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Yo! Bum Rush the Show was an invigorating record, but it looks like child's play compared to its monumental sequel, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, a record that rewrote the rules of what hip-hop could do. That's not to say the album is without precedent, since what's particularly ingenious about the album is how it reconfigures things that came before into a startling, fresh, modern sound. 

Public Enemy used the template Run-D.M.C. created of a rap crew as a rock band, then brought in elements of free jazz, hard funk, even musique concrète, via their producing team, the Bomb Squad, creating a dense, ferocious sound unlike anything that came before. This coincided with a breakthrough in Chuck D's writing, both in his themes and lyrics. 

It's not that Chuck D was smarter or more ambitious than his contemporaries - certainly, KRS-One tackled many similar sociopolitical tracts, while Rakim had a greater flow - but he marshaled considerable revolutionary force, clear vision, and a boundless vocabulary to create galvanizing, logical arguments that were undeniable in their strength. They only gained strength from Flavor Flav's frenzied jokes, which provided a needed contrast. What's amazing is how the words and music become intertwined, gaining strength from each other. 

Though this music is certainly a representation of its time, it hasn't dated at all. It set a standard that few could touch then, and even fewer have attempted to meet since. — (via AllMusic)
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Public Enemy formed around Chuck’s gig at Adelphi’s student radio station, gaining momentum as he and his friends’ forays into rap music grew increasingly accomplished. Their squelching, skeletal “Public Enemy No. 1” won a fan in Def Jam co-founder Rick Rubin, kicking off a lengthy courtship of Chuck, sidekick Flavor Flav, DJ Terminator X and producers Hank Shocklee and Eric Sadler. Two years later, the group caved and signed with the label. A debut album (1987’s Yo! Bum Rush the Show) and a package tour with Run-D.M.C. and LL Cool J followed. The music was boldly gritty, if a touch late to the party, scooped by advances in landmark singles by Big Daddy Kane and Eric B. & Rakim released the same year. The live show was gripping, Chuck and Flav stalking the stage as “Minister of Information” Professor Griff cut in with searing political diatribes and the S1w’s, the group’s security detail, performed silent combat exercises with toy rifles in the background. It was black power theater. It shocked American audiences cold.

Nation found a way to expound on the explosive soundscapes of the debut without exhausting listeners or cluttering the mix. Chuck, Sadler, and the Shocklee brothers’ production as the Bomb Squad was as thick as its source material was diverse; it was rap, soul, rock, funk and musique concrète all at once. “Most people were saying that rap music was noise,” Hank Shocklee told Rolling Stone in 1989, “and we decided, ‘If they think it’s noise, let’s show them noise.’” "She Watch Channel Zero?!" pulls its central riff from Slayer’s thrash classic “Angel of Death”. “Night of the Living Baseheads” outfits a stable of trusty James Brown samples with over a dozen assorted soul and rap tidbits and bridges, folding in elements of ESG’s “UFO” and David Bowie’s “Fame”. Snippets of legendary speeches from Jesse Jackson and Malcolm X and stage banter from Public Enemy’s successful European tour formed connective tissue between songs for a unified listening experience that only let up briefly in the middle and finally, at the end. The Bomb Squad built beats like ships in a bottle, delicately stitching tiny pieces of black history into layered blasts of sound. Public Enemy looked and sounded a fright to the uninitiated, but careful attention showed every piece of this black radical machine moving in perfect concert.

Nation of Millions netted Public Enemy the elusive American audience and platinum sales their debut couldn’t, and it changed the face of rap music. The hip-hop landscape of ‘89-’90 was dotted with sample-heavy sons of Nation. Chuck sent early copies of the album out west to Dre and Ice Cube, and N.W.A.’s landmark Straight Outta Compton cropped up like a gangsta rap rejoinder to the Bomb Squad ethos. (Cube would later tap the team for production on his post-N.W.A. solo debut AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted.) De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising and the Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique added a playful, psychedelic charm to the proceedings. Nation’s message of black self-sufficiency resonated through the proudly Afrocentric art of A Tribe Called Quest, X Clan, Brand Nubian and more. Beyond the ’80s, the music of Nation of Millions would continue to find new life in unexpected places: Weezer’s 1996 comeback single “El Scorcho” nicked its “I’m the epitome of public enemy” barb from “Don’t Believe the Hype,” and Jay-Z’s 2006 post-retirement salvo “Show Me What You Got” is a nod to Nation’s “Show ‘Em Whatcha Got.” (Without Public Enemy we don’t get Kanye West; in addition to sampling the Long Island legends liberally, Kanye inherited a bit of his fearless politics and kitchen sink beat construction from here.) — (via Pitchfork)

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In making Nation Of Millions, PE set out with the conscious aim of making their own What’s Going On – an album that, in keeping with their conception of rap as “the black CNN”, would communicate both widely and directly with black America; that would echo Marvin Gaye’s “Talk to me” plea not only in taking it to the streets, but taking it from there in the first place, acting as a conduit, a means to cohere, articulate, analyse and disseminate that reality.

They far surpassed this ambition. Which is not to say that Nation Of Millions is necessarily the better album – although as a political piece, and a polemical one, it is in another league, one of its own making. Rather, that they created a new category; a thing that was sui generis. Nation Of Millions was not an updated or even upgraded version of something else. It was something else. Nobody had ever heard anything like it, because there never had been anything like it. PE approached hip hop as science, and made it into astounding art.

As it goes, PE’s next album, Fear Of A Black Planet, would come much closer to being a rap iteration of Gaye’s record. It also happens to be my favourite album of theirs, the one I find most musically satisfying as a whole; but there is no question in my mind that while Black Planetis also a masterpiece, Nation Of Millions is much their most radical and important work. I can think of no rap albums that could challenge it on those counts, and very few of any other genre, either. It is one of the indisputable peaks of popular music. — (via The Quietus)

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Label: Def Jam Recordings
Format: Vinyl, LP, Album, Limited Edition, Reissue, Stereo, Yellow
Reissued: 2019 / Originally Released: 1988
Genre: Hip Hop
Style: Rap, Conscious

File under: Hip-Hop
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