Just read Christopher Weingarten's 33 1/3 book on Public Enemy's It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back. It's a great example of what this series does at its best, giving a decent background of the history and cultural context in which the album was recorded, and offering a fairly detailed description of the recording of the album. Though I enjoy the more abstract titles in the series, like Carl Wilson's already classic Let's Talk About Love, Erik Davis' magick-drenched Led Zeppelin IV and Marvin Lin packing in a wide range of musings on cultural topics and music theories in his recent Kid A, I appreciate the more generalized classic journalism/biography approach most of these books take. Weingarten also steers clear of the understandably-important-to-the-author but more often than not boring-to-the-reader personal experiences a lot of the writers like to cram in theses books. Since this is a blog and not a book, however, you will not be spared such a fate, and I'll be sharing a personal story after a few more comments on the book.
Though much of the information in this book, particularly a list of the samples used, is available on the internet (look at all the samples used in the 3 minutes and 14 seconds of "Baseheads"), Weingarten make sure we understand the reasoning and context behind The Bomb Squad's decision to use certain samples in specific songs, other than just for their sonic quality. The lengthy section on the Wattstax film and album is particularly interesting, as is the ongoing discussion of the influence of James Brown, Isaac Hayes and P-Funk to the album's sound. These are the most obvious sources and inspirations, and the book details many more. One thing that's fascinating was how much Def Jam honcho Russell Simmons hated PE. The first time he heard a tape of them, he took it out and threw it across the room. Cohort Rick Rubin had to convince him of their merit, and Simmons' told him, "Rick, I don't even know why you're wasting your time with this garbage. No one is ever going to like this. This is like black punk rock." (Weingarten quotes from Ronin Ro's Raising Hell: The Reign, Ruin and Redemption of Run DMC and Jam Master Jay.) And this quote provides a nice segue for my personal story.
I first heard the album in April, 1989, about a year after it was released, when I was 15 years old and living on the East Tennessee farm I grew up on. Although my siblings and I were too old for Easter baskets, our mother still bought us an Easter present, an idea that now seems incredibly absurd. I suppose it was supposed to be like Christmas-lite or something, equating receiving gifts with religious holidays so you'd associate church with getting stuff. I certainly wasn't critical of it at the time, because it meant getting a moderately priced present or two of your choice. I had been getting more and more into rap in the past year, and asked for a tape of Ice T's Power. Instead I got Nation. My mom took one look at the cover of Power and decided no way was he getting this for me. (And she didn't even know what the album's "L.G.B.N.A.F." stood for. At least I don't think she did.) So she asked a clerk at the Camelot store in the Morristown Mall for something like it but not dirty, and the guy had the wherewithal to hand her Nation. I have no idea what she thought of the cover picture of an angry black man and weird looking black man with a clock around his neck glaring out at the camera from behind prison bars, or the military style logo next to a silhouette of a man in crosshairs, or if she noticed song titles like "Countdown to Armageddon," "Mind Terrorist," and "Prophets of Rage," but I'm eternally grateful that her Methodist sensibilities preferred that to a cover of two black men standing next to a woman in a swimsuit holding a shotgun. (Several years earlier she refused to buy me a Culture Club tape because it contained a song called "Church of the Poisoned Mind." ((Plus for some reason my dad didn't really care for Boy George.)) What did she get me instead? The probably-Satanic-but-at-least-not-gay Bark at the Moon. Score two for mom!) I'm also glad that clerk was hip enough or at least had the sense of humor to recommend the album, because who knows how late I would have been coming to it otherwise. Because the first time I listened to it, it was the weirdest thing I had ever heard, and I hated it.
Thinking of Simmons' "black punk rock" quote, it occurs to me I was exposed to Nation before I'd heard punk rock. The speed and aggression of Black Flag and Husker Du, poetical-political lyrics of Minutemen, and the noise-as-texture watershed that Daydream Nation provided lay several months ahead for me. The strangest things to my ears up to that point were probably Dark Side of the Moon and "1983... (A Merman I Should Turn to Be)". (Actually I still find "1983..." pretty freaky. Dig those crazy voices!) Nation blew my farm-bred mind. I was put off by Chuck D's speed, cadence and haranguing voice, and anyway couldn't make out half of what he was saying, and I didn't understand much of what I could make out. I found the screeching noises annoying and, like Simmons, initially couldn't get past the general cacophony of it all. I was accustomed to the clean annunciation and rap along-ability of LL Cool J (just about every one of my guy friends could rap along with "I'm Bad" and "I Need Love" in its entirety) Slick Rick (ditto "La-di-da-di"), Too Short ("I Ain't Trippin"), RUN DMC (several tracks) and Beastie Boys (take your pick, though the soon to be released Paul's Boutique would be even more inscrutable than Nation). Chuck D's rhymes were harder to get your ear and mouth around. The dense liner notes didn't help things, the fold-out sheet of transparently thin paper with tiny print listing a bunch of names I wasn't familiar with, extremely lengthy song lyrics and pseudo-revolutionary jargon I had no idea was either pseudo or revolutionary at the time. I had very little context for any of it, even though I had more or less grown up with rap ever since my older brother brought home a copy of "Rapper's Delight" in the early '80s (he hated it, and I was young enough that all electro-oriented '80s pop music sounded both strange and perfectly normal). And of course Licensed to Ill and Raising Hell changed everything for teenagers. But this didn't sound like anything I'd heard when I'd gone to the theater to see Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo.
After maybe two listens (and at @ an hour it was a long album by 1989 standards), the tape was put away for a while. I don't remember exactly when and how I finally "got" it, but I suspect it wasn't a eureka moment, that it was a gradual thing. Surely helpful was almost obsessive listening to NWA's gleefully vulgar Straight Outta Compton* later in the year, the first punk album I connected with (and interviews with white boys in suburbs and farms all over America falling in love with that album is a mini-documentary waiting to happen), as was my eventual introduction to the attitude and noise of punk rock and, ahem, grunge. On a more subconscious level, possibly, Nation helped prepare me for those albums. It also contained the most intricate sonic collages I'd heard, well before plunderphonics and Negativland were on my radar. Equally important, that album contained the most overt political music I knew of at the time. Fear of a Black Planet would take the sonic collages, noises and politics even further, and by the time it came out I was totally on board, but Nation helped break down some resistance and prep the mind for the sea change it would help bring to hip-hop and pop music in general.
Nation sits alongside Astral Weeks, Daydream Nation, Damaged, Loveless, Straight Outta Compton, Trout Mask Replica, Bitches Brew, Moment Precieux, and a Haters 7" with some of the music that helped rearrange my mind and open my ears as a teenager. Aside from the Haters and maybe Braxton/Bailey, that list looks fairly pedestrian and is full of accepted classics, but in pre-Internet farm land, where we didn't even have cable, Chuck D, Flavor Flav, Griff and The Bomb Squad really were mind terrorists, and I've had Stockholm Syndrome sever since.
*NWA anecdote: The first copy of Straight Outta Compton I had was recorded over a copy of ...And Justice For All, after I decided I didn't like metal anymore. It was dubbed on a crappy Emerson dual tape deck, and Metallica's riffs could still be faintly heard under NWA. It caused this constant high-pitch buzzing to run throughout the album, and I remember a particularly awesome guitar solo kicking off during one of the silence between songs. I eventually got a genuine tape myself, but for a few months I listened to the album with Metallica as a backing band buried in the mix. If I still had that tape I'd try to release it on Not Not Fun.
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