Public Enemy's It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (33 1/3)

IT TAKES A NATION OF MILLIONS
TO HOLD US BACK

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Christopher R. Weingarten

2010

The Continuum International Publishing Group Inc
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The Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd
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Copyright © 2010 by Christopher R. Weingarten

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publishers.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Weingarten, Christopher R.
It takes a nation of millions to hold us back / Christopher R.
Weingarten.
p. cm. —(33 1/3)
Includes bibliographical references.
eISBN-13: 978-1-4411-4284-9
1. Public Enemy
(Musicalgroup). It takes a nation of millions to hold us back. I.
Title. II.
Series.

ML421.P82W45 2010
782.421649092’2—dc22

Typeset by Pindar NZ, Auckland, New Zealand
Printed in the United States of America

1. “Yes . . . The rhythm, the rebel”

2. “This is a sampling sport”

3. “Back . . . Caught you looking for the same thing”

4. “Beat is the father of your rock ’n’ roll”

5. “Consider yourselves warned”

6. “All in, we’re gonna win”

7. “Def Jam tells you who I am”

8. “Here we go again”

Works cited

Special Thanks

Notes

The greatest anti-government record ever made was kicked into funky gear by a military parade. The heartbeat of Public Enemy’s
It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back
was officially defibrillated around 1951, within earshot of martial feet clomping on the Tennessee tarmac. At about 8 or 9 years old, Chattanooga native Clyde Stubblefield attended an Armed Forces parade after school. He heard the snapping, popping snares and was hooked. As he marched home to beat on boxes and tin cans, he took the first steps in changing America’s booty muscles and brain tissue.

By 1965, Stubblefield was the percolating rhythm technician backing the Godfather himself, James Brown, tip-tapping along the equator of the most rhythmically adventurous band around. Stubblefield wasn’t the backbone of the James Brown Orchestra;
he was more like its circulatory system. His grooves didn’t drive the band so much as they floated between the percussive horn stabs with a delicate interweave, filling in the gaps
between
the grooves, a style no drummer has come close to duplicating. “We all know how to jam,” said Stubblefield, “but to keep from getting up on somebody else’s pattern, that’s hard to do.”
¹
Two decades later, when Public Enemy were layering sample after sample on top of his beats, they had to adopt the same philosophy, lining up complementary frequencies so their frenetic collages never got muddy. “We didn’t just put something in there to put it in there,” said co-producer Keith Shocklee. “Ours had a science to it.”
²

By the late ’60s, every James Brown single graced by Stubblefield introduced a tricky new contraption: the fluid yet jerky waves and crests of “Cold Sweat,” his favorite beat; the hyperkinetic drum-’n’-bass jackhammering of “I Got the Feeling”; the labyrinthine stutter step of “Give It Up or Turnit a Loose.” They were beats that were works of architecture, calculated with the same meticulous planning used to erect beams in a curvy Frank Gehry building. Before each session, Stubblefield would construct patterns in his head, trying to invent a unique rhythm for each song. But ask him to play his most famous drum break, and he probably couldn’t do it.

Born on November 20, 1969, in a studio in Cincinnati, “Funky Drummer” was never really about
a drummer, as it’s mostly a tenor sax solo and lots of Brown’s unheralded organ work. It was essentially a jam session, an extended riff that Brown and his band would bang out as a stopgap between the big singles. For the recording “Funky Drummer,” they gathered at King Studios for a session of “not playing.” As Stubblefield said, “You just go into the studio and start up a groove and that’s it.”
³
Play a groove, split it between two sides of vinyl, see if it sticks. Brown spends this particular session of “not playing” by ad-libbing and shouting. Being Brown, pretty much everything he said — from band directions to winded exhalations — has since been regarded as funky gospel.

Brown opens with “Pull back the cover . . . The shades . . . Good God, it’s a raid.” As Public Enemy tracks like “Party for Your Right to Fight” teach, the FBI and local police were routinely raiding the California Black Panther Party in 1969, encouraged by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and his disruptive covert operations program COINTELPRO. Two weeks after “Funky Drummer” was recorded, the Chicago Police Department would raid the Black Panthers’ Chicago chapter, killing Fred Hampton and Mark Clark at point-blank range.

Brown continues: “Honky Tonk Women . . . is all I
need
. . .” — a nod to his good friends the Rolling Stones. They had topped the pop charts with “Honky Tonk Women” a few months earlier — the same time that Brown and Stubblefield were topping the R&B
chart with “Mother Popcorn,” twin totems of youth culture circa 1969, ruling a nation bursting with Vietnam paranoia. Two songs from men claiming to like their women bold and proud, strong enough to heave you over their shoulder. Coincidentally, the Stones’ “Honky Tonk Women,” like Brown/Stubblefield songs of the era, opens with a drum break that would be appropriated by hip-hop producers in the 1980s.

About four and a half minutes into “Funky Drummer,” Brown gives listeners a quick and dirty primer on Stubblefield’s many achievements. “Fellas! One more time, I wanna give the drummer some of this funky soul we got here.” The “one more time” is because Brown had already given the drummer some on the chart-topping “Cold Sweat” two summers earlier. “You don’t have to do any soloing, brother, just keep what you got. Don’t turn it loose” — as in “Give It Up or . . .” — “‘cause it’s a mother” — as in “Mother Popcorn.” “When I count to four, I want everybody to lay out and let the drummer go . . . A-ONE-TWO-THREE-FOUR-GETTIT.”

Stubblefield, on his own, tumbles along with the same beat he’s been kicking downhill for five and a half minutes. “I didn’t actually care about the beat,” he later said. “People ask me to play ‘Funky Drummer’ all the time, and I really don’t know how it goes. It was just something I put together at that moment.”
⁴
This wasn’t a painstakingly crafted Stubblefield Beat created through heavy brainstorming but an effortless
rhythm that just came naturally. It was what he was feeling in his body that particular day, what he felt while “not playing,” caught a little off guard. The now famous syncopated pulse-gallop rattles like the sounds Stubblefield absorbed during his childhood in Chattanooga: the compressed air he would hear boom-banging from the smokestack of the local factory, the locomotives he would hear rumbling around the bowl-shaped city. Ticka-ticka-
takk
.

* * *

“Y’all suck, get the fuck off the stage!”

Public Enemy were onstage at the Latin Quarter in New York in March of 1987 — the group’s first time performing in Manhattan. Between 1984 and 1988, the Latin Quarter was a Times Square club that served as the incubator for hip-hop’s golden era. On any given night, the place would be packed to the gills with famous MCs, hungry record-label reps and the future pioneers of hip-hop, swarming together from every borough. Public Enemy had driven from Long Island stuffed inside the unreliable, smoke-belching yellow-and-white Chevy that frontman Chuck D had borrowed from his dad. This was the very first promotional show for Public Enemy’s debut album,
Yo! Bum Rush the Show
, and no one in the crowd was really ready for what they were seeing: big beats, a throttling baritone and a bunch of guys parading around onstage
with plastic Uzis. “Get them clowns off the stage,” the voice boomed.