“You know most rap records at the time were about 107 beats-per-minute, 108. It was one of the first records that was made strictly from other records.” On Pushing The Envelope And I think that that's on of its appeals. And keep in mind, that statement had to be made without melodies, without real instruments. It's so many records and pieces that's woven in to each other in order to make that statement. It's also Sly and The Family Stone's There's A Riot Going On. This is just got Gil-Scot Heron's Winter in America. So I would have to say that yeah this is Rastaman Vibration. But for me, it was a combination of things because when I'm looking at music, I'm looking at music not in terms of what one particular song gives me but what many songs have in common. If you talk to Flav, he's got a soundtrack in his head. When you talk to Chuck he's going to have a soundtrack in his head. “Everybody has a soundtrack in their head. ![]() ![]() I need to get the message of Chuck across, but I needed the aggression of the sax to kick through. If I turn Chuck up, I get more laid back. So the fight was, if I turn up the sax I get more aggression. The sax was in the same frequency range of Chuck's vocal. The reason why "Rebel " was very difficult to make and angst over it because we had did that record at Chung King studios with the late great engineer Steve Ett. On the Saxophone in “Rebel Without a Pause” So for me, that was a big thing to see this new wave of music fans that was obsessed over this music called hip hop. I saw that as analogous to the Berry Gordy "The Sound of Young A merica," if you want to look at it from that perspective. I just kind of like saw the emergence of street music and it was teen oriented. And so I fell in love with this music called hip hop because I was always interested in cutting edge music. They were also statements of social issues and concerns. So like when you're listening to groups like Sly and The Family Stone and Bob Marley and The Wailers and you're listening to Gil Scott Heron, you're listening to Marvin Gaye, you're listening to Stevie Wonder those are records that were more than just records – they were soundtracks of our lives. Even if it was introspective, I was interested in it. So I've never really listened to a lot of records that was, to me, considered to be nonsense records that really didn't have any global or bigger message. So this is what made us big in that circuit, because we had to speak to our audience and our audience wasn't at the major radio station.” On Becoming Interested in Hip-Hopįrom the start, I've always been an avid listener of music that had a message. It got purely nighttime play or purely alternative play at colleges and universities that had radio stations. So therefore if you look at "Bring The Noise," for example, it didn't get no daytime play. And even the approach to making it was purely organic and alternative. So it was it was purely organic, purely underground, purely alternative. ![]() It was all fostered through underground activity. It's the record that no radio station really played. It's the record that no one had on their radar. “The beautiful thing about Public Enemy was the fact that it was the anti-thesis. And that could become a record.” On Public Enemy as an Underground Band And that's when we realized that that record – the demo at that point – was good enough for us to finish it off. And he had his car that had a huge sound system and he played that song at around 2:00 in the morning and then my phone started lighting up around 2:30 and I'm all like, "Well, what's going on?" They're just blasting, telling me, "Yo, "Don't Believe The Hype," everybody was going crazy over when they heard it coming out of the theater. There will be like 3,000 people out in front of the Apollo Theater. It took for DMC to kind of like play the record out of the back of his Jeep at the time that the Apollo was letting out for their amateur nights. And "Don't Believe The Hype" was a song that was made that I wasn't feeling and none of us was really feeling that record. We were just making records all the time. ![]() ”The one thing about us making these records, we never made these records in any chronological order. Stream the interview in its entirety and read some selected quotes from the conversation below. KEXP had the chance to chat with Shocklee about the creation of the album for its 30th anniversary, covering everything from their use of sampling to carving out a space for themselves in a music industry that had other priorities. You can’t talk about the record without digging into the sonic wizardy of producer Hank Shocklee and The Bomb Squad. It wasn’t just the grand power of Chuck D’s voice and Flavor Flav’s charisma that helped establish Public Enemy’s It Takes A Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back an instant classic upon arrival.
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