Can't Stop Won't Stop (41 page)

The record did decently in the south and the midwest, but New York City
wasn't feeling the group. Melle Mel heckled the crew at their first show at the Latin Quarter. Mr. Magic played “Public Enemy #1” only once, making a point of saying that he hated it. And in Queens, Magic's DJ, Marlon “Marley Marl” Williams was making them look played-out with his sonic innovations.

Marley had been a studio apprentice to Arthur Baker, watching him struggle with the early, prohibitively expensive Fairlight sampler. In 1983, Marley launched his own producing career with a classic single, “Sucker DJs (I Will Survive),” featuring his smooth-rapping then-girlfriend, Dimples D. On his early dance records, like Aleem's 1984 club hit, “Release Yourself,” he used a sampler to repeat and pitch up and down vocal snippets: “Release yourself! Re-rerererere-rererere-release yourself! Yo-yo-yo-yourself!” While trying to sample a voice for another song on his affordable new E-mu Emulator, he caught a snare snap. Punching it a few times, he suddenly realized the machine's latent rhythmic capabilities.

On the 1986 hit “The Bridge” by MC Shan, he revealed the fruits of his discovery, with a booming loop of The Honeydrippers' “Impeach the President” drum break. No more tinny, programmed DMX or Linn drums, which stiffened the beat and reduced most rappers to sing-songy rhyming. On top, Marl kept his vocalists bathed in billowing Rubinesque arena echoes, but on the bottom, the groove suddenly felt slippery. Inevitably, his rappers responded with more intricate rhymes.

By contrast, Hank, Eric and Keith had made “Public Enemy #1” the old-fashioned way—with Eric banging out the drums in real time, and a long two-inch tape loop of “Blow Your Head” that stretched across the room and around a microphone stand. Marl's sampler breakthrough forever altered rap production techniques. It wasn't clear Public Enemy could stay competitive.

The Black Belt had bred a new school, and these artists—Biz Markie, De La Soul, JVC Force, Craig Mack (then known as MC EZ) and EPMD, even their homies, Son of Bazerk, Serious Lee Fine, True Mathematics and Kings of Pressure—were breathing down P.E.'s necks. And then there was Marley Marl's roommate, a DJ from the Black ‘burbs of Queens named Eric Barrier, and his rapper, a Five Percenter from Wyandanch, Long Island, named William Griffin, Jr. (no relation to Professor Griff) who called himself Rakim Allah.

Rakim was about to graduate from high school, where he was the star quarterback, when a mutual friend introduced him to Eric B. The two hit it off, and Barrier asked Marl about recording something in their studio. They headed into Marl's studio and cut Rakim's demo, “Check Out My Melody.” MC Shan sat in.

Rakim obviously had lyrics, battle rhymes funneled through Five Percenter millenarian poetics. He didn't just slay MCs, he took them out in three sets of seven. “My unusual style will confuse you a while,” he rhymed. “If I was water, I'd flow in the Nile.”

Shan and Marl weren't sure they understood this guy. At the time Shan's excitable high-pitched style ruled New York City. But Rakim refused to raise his voice. “Me and Marley would look at each other like, ‘What kind of rap style is that? That shit is wack,' ” Shan recalled.
²⁵
“More energy, man!” he yelled at Rakim.
²⁶

Figuring “My Melody” was too sluggish, they gave Rakim another beat that was almost ten beats-per-minute faster. Based on Fonda Rae's “Over Like a Fat Rat” and James Brown's “Funky President” and alluding to Marl's by-now famous jacking of “Impeach the President,” the concept became “Eric B. Is President,” Marl and Shan listened to Rakim's intro in amazement:

I came in the door I said it before

I never let the mic magnetize me no more

In the lyric, Rakim described the act of rhyming as if it were a pit bull on a long leash, an undertow pulling into a deep ocean of words—above all, a dangerous habit from which there was no return:

But it's biting me, fighting me, inviting me to rhyme

I can't hold it back

I'm looking for the line

Rakim rocked a weird mix of braggadocio and self-consciousness, a metarhyme—encompassing the paralysis of stage-fright and the release of the moment of first utterance, all delivered with an uncanny sense of how to use silence
and syncopation, lines spilling through bars, syllables catching off-beats, it made them believers. Rap had found its Coltrane.

Rakim came from a musical family. His mother was a jazz and opera singer. His aunt was R&B legend Ruth Brown. His brothers were session musicians who had worked on early rap records. He was a gifted saxophonist and had participated in statewide student competitions. He switched from tenor to baritone sax because he preferred the deeper tone.

The Griffins had left Brooklyn to come to Wyandanch, an unincorporated town of seven thousand, one of the oldest in the Black Belt and deteriorating into one of the most troubled. Blacks began moving there during the 1950s, expanding southward toward the wealthy white beach community of Babylon. By the end of the decade whites in Babylon rezoned its northern border from residential to industrial. From there, Wyandanch went downhill.

William was a smart student with a lean athleticism and a nose for trouble that kept him close to the streets. By his teens, he was a graffiti writer turned stick-up kid, getting high, staying paid, holding down corners in Wyandanch and spinning drunkenly out of the projects in Fort Greene, before he became righteous, took the name Ra King Islam Master Allah, recircled Strong Island and Brooklyn to build from cipher to cipher.

The graf burners on his bedroom wall were covered over by primer. Photos of Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X and Minister Louis Farrakhan went up. He met Eric, Marl and Shan, cut the record, abandoned a football scholarship to the State University at Stony Brook, signed with Rush Management, and became a rap legend.

Rakim never smiled. Draped in African gold, inside Dapper-Dan customized
faux
-Gucci suits, he stood tall in a way that assured he was in supreme control of his body. He was, as he put it, “serious as cancer.” He asked rhetorical questions like, “Who can keep the average dancer hyper as a heart attack?” Chuck D and Rakim had come from similar circumstances and had similar aspirations for themselves and the race, but they had different ways of seeking their utopias. As Greg Tate wrote, “Chuck D's forte is the overview, Rakim's is the innerview.”

Rakim had joined the Nation of Gods and Earths, better known as the Five Percenters, in 1985, the year that Supreme Mathematics signified as: “
Build Power
.” Founded in Harlem (renamed Mecca) in 1963 by a charismatic former student minister of the Nation of Islam, Clarence 13X, their core belief was
taken from Lost-Found Lesson Number 2. Eighty-five percent of the people were uncivilized, mentally deaf, dumb and blind slaves; 10 percent were bloodsuckers of the poor; and 5 percent were the poor righteous teachers with knowledge of self, enlightened teachers of freedom, justice and equality, destined to civilize the uncivilized.

Like Bambaataa, Rakim was now on a lifetime mission to lift the word from the street into the spiritual. Whether he could escape the social prisons represented by Fort Greene and Wyandanch was immaterial. Rakim told a journalist, “You're dealing with heaven while you're walking through hell. When I say heaven, I don't mean up in the clouds, because heaven is no higher than your head, and hell is no lower than your feet.”
²⁷

“It's 120 degrees of lessons,” he told Harry Allen, “and you gotta complete it by Knowledge, which is 120, Wisdom, another 120, and Understanding, which is 360 degrees. That's what I'm saying. 360 degrees I revolve. And 360 degrees is a complete circle—a cipher. So you must
complete
it.”
²⁸

In rhyme, Chuck compared himself to Coltrane, but he had more in common with Miles Davis, whose earthy middle-class rage always boiled beneath the mask of blue minimalist cool. The streetwise mystic Rakim was closer to Coltrane, and “I Know You Got Soul” was Rakim's “Giant Steps,” a marvel of rhythmic precision and indelible imagery, a masterful declaration of transcendent black identity and a certifiable crowd-pleaser.

Based on the Bobby Byrd song of the same name and featuring a monstrous Funkadelic drumroll by Ben Powers, Jr., “Soul” began with unusual flattery to its audience—an apology for keeping them waiting. It described writing as a difficult sacrament, but a necessary rite to uplift the race. In the end, the performance of the words—like a triumphant Ali title bout—became an act of deliverance.

“I Know You Got Soul” dropped only weeks after
Yo! Bum Rush the Show
. When Chuck and Hank heard it, they realized that hip-hop's aesthetic and political development had suddenly accelerated. Envious and yet confident that the game had somehow shifted decidedly in their direction, they retreated to 510 South Franklin to close the circle that Eric B. & Rakim had begun.

“We knew we had to make something that was aggressive,” Hank says. “Chuck's voice is so powerful and his tone is so rich that you can't put him on smooth, silky, melodic music. It's only fitting to put a hailstorm around him, a tornado behind him, so that when his vocals come across, the two complement each other.”

Unlike Marley Marl's method—which flowed with the possibilities of the new technology, privileging sampling and mixing over arranging—the Bomb Squad mapped out the samples in the song's key and structure, piled them atop each other, then played them by hand as if they were a band. A Bomb Squad composition mounted tension against all-too-brief release.

Their musical method mirrored their worldview. “We were timing freaks,” Hank says. “[W]e might push the drum sample to make it a little bit out of time, to make you feel uneasy. We're used to a perfect world, to seeing everything revolve in a circle. When that circle is off by a little bit, that's weird . . . It's not predictable.”
²⁹
Public Enemy was never about elevating to perfect mathematics or merging with sleek machines, it was about wrestling with the messy contradictions of truth. “It's
tightrope
music,” Chuck said, “in confrontation with itself.”
⁶⁰

Hank and Chuck pulled out James Brown's “Funky Drummer,” the not-yet-famous Clyde Stubblefield break, and the JBs' 1970 single, “The Grunt,
Part 1
,” which had an elemental, squawking intro reminiscent of “Blow Your Head.” On his Ensoniq Mirage sampler, they grabbed two seconds of Catfish Collins's guitar, Bobby Byrd's piano and, most important, Robert McCollough's sax squeal, sampled it at a low rate to grit it up, and then pounded it into ambulance claustrophobia. Underneath, Flavor Flav made the Akai drum machine boom and stutter. The only release came in a break that layered a live go-go groove, funky guitar, a horn-section blast and the drums from Jefferson Starship's “Rock Music.” When Terminator X transformed Chubb Rock's shout, “Rock and roll!”, “Rebel” staked a claim to more than soul. The effect was hypnotic and relentless.

From an intro as memorable as Rakim's through an ending that declared it was “my time,” Chuck brought pure boxing-ring drama, with Rakim as muse and opponent. Chuck offered props where they were due—”I got soul too”—but reserved for himself the title of “the voice of power.” Rakim had rapped, “It ain't where you're from, it's where you're at,” an epigram not at all unlike “Who feels
it, knows it.” Chuck flipped that into an explicit call for Black solidarity: “No matter what the name, we're all the same—pieces in one big chess game.” His lines encapsulated P.E.'s game-face competitiveness, anti-authoritarian howl and gleefully punning, polycultural, signifying trashing of Standard English:

Impeach the president

Pulling out the raygun (Reagan)

Zap the next one

I could be ya shogun!

“Man, you got to slow down,” Flavor yelled over the break. “Man, you're losing ‘em!”

Titled “Rebel Without a Pause,” it was the perfect balance to “I Know You Got Soul.” “Soul” moved the crowd in divine, timeless ritual. “Rebel” was a Black riot. Stephney took the record to club DJs at the Latin Quarter and the Rooftop, places that had dissed P.E., and watched from the booths as the fader slid over to “Rebel” and the room hit the boiling point like a kettle. It was John Brown playing “Soul Power,” Kool Herc spinning Mandrill's “Fencewalk” or Grandmaster Flash dropping Baby Huey's “Listen to Me” all over again. “Just to see kids go crazy,” Stephney remembers. “In many instances, fights started.”

“Rebel,” and its follow-up, “Bring the Noise”—in which Chuck ripped crack-peddling, Black incarceration and the death penalty, and then compared critics' condemnation of his support for Farrakhan to being shot by cops, all in just the first verse—captured the tensions of the time and externalized them. The records stormed the airwaves, boomboxes and car stereos that summer and fall. They became unavoidable. Public Enemy sounded like the new definition of black power—smarter, harder, faster, leaner and winning.