal consequences of such prolific sampling, but also due to diminishing ambitions.

David Schmader cogently summarized Millions in these pages back in 2006: "It was terrifying. Over what would become the band's signature audio hurricane—compressing the wildest exertions of free jazz into harsh layered beats to create the densest, most intense racket ever made in the name of pop music—Chuck D laid out his explicitly political call to revolutionary action, with a righteous fury that, to this white American, felt inevitable and historic."

(from 6am, Pacific time: https://www.kexp.org/publicenemy30/ )

PE's outrage feels more relevant than ever

otm, sadly

five hours in, seven to go, up to Caught, Can I Get A Witness