It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back

Sixteen tracks, and the subtractive test finds a hard core and a loose margin. Bring the Noise must open the songs, as the manifesto; Don’t Believe the Hype must follow, turning it on the press that will receive it. Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos is the centre of gravity, and Night of the Living Baseheads, the one place the record turns its argument on its own community, could not go. Mind Terrorist and Security of the First World work as station breaks in a broadcast. The test bites three times: Cold Lampin’ with Flavor is a turn the argument could lose, Show ’Em Whatcha Got restates a mode, Prophets of Rage repeats Rebel Without a Pause at lower heat. Two strong tracks were made before the album was conceived as a whole. A tenth to an eighth is permitted rather than compelled.

Score: 8.2 / 10

The disclosure can be stated, and most of it holds: in the America of the late 1980s the Black citizen stands inside systems, the press, the state’s surveillance, the prison, the draft, the drug trade and the law of property in sound, each presenting itself as neutral and each working to hold him in place. Don’t Believe the Hype names the press; Louder Than a Bomb the wiretap; Black Steel the draft and the prison; Caught, Can We Get a Witness? sees early that copyright would become a way of owning Black sound. Night of the Living Baseheads indicts crack from inside. The sound discloses as fully as the words. Held below the top: the endorsement of Farrakhan in Bring the Noise, a conspiratorial strain, and the contempt of She Watch Channel Zero?! for a woman before a television, where diagnosis turns to sneer.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Elevation is of the dreadful and exultant kind, the sublime of the alarm, and it comes often. Rebel Without a Pause is the height: the scream from the J.B.’s “The Grunt” looped into a siren that never stops, a voice riding it in command, terror and joy at once. Bring the Noise rises from Malcolm X’s voice into a wall of sirens and breaks. Black Steel is height of another kind, slow and grave, Isaac Hayes’s “Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymistic” walking under a prison narrative until the escape lifts it. Night of the Living Baseheads is vertigo, horns cut into shrapnel; Countdown to Armageddon makes a crowd’s roar an overture. Cold Lampin’, Show ’Em Whatcha Got and Prophets of Rage stay level. Ten or more of sixteen tracks rise, but mostly in one kind: the warm and the still sublime are absent.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Myth is built in two places and evoked across the rest. Black Steel builds it: a conscript refuses the summons, a “letter from the government”, is jailed, and leads a break from the prison with his fellow inmates, the exodus from bondage told as one man’s escape, and the archetype bears the load. The second construction runs the length of the record in its two voices: Chuck D as prophet, grave in warning and judgment, and Flavor Flav as the fool who mocks, interrupts and confirms, call and answer on nearly every track. Around these, archetypes are evoked by title and frame: Armageddon, the prophets, the undead of the baseheads. What holds the axis below the bar is that the apocalyptic frame is announced and not built through the sequence, and most songs argue more than they enact a pattern.

Score: 8.3 / 10

The inheritance is the hip hop of 1986 and 1987: the sparse drum machines of Run-DMC, the looped samples of Marley Marl and of Eric B. and Rakim, and the group’s own modest debut, Yo! Bum Rush the Show (1987). The turn is large. Tracks are built from many samples at once, layered until they clash; noise becomes the hook; the tempo rises; and all of it is joined to political speech in place of the boast. The stake was real: a group with a weak first record, on a label living by radio and crossover, made a record abrasive by design. What holds it below the top: collage had been made by Afrika Bambaataa’s camp and by Double Dee and Steinski, political verse ran back through Gil Scott-Heron and the Last Poets, and Boogie Down Productions moved toward the same ground the same year. The joining, and its density, were new.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Change the form and much of what the record knows goes, because it knows pressure, and pressure is density and speed. A record about a citizen surrounded by systems is built as a surround, a voice that must command the noise or drown in it. Over a plain loop Rebel Without a Pause would be a boast; over the scream it is a man holding his ground in an alarm. The sequence is counted here, once: the record is framed as a show and a broadcast, opening on a live crowd and paced by station breaks, so the songs arrive as transmissions from a station at war with the channels named in She Watch Channel Zero?! and Don’t Believe the Hype. Held short of the top: the frame is laid on lightly, much of the order could change without loss, and two tracks are containers rather than instruments.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Evidence over thirty-eight years, of two kinds. Formally the record has been taken apart by producers and listeners for decades, sample by sample, and keeps yielding: the layers separate on close listening into sources that change bar by bar, and it became a standing case in the history of sampling and its law. Its makers have kept the making open in their own accounts, and writing on hip hop and on Black noise has returned to it repeatedly. Semantically the references, Panther history, Hoover, Malcolm X, the Nation of Islam, the press of the day, reward knowledge and reopen as the history is learned. What holds the figure: the words, being argument, give most of what they have on first hearing; return deepens their context more than their meaning; and some of the yield is the method’s history rather than the record’s depth.

Score: 8.6 / 10

The field is hip hop and the popular record of the late 1980s. The intrinsic force is very large: the record showed that a hip hop track could be composed from noise and from many sources at once, that the producer could work as a composer of collage, and that the form could carry political speech at full force and still be heard. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the political rap of the next years ran through it; the Bomb Squad carried the method west in Ice Cube’s AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted (1990); rock and industrial bands took its density and attack, and a later rock band took the name Prophets of Rage; it stands at or near the head of hip hop’s canon. Discounted: the sampling law that followed within a few years closed much of the dense method, so the reach travels as stance and sound more than practice, and the credit for collage is shared.

Score: 9.0 / 10

Survival is weighed over thirty-eight years. The form is whole: the recording survives as released and has been reissued. Presence is continuous and wide among musicians, critics and those who study the form, and Don’t Believe the Hype, Rebel Without a Pause and Bring the Noise remain in circulation. Two charges. Presence among the general public is narrower than the record’s standing among critics, and some of it is charged: the group’s own public controversy began within a year of the record, and the Farrakhan endorsement still bears on how it is heard. The fabric is fixed in part to its moment, in the sampler and drum-machine sound of 1987 and 1988 and in topical surfaces, though its subjects have aged toward us rather than away. It stands level with The Downward Spiral at 8.5 and below What’s Going On at 8.9.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Command of the recorded medium, with invention credited elsewhere. The making is load-bearing throughout. The Bomb Squad’s construction is exact where it sounds like chaos: in Rebel Without a Pause and Night of the Living Baseheads the layers are placed so the drums stay legible under the noise and the voice always has room, and Black Steel holds a slow groove for about six minutes without slack. Chuck D’s voice is among the great instruments of the form, a baritone of command whose diction cuts through any mix and rides tempos that would swamp a lesser voice. Terminator X places his cuts as punctuation; Flavor Flav’s interjections are timed as counterpoint. The faults fall on a share of the record: some mixes are crowded to mud, Cold Lampin’ and Show ’Em Whatcha Got are thin in construction, and parts of the drum sound belong to their year.

Score: 8.8 / 10

One law governs the record: the voice against the noise, a speaker holding his ground in an alarm, answered by a chorus of one. Take the two most distant elements, Cold Lampin’ with Flavor, a comic turn in the fool’s voice, and Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos, a slow prison epic told in the first person. They obey the same law: in each a voice works inside a sound that presses on it, and the fool’s comedy is the prophet’s seriousness seen from below. Party for Your Right to Fight closes on an answer to another group’s party anthem, and obeys the law as rebuttal. The range is wide in subject and narrower in sound, where the palette is largely one, attack and density; narrowness is not coherence, and the sameness of the faster tracks is charged. No break, and one manner.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. The state is held, as surveillance, the draft and the prison; the press and television as an order of power; the drug trade and the community it harms; history, in the Panthers, Hoover and the line from Malcolm X; the law of property, in Caught; the sacred, as prophecy and the Nation of Islam; the crowd and the public, in the live frame. One voice and one condition join them, and the sound holds them in one structure, a wider span than most albums attempt, integrated more than listed. What holds it lowest: the family is absent; women appear chiefly as a figure of contempt; labour and the natural order are absent; and the speaker’s inner life is kept almost wholly behind the stance, so consciousness is held as will rather than as depth.

Score: 7.8 / 10