Public Enemy's It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (33 1/3) Read Online Free Page A

that had been rocking parties for the past 12 years were being used to elevate a new generation of songs. In 1986, Ultramagnetic MC Ced Gee chopped and flipped a James Brown break on Boogie Down Productions’ epochal “South Bronx” (“Get Up Offa That Thing”), and Marley and Eric B would soon follow with Eric B and Rakim’s “Eric B for President” (“Funky President” — a track Rakim rhymed on back in the day).
    The
Ultimate Breaks and Beats
series of records appeared almost immediately.
UBB
pulled back the
Wizard of Oz
curtain shrouding hip-hop’s building blocks, exposing all the classic head-knocker loops that DJs had been hiding in their arsenals for years.No longer did aspiring wax technicians have to play “guess the label.” This revealed the magician’s secrets in 25 volumes of vinyl, making a decade of tricks available to anyone with
one
turntable, let alone two. Combine these Cliff’s Notes with the new digital samplers and you’ve got the tools for any producer to quickly loop time-tested body movers. By the time “Funky Drummer” was etched to Volume 12 — either the last
UBB
record to be released in 1986 or the first one to be released in 1987 — it was already floating around on the Marley Marl-produced “It’s a Demo” 12-inch by Kool G Rap and DJ Polo. Marley sampled Stubblefield off a record Polo brought with him when they met for the first time — literally to make a demo. “Demo” got a uniquely funky “Funky Drummer” treatment when Marley stuttered Stubblefield’s licks. Producer Herbie Luv Bug used a slowed-down “Funky Drummer” for Sweet Tee and Jazzy Joyce’s end-of-year hit “It’s My Beat.”
    Seeing Brown’s music voraciously mined by hip-hoppers, Polydor issued a compilation album,
In the Jungle Groove
, full of 1969–71-era Brown, ready for looping and scratching (and probably, years later, some angry phone calls from lawyers). A three-minute “Funky Drummer (Bonus Beat Reprise)” closed out Side A, looping the soon-to-be-epochal break for anyone who couldn’t afford a sampler. Still, “Funky Drummer” wasn’t totally in vogue when the Bomb Squad jacked it. They were sick of the stock snaresof the DMX drum machine, which Hank Shocklee said were in everything from Midnight Starr to the Thompson Twins. To get the snare sound they wanted for “Rebel without a Pause,” they just went to the record they loved the most.
    It was a beat that Stubblefield himself couldn’t figure out the science behind, as it was so instinctual and immediate. And this is something Hank stressed in his own music: Don’t think it; feel it. Hank and consummate musician Eric Sadler would bicker in the studio when one of Hank’s layered tracks was out of key or rhythm, the unease perking up Sadler’s classically trained ears. Sadler remembered, “They were teachin’ me at the same time: Fuck all that technical shit. Do what’s funky. Do what feels good.” 16 Another time, when an engineer told Hank that two of his samples clashed in a way that wasn’t exactly musical, he reportedly shot back, “Fuck music!” The “Funky Drummer” break was all about feel — a natural fit for the Bomb Squad . . .
    . . . Or so it was popularly thought. At a panel discussion in Chicago in 2008, Chuck said that it is
not
“Funky Drummer” under “Rebel without a Pause,” but some other mystery break — despite Hank’s insisting otherwise in interviews. Chuck has been understandably mum on the details (as Hank said in that same panel, “Sampling is almost like committing murder: There’s no statute of limitations”). But the damage had been done. Actual sample or no, “Rebel withouta Pause” became the standard-bearer by which all “Funky Drummer” tracks would be judged.
    When
It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back
was released in 1988, it would ultimately make “Funky Drummer” its engine. On the album, at the end of “Rebel without a Pause,” you can hear a