Public Enemy: Waxin’ Nostalgiac
Thursday, July 17, 2008
[Editor’s note: We’ll be at Pitchfork this weekend, but since we’re going to miss Friday, we wanted to give Public Enemy some much needed preemptive lovin’.]

Public Enemy - “Bring the Noise”
(from It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back)
When I first heard It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, I thought it sounded outdated and a little too old school for my tastes. After all, it had been a little over a decade since it was released, so it wasn’t surprising that it didn’t seem incredibly relevant to me at the time. The reason I picked it up was because it was one of those albums that consistently made all the Best Albums of All Time lists, in everything from The Source to Time magazine. From what I could tell, its importance and cultural impact weren’t up for debate and it was a classic in every sense of the word. Being a curious music fan with limited knowledge and taste, I wanted to understand what all the fuss was about and see if it could live up to the hype. So after hearing it a few times, I was a little disappointed that it hadn’t changed my life.
That would come later.
It Takes a Nation sat on my shelf for a couple years before I listened to it again. It had become one of those albums in my collection that I set aside before fully absorbing, as I waited until I was in the right mood for it. After all, you can’t force music to reach you when you aren’t ready for it. Like wine, music can require a bit of patience, but oftentimes it’s well worth the wait. So that year I decided I was going to listen to as much hip hop as possible, since it was a genre I enjoyed, but didn’t know a whole lot about. Being a middle class white kid from a small town in Michigan, the only hip hop I was exposed to growing up was whatever I saw on MTV in the nineties. As I was making my way through classics I had missed like Raising Hell, Paid In Full and Three Feet High and Rising, I figured it was time to give Public Enemy another try.

So I put It Takes a Nation back on my stereo and it felt like I just got punched in the face. I was immediately struck just by the sound of it. I’d never heard production as dense as this before. It felt like all my senses were being bombarded at once. How could I have ignored this before, I mean physically? There were samples colliding all over the place from police sirens to James Brown horns and beats to Malcolm X speeches to guitars from Slayer and David Bowie. Plus they were even sampling themselves! It was music that forced you to pay attention to it since there’s so much going on and it’s never pretty. Production team The Bomb Squad wasn’t interested in creating music that was even remotely pleasing to the ears. They wanted to hit you over the head repeatedly and without mercy. Their production assault mixed with DJ Terminator X’s up front scratching technique created a sound that was totally relentless. (Continued)






