On this day in 1988: Public Enemy released It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back

Classic Album Review: Originally published in Hot Press in 2002

1988 was one of those terrible "in between" periods in modern music. The year before acid house music exploded all over Europe, a time when the UK music scene was still recovering from the fey, narcissistic nuances of ’80s synth pop and New Romantic foppery. Apart from Euro renegades like Swiss industrial-techno merchants The Young Gods, the most exciting developments were coming from the US, with Sonic Youth and The Pixies providing the highlights.

Under these predominantly guitar-based circumstances, US rap and hip-hop was still a ghettoised commodity.

Spawned in the Bronx at the tail end of the seventies, when DJs like Kool Herc fused the steely European rhythms of Kraftwerk with ’70s funk, hip-hop grew in popularity throughout America’s black inner city areas during the ’80s, but remained an alien form amongst the white moral majority.

Like all music genres, hip-hop had split into clearly defined sub-groups – the gun-toting, gang-banging, gangsta life was portrayed by Messrs. T and Cube and more radically through NWA’s "Fuck Tha Police" style polemics, while positive, black awareness values were promoted by De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest.

With both camps providing disparate snapshots of Black America, Public Enemy represented a third, more politicised viewpoint. Members of Farrakhan’s Black Nation group, the New York act, with their unwittingly camp Security Of the First World "commandos" constantly in tow, looked more like an active combat unit than fresh hip-hop playas.

Although political music so often substitutes quality of content for "the message", Public Enemy were almost unique in that their dark, apocalyptic take on hip-hop was as compelling as Chuck D, Professor Griff and Flavor Flav’s verbal assaults.

Public Enemy. Credit: Jack Mitchell

While their debut album, Yo! Bum Rush The Show! promised a war on vinyl, Public Enemy’s urban battle only truly materialised when they dropped their second long player, It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back. Signed to Def Jam, home of the Beastie Boys and slush-rapper LL Cool J, the album was a righteous, terrifying wake-up call to America’s chattering classes.

With Chuck D and Flavor Flav pictured behind bars on the cover, Nation laid down a blueprint for the escape of Afro-Americans from the oppression of the white majority. Freedom Is A Road Seldom Traveled By The Multitude may have been the slogan adorning the album cover, but the twelve lyrical bombs within provided a survivalist code for the masses.

Yo! Bum Rush the Show! had already created concern in the media about Public Enemy’s militaristic stance and, as Chuck D introduced the album with the words "London, England, consider yourself warned", conservative elements on both sides of the Atlantic must have felt like their worst fears had been confirmed. Despite these perceptions, ‘Don’t Believe The Hype’, PE’s best known track, immediately shattered this illusion, with Chuck explaining that "they claim that I’m a criminal, by now I wonder how, some people never know, the enemy could be their friend, guardian, I’m not a hooligan. I’m not a racist, the minute they see me, fear me, I’m the epitome – a public enemy."

As their contemporaries glorified the "thug life" or removed themselves from reality, Public Enemy became the only hip-hop act to meet the dilemmas of Black America and attempt to provide solutions. Nation Of Millions documented the all-too-real ills of inner city life, including drug addiction (‘Cold Lampin’) police harassment (‘Caught, Can I Get A Witness!’), military conscription (‘Black Steel In the Hour Of Chaos’) and television culture (‘She Watch Channel Zero’) – and, on ‘Prophets Of Rage’ and ‘Party For Your Right To Fight’, attempted to right these wrongs.

As Chuck D’s almost poetic lyrics and rhymes provided the necessary fuel for his co-rappers Professor Griff’s serious declarations and Flavor Flav’s daft intonations, Nation’s musical backing was as important as its agenda. Boasting production that still sounds fresh nowadays, the album is visceral, yet eminently funky, as the Enemy’s DJ, Terminator X cut old funk standards to pieces, setting them against massive slabs of bass attitude, the perfect accompaniment for the act’s outpourings.

Public Enemy toured the album all over America and Europe, in an attempt to spread the theory of "the liberation of Afro-centric peoples from the shackles of white oppression," and, although they gained a global following, Nation was their true creative highpoint. Shortly after the album was released, Professor Griff was fired from the group for making anti-Semitic remarks, and the paranoid maelstrom of their third album, Fear Of A Black Planet never achieved the same incendiary heights.

But, if you drop the needle on 1988’s Nation Of Millions rest assured the hairs on the back of your neck will still stand on end...

ODD FACT: The opening live sequence on It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back is introduced by UK DJ Dave Pearce!

STAR TRACK: ‘Rebel Without A Pause’

ACE LYRIC LINE: "I got a letter from the government the other day, I opened it and read it, it said they were suckers, they wanted me for their army or whatever, picture me giving a damn, I said never!" - ‘Black Steel In the Hour Of Chaos’

MAGIC MOMENT: Chuck D intoning "London, England, consider yourself warned!" on ‘Countdown To Armageddon’