Boom with a view

One of the most influential production units of the past 20 years has been Public Enemy groove technicians the Bomb Squad, whose groundbreaking sonic experimentation resulted in two of the greatest albums ever made, It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back and Fear Of A Black Planet. Public Enemy’s influence spread far beyond the hip-hop realm and the group were subsequently cited as an inspiration by a wide array of premier league rock acts, including U2 (whom they supported on the Zoo TV tour), Blur, Radiohead, Nirvana and Nine Inch Nails, amongst many others.

One member of the Bomb Squad, Hank Shocklee, was recently in town to participate in the Red Bull Music Academy Workshop in Spy, alongside Berlin dance producer Henrik Schwarz.Thoughtful, articulate and bursting with ideas, he ranks among the most interesting interviewees this writer has ever had the pleasure to talk to.
“It’s funny, but I don’t make tracks like everybody else,” says Shocklee. “I don’t go in there with a detailed plan and say, ‘I’m gonna make this kind of track for this particular record’. I’m kind of always in the lab, making things. We’ll have certain elements that we work with, which might be some bass and drums, or just some sounds that give us a groove and a direction. Then when it comes to making the songs, and especially with the Public Enemy records, I wanted to give those albums a cinematic feel.
Hank explains that the Public Enemy sound was born out of the Bomb Squad setting up three or four turntables and playing them simultaneously.
“The beautiful thing about that was that although it might seem like a mess, what you get is this organic amoeba of sound. We were talking about the Burial record earlier, and basically we were doing that back then. We were making those kind of grooves, and then we’d decide that a particular rhythm was maybe too esoteric, so we’d say, ‘Alright, let’s scale it back a bit.’ We came up with some really interesting soundscapes that way.”
This approach was a key factor in the development of Public Enemy’s music – the Bomb Squad were perhaps the first production team who treated the turntable as an instrument.
“Back then, the turntable was only for listening to the record after it was made, or playing records in a club. The extent of it was maybe mixing the two, or you might do some cutting of different drumbeats. But it was never really looked upon as an instrument. We treated a turntable like a synthesizer, as opposed to just treating it as a turntable. We would pitch things up, slow things down and morph them. All the different techniques that people are using today on their Akai samplers and drum machines, that was stuff that we invented.
“We invented filter cut-offs, which previously only existed in synthesizers. We had to learn that through a default process. If you take a 1200 drum machine and put the jack in halfway, it shaves off the high end, and all you get is a muffled beat. That in itself made us go, ‘Wow, that’s interesting’. It made us understand that you can take one sample and treat it like two separate halves. And treating it like two separate halves just makes it amazing. Because now you have a sample that works on its own, but you can also split it in two and give it different textures. It expands your dynamic range.”
Perhaps my favourite Public Enemy track is ‘911 Is A Joke’, which, like a lot of the group’s songs, derives its sonic power from mixing organic instrumentation (wah-wah guitar, funk bassline) with samples, industrial dissonance and hip-hop beats. It also boasts a brilliant video which, as Hank explains, captures the essence of Flava Flav’s personality, in that it has a slightly comedic feel, whilst also retaining a certain surreal and threatening quality.
“I wrote that video, and most of the Public Enemy videos, actually. With ‘911 Is A Joke’, I wanted Flava to be everywhere. They got it, but they didn’t capture it the way I exactly saw it. Flava’s in a good church, and I didn’t want him to be in a good church, I wanted him to be in a storefront church, which we have in New York. The beautiful thing about them is that they’re tight, they’re crammed, and they just have a look that I wanted. But they put it in a bigger church.
“And I wanted everyone in the church to be Flava, but we didn’t have enough money to do it. One of the major battles I had with Flav was that I wanted him to be in the casket, but he said, ‘Hank, I’m not fuckin’ doing that shit!’ Come to think about it, that video was one of Samuel Jackson’s first appearances, I think he plays this guy who’s leaning over Flava, having a drink.
“I wanted something comical, but at the same time I wanted it to have the tone of Public Enemy. Also, with the song, I wanted Flava to have a different kind of vibration to Chuck. Flava’s a quirky kind of guy, so he has to have a quirky style of music.”
Indeed, Hank believes that the producer’s job is chiefly to allow the artist’s personality to come through.
“It’s those kinds of things that to me are the challenge. Even if you listen to other records that we’ve produced, you’ll see that I’m big on making the record suit the artist. I don’t produce cookie-cutter tracks where you say, ‘That’s a Bomb Squad beat’, or ‘That’s a Shocklee imprint’. That’s not what it’s all about. The producer has to be invisible. If I can make you hip, and nobody knows who did it, that’s crazy for me. I’ve done the job.”