A word on Byrd: When they met as teenagers in the early ’50s, James Brown and Byrd were both keyboardists in gospel groups in Toccoa, Georgia. However, Brown was stuck behind a prison fence and Byrd was a curious town gawker striking up conversation from the other side. When Brown was released from prison at age 19 with nowhere to go, Byrd’s family gave him a place to stay. In no time Brown was playing with Byrd’s group the Avons. Byrd and bandmate Sylvester Keels pushed Brown out front, the Avons became the Flames, the Flames became the Famous Flames, the Famous Flames became a couple of different versions of James Brown and the Famous Flames, and it all eventually became the-amazing-Mr.-Please-Please-himself-the-star-of-the-show-Jaaaaames-Broooown — Byrd Bobby was by Brown’s side for every step of the way. They were so close, in fact, that there was even a rumor in 1965 that Brown was getting a sex change so he could marry Byrd.
Byrd was always there to add a “Get on up!,” and he pretty much invented the concept of the hypeman. Chuck would be the first to point out how closely the Brown/Byrd dynamic mirrored that of himself and Flavor Flav. When Public Enemy was signed to Def Jam in 1986, Hank Shocklee and Chuck wanted to bring Flavor Flav in as part of the group, an idea that both Rick Rubin and Russell Simmons loathed. They wondered what exactly Flav did. Hank and Chuck couldn’t really explain, but they knew he would bring the “supercalifragihestikalagoothki.” Chuck wanted someone to bounce things off of, citing Byrd as a direct influence.
The JB’s who backed Byrd on “Get Up” weren’t the same JB’s whom Brown had plucked from obscurity two years earlier. That band and Brown clashed over creative control, and after a European tour, they decided to split ways. Bootsy Collins tells an interesting story about battling the staunchly anti-drug Brown after a show where he thought the neck of his bass guitar had turned into a snake while tripping on acid. Even though Brown never really yelled at the guys or fined them like he did with the previous band, it was time for them to go. As Brown’s heaviest band, it was only natural that Collins and crew would hitch their next ride on the just-launched P-Funk Mothership. By 1971, Brown had a new band whose experimental spirit was analogous to Pubic Enemy circa 1987.
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After the success of “Rebel without a Pause” in May 1987, Chuck, Flav, Terminator and the plastic-Uzi-toting S1Ws spent their summer on the Def Jam tour, gigging across the U.S. with Whodini, Doug E. Fresh, Eric B and Rakim, Stetsasonic and, the star attraction: the sweat-dappled chest of LL Cool J. On the bus, Professor Griff would play Farrakhan tapes and the S1Ws would practice their defense moves — a far cry from the party atmosphere in Whodini’s ride. Meanwhile, the Shocklee brothers and Eric Sadler stayed behind in their 510 South Franklin pre-production studio, cooking up tracks. They would send Chuck tapes of what would be “Don’t Believe the Hype” and “Bring the Noise.”
When Chuck returned in September, the first track they finished was “Don’t Believe the Hype,” a slow, punchy rumbler that seemed downright friendly compared to the spastic “Rebel.” On “Don’t Believe the Hype,” the Bomb Squad did some of their heaviest experimenting. The opening of the song sounds like two tracks jogging in reverse, an effect created by sampling sounds they first manipulated on a turntable. In this case, mainly through the transformer scratch. The transformer, an invention usually credited to DJ Jazzy Jeff, is the slurping sound of a DJ pulling a record backward against the needle, ducking the crossfader during the parts where it plays forward. It’s a woozy effect built solely on the noises a DJ usually doesn’t want you to hear. It’s often used as an embellishment, but here it makes up most of the track — ugly noise for noise’s sake. Another experiment involved the Bomb Squad inventing their own bass sound. Sitting around toying with the gear, Sadler took the sine wave from the Akai’s tone generator, tuned it down an octave and made a bass track from it.
The shrill, one-note tenor-sax blast anchoring the song is from the lungs of St. Clair Pickney. It’s a rubbed-raw squonk taken from James Brown’s “Escape-Ism Pt. 1.” On the original Brown recording, it’s a piercing surprise, an unexpected peak in a solo that probably set the track into the red for a split second, an ill squeal like a heavy boot stepping on a cat’s tail. This piercing moment of music comes from a band — like the Bomb Squad — that was forced to do a little quick experimenting. After the Bootsy Collins-led JB’s jumped ship, veteran trombonist Fred Wesley was recruited to assemble a new band in December 1970. This was not the crack lineup of gifted teen savants from Collins’ Pacesetters; this band was raw. Said Wesley: “They were totally green. Cheese Martin was so used to playing rhythm, just scratching behind James, that I had to teach him to play lead guitar. And at first Fred Thomas wasn’t much of a bass player. We rehearsed for two weeks in the basement of the Apollo Theater just to get the show together.”41 They contacted Jimmy Parker, who they thought was an alto sax player. He accepted the gig but had never played an alto sax prior to joining the band. They put a show together in eight days. Within two months, the band had recorded two hits for Bobby Byrd — “I Know You Got Soul” (sampled on “Cold Lampin’ with Flavor”) and follow-up “Hot Pants — I’m Coming, I’m Coming, I’m Coming” (sampled on “Caught, Can I Get a Witness”).
James Brown’s “Escape-Ism Pt. 1” was released in a turbulent time. It was one of the first songs the new band recorded together, the first single under Brown’s name with the new band, one of the last singles released as part of his King Records deal and the first track on Side B of the album that his new label rushed out in order to keep the momentum going. Like “Funky Drummer,” it’s just an extended studio groove paired down to fit two sides of a single. The uncut, 19-minute take (available on the Hot Pants reissue) reveals just how fresh everything is. Brown ad-libs in his classic style, going around the room to ask his new sidemen where they’re from. When he gets to Jimmy Parker, he stumbles: “Where’re you from, uh . . . You know I keep forgetting this cat’s name . . . What your name is, man?”
Immediately after the recording, the band was scheduled to play at the Apollo to record Brown’s sixth live album. Barely together three months, they rehearsed day and night in the Apollo’s basement to work up the telekinetic bond that made Brown’s live shows so amazing. The live album, Revolution of the Mind, released in 1971, would be incredibly influential for Public Enemy. For starters, the cover image is the spiritual blueprint for the Nation of Millions sleeve. On the jacket of Revolution, James Brown is pictured behind bars, looking resolute and unbreakable, the dull orange wall behind him seemingly one cell over from Chuck and Flav’s.
The Nation of Millions cover was shot by punk-rock archivist and skateboard photographer Glen E. Friedman, who also shot the cover of Yo! Bum Rush the Show. The shoot was at a midtown Manhattan police station in some vacant jail cells. They had to reschedule the shoot after Flav didn’t turn up — apparently he was in an actual jail at the time. Friedman told U.K. hip-hop magazine Hip Hop Connection that Flav wasn’t too excited to spend another day sitting in a cell. The now-classic cover wasn’t the image that Friedman wanted. He had aimed for something grittier, shooting a series of black-and-white photos of Chuck and Flav breaking out of jail from the perspective of the surveillance cameras. His preferred cover was a black-and-white image of the last thing a security camera would see before Chuck clocked out with a swift punch.
But Public Enemy balked at Friedman’s idea from the beginning, saying it was too conceptual. They asked him to do a simpler shot of the two MCs in a cell. The shot they eventually chose was not Friedman’s favorite (he even threatened to scratch the negative), but it was picked because they thought thick bars would look stark and compelling even under a tiny cassette tray. The photo of Chuck knocking out the surveillance camera would later turn up as the cover of the “Don’t Believe the Hype” single. And the cover of Nation — despite Freidman’s complaint that you can’t see Chuck’s eyes — is one of pop music’s most enduring images, overshadowing its forebear, Revolution of the Mind.
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sp; Around the release of Revolution, James Brown started noticing that radio was being segregated and formatted by genre. Despite the fact that he sold tons of records (he would have two No. 1 R&B singles in 1971, the year Revolution was released), he said that rock stations stopped playing him: “I was making some of my strongest music during that period, and I think most whites have been deprived of it.”42 “The radio’s scared of me,” echoes Chuck on “Hype.” “’Cause I’m mad, plus I’m the enemy.” It didn’t end there: Public Enemy would sample Revolution of the Mind throughout their career. MC Danny Ray’s intro (“Are you really ready for some super dynamite soul?”) would turn up on Nation’s 1990 follow-up Fear of a Black Planet. The rapturous screams from the audience in “Soul Power” would be transformed into whistling missiles in the bridge of “Caught, Can I Get a Witness.”
And the JB’s would find even more session work on “Don’t Believe the Hype”: Some guitar (either by Cheese Martin or Robert Coleman) from Brown’s 1971 single “I Got Ants in My Pants, Pt. 1” is sliced in under the verses. One of Chuck D’s unheralded roles as a Bomb Squad member was doing light scratching and turntable manipulation, and this song features his handiwork.
“‘Don’t Believe the Hype,’ it’s a sequel,” begins Chuck in the third verse, still mulling over the can of worms he opened in “Rebel without a Pause.” His line “They claim that I’m a criminal” is in the same vein as “Rebel’s” “Designed to scatter a line of suckers that claim I do crime” — consecutive songs in a row that put racist cops on blast. Fittingly, Public Enemy borrow from Whodini’s “Fugitive” for that paranoid “hu-ahh-AHH-ahhhm-yah” vocal ejaculation. “Fugitive,” a hard-rocking track off Whodini’s 1986 album Back in Black is also about being wrongly accused.
But this time, Chuck had music critics in his scope, most notably writer John Leland. Much like radio stations, American critics weren’t too receptive to Yo! Bum Rush the Show, and Leland was especially vicious in his Village Voice review titled after the Buzzcocks song “Noise Annoys.” Chuck later told NME that he attended a Spin party looking to fuck Leland up. Chuck heard he was hiding. When Public Enemy were cornered, they would bite back. Here was a band that not only read their press but would call writers out on it. In a Spin interview in 1988, they had a comically tense exchange: “Your last single, ‘Bring The Noise,’ was basically about what other people are saying about you.” . . . “Oh, yeah, that was about you. I was talking right at you.”43
“White media were terrified of these guys,”44 said Public Enemy publicist Leyla Turkkan at a panel in New York City. She told a story about how one prominent rock critic cowered in fear during the drive to a face-to-face interview with Chuck.
Def Jam co-founder Rick Rubin spent his summer vacation in L.A., recording metal bands Danzig and Slayer for the Def Jam helmed soundtrack to Less Than Zero, the chilly, druggy, cult flick loosely based on the Bret Easton Ellis book. When Rubin returned to New York in August, he wanted a Public Enemy track to top the soundtrack off, and they submitted “Don’t Believe the Hype.” Rubin didn’t think the song fit. Hank Shocklee was never the biggest fan of it, and the rest of the group agreed they wanted to make something “turbulent, not funky.”45 Ultimately, the song was scrapped for the punkier “Bring the Noise.” The group put “Don’t Believe the Hype” on the shelf and forgot about it.
“Don’t Believe the Hype,” the true “sequel” to “Rebel without a Pause,” became more of a Part 3, since it didn’t see the light of day until later. Like with “Rebel,” Chuck’s heroes Run-DMC were integral in giving the song the go-ahead. Since tapes were easy to get in the Def Jam office, DMC had gotten a copy of “Don’t Believe the Hype” after mastering.
Hank later stumbled across DMC blasting the track from his Bronco on a Saturday night — on the Lower East Side or in Harlem depending on whom you ask. The entire block was grooving along. Public Enemy changed their opinion on the track immediately and, once May 1988 rolled around, wrapped tightly under Friedman’s surveillance-camera cover, it became Nation of Millions ’ third single.
Chapter Four –
“Beat is the father of your rock ’n’ roll”
While James Brown, Fred Wesley and the JB’s were picking up the pieces in 1971, space cadet Bootsy Collins and his brother Catfish had run away to join George Clinton’s P-Funk circus. Over the next decade, Parliament and Funkadelic would leave an acid-soaked trail that ushered in the second wave of funk, providing hip-hop with enough low-end theories to wear out a generation of woofers. (Old George would be sampled so reliably in the ’90s that he eventually released his own series of snatchable snippets called Sample Some of Disc, Sample Some of D.A.T.) But before Digital Underground and Dr. Dre made their Mothership Connection, the Bomb Squad was borrowing Funkadelic’s gnarliest transmissions.
Funkadelic was the hard-rock branch of the Clinton legislature. Evolving from a ’60s doo-wop band, Funkadelic turned into a fuzzed-out monster after borrowing Vanilla Fudge’s Marshall stacks at a college show. From then on out, Parliament were smooth and Funkadelic (same members, different label) were crunchy — a band synonymous with swirling clouds of feedback, Black Cheer crunge, cartoon voices and infectious chants. Like the Bomb Squad, Clinton produced Funkadelic records for maximum headfuck: “You turned on a Funkadelic record with earphones on, drums running across your head, panning the foot, we panned everything . . . We went to colleges where they wasn’t taking anything, but they was tripping on the records.”46
But Funkadelic were Public Enemy’s forefathers for reasons well beyond their affinity for noise and hard rock. They had a visual aesthetic that spoke as loud as their message, something Chuck would allude to in a London interview when he talked about Public Enemy’s bold stage presence. “We wanted to be identified visually because we knew sonically a lot of music would not be understood . . . We knew that when people came to a concert, the No. 1 reaction was based on what they saw, and what they heard second.”47 Public Enemy surrounded themselves with arresting gold and black banners, one of the highest-visibility color combinations available. The unforgettable Instamatic icon of Flavor Flav’s clock pendant was a signifier at once simple and loaded with meaning, something that evolved naturally from Funkadelic stage wear like Bootsy’s sparkling star glasses or Gary Shider’s diaper. P-Funk did it all first. They would flank themselves with a logo onstage: a massive skull that would, at show’s climax, smoke a six-and-a-half-foot joint. And hey, there were guns onstage too, even if the kitschy, strobe-lit “bop gun” held by Shider wasn’t exactly the Uzis toted by the S1Ws. Years after Alice Cooper and Kiss started packing semi trucks with explosives and guillotines and fake blood, this may not seem like a big deal, but remember that the only black groups with huge production budgets for theatrical stage shows in the mid-’70s were P-Funk, the Commodores and Earth, Wind and Fire. And only P-Funk had their own spaceship.
Funkadelic paid attention to album art, which surely drew in Chuck, who had studied graphic design at Adelphi University. While there, Chuck drew a comic for the school paper called “Tales of the Skind” — short for “Takes of the Spectrum Kind.” Every day in the cartoon, Chuckie D and the members of the mobile DJ crew Spectrum Crew would assume the role of superheroes from outer space that battled Ronald Reagan or drug dealers or whomever from their Funkadelic-styled spaceship. Keith Shocklee credits the use of characters in the group’s aesthetic — from the Spectrum days all the way through Terminator X, who “speaks with his hands” — with the group’s love of cartoons, television and comic books. The closest antecedent to “Skind” was Pedro Bell’s artwork on the Funkadelic albums, a busy Technicolor world of Afro’d Amazons, cyborg warriors and space warfare. By the ’90s, cultural critics were retroactively calling Bell’s cosmic slop and the P-Funk intergalactic mythos a defining moment in “Afrofuturism,” a way to explore the black experience via tales of encountering alien worlds and fantastic technologies. Essayist Greg Tate wrote, “Black people live the estra
ngement that science-fiction writers imagine.”48 George Clinton took it even deeper: “I knew I had to find another place for black people to be. And space was that place.”49
“African-American culture is Afrofuturist at its heart,” wrote critic Mark Dery in the definitive essay on the topic. “With trickster élan, it retrofits, refunctions and willfully misuses the technocommodities and science fictions generated by a dominant culture that has always been not only white but a wielder, as well, of instrumental technologies.” In Bell’s version of Afrofuturism, his “zeep-speak” slanguage transmutes the English language into P-Funk’s cosmic-beatnik universe, an alternate land of the “epizootic,” the “foxative,” of “baby-masturbating nixonharpies” and the “neegroid protoplasm of cherrybustative dimensions.” Classic sci-fi tropes got pushed through the Funkadelic particle demobilizer: the sexy robot from Metropolis gets a funky overhaul for the cover of 1976’s Tales of Kidd Funkadelic; “Ratman and Robinlee” hide from the flagrant, filthy, flastic forces of Funkadelia on the back of Hardcore Jollies; a Kubrickian star-child relaxes in the corner of Cosmic Slop. Bell’s felt-tip recontextualizations were Funkadelic’s version of sampling.
While most agree that the crowded covers of Hardcore Jollies and Cosmic Slop are classics, Bell looks back at the austere cover of 1975’s Let’s Take It to the Stage with some criticism — “a little too much mutant science on that one.”50 The cover is almost a prototype for heavy metal album art, with a green autopsy subject who’s a mix of Linda Blair in The Exorcist and Iron Maiden’s as-yet-unborn mascot Eddie. This is the album from which the Bomb Squad took the most crucial noise in “Bring the Noise.” The album was driven by the same competitive spirit that drove Public Enemy to be overachievers, its lyrics full of jocular jibes at Funkadelic’s competition: “Slufus,” “Earth Hot Air and No Fire,” “Fool and the Gang,” “the Godmother,” etc. The title Let’s Take It to the Stage was a battle cry that said no one could defeat them onstage, something that Chuck D pressed upon his own troops when he saw rock bands outhustling his group.
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