Yet Glover is not PE’s direct heir. America is a country in which even its wealthy black citizens understand very well that their skin makes them – literally so – targets; that it puts their children in jeopardy when they walk down the street; that status is no protection from threats supported and often inflicted by its institutions. Nation Of Millions could probably have happened only exactly when it did: at a moment when technology permitted its creation and did not yet make redundant its conceptualisation as both medium and message; and when Western societies by and large abided by the idea that overt racism was somehow distasteful, and unrespectable – meaning its better disguised forms required intense scrutiny. If you love what we do, you can help tQ to continue bringing you the best in cultural criticism and new music by joining one of our subscription tiers. Votes are used to help determine the most interesting content on RYM. An improvement over the original pressing, but why cram an hour onto one disc? A run-through of the tracks feels redundant here. political, angry, protest, raw, urban, energetic, sampling, male vocals, dense, conscious, noisy, rhythmic, rebellious, anxious, violence, Bonus CD, Bonus DVD, Deluxe Edition, Digipak, Remastered, Bonus CD, Bonus DVD, Deluxe Edition, Digipak, Release view [combined information for all issues]. Chuck D has described him as a “daredevil” and an “antimusician”, and it’s hard to overstate the importance of this to Public Enemy’s magnum opus, which is as magnificent a work of sustained antimusic as any I know. Everything is still if not more relevant for what's going on in the world today. Great LP and listening to the sound of Vinyl is still amazing. All its components – the MCs, the production team, a security crew doubling as a stage act, a “Minister Of Information”, a “Media Assassin” – were vital to its operation. The other Bomb Squad members were variously skilled at creating rhythm, feel and movement, using vocal and instrumental samples as riffs (while Flavor Flav played the drum machine track on ‘Rebel Without A Pause’ by hand, giving it a live rather than looped feel; Liam Howlett of The Prodigy later incorporated that kind of variation into his programming to similar effect.) And that was ten years ago. It was one of the first hip-hop tapes I ever listened to on the walk-man on the bus to school. David Bennun looks at how Public Enemy’s masterpiece also remains politically vital. Don't get in arguments with people here, or start long discussions. They both sound amazing. I appreciate the fact they let me download the mp3 version for free with the purchase of this album. PE was so unique and cool at that time. Prime members enjoy FREE Delivery and exclusive access to music, movies, TV shows, original audio series, and Kindle books. It also happens to be my favourite album of theirs, the one I find most musically satisfying as a whole; but there is no question in my mind that while Black Planetis also a masterpiece, Nation Of Millions is much their most radical and important work. Likewise, don't respond to trollish comments; just report them and ignore them. Don't use this space to complain about the average rating, chart position, genre voting, others' reviews or ratings, or errors on the page. It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back. Yet at least, when it comes to the past, popular culture, popular music, remain solid enough. And that was ten years ago. All bets are off now, and polemical art feels like so much shrieking into a hurricane. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Jokes are fine, but don't post tactless/inappropriate ones. Reviewed in the United States on November 15, 2013. Which is not to say that Nation Of Millions is necessarily the better album – although as a political piece, and a polemical one, it is in another league, one of its own making. ‘This Is America’ is a righteous gonzo howl hurled into the internet bearpit that is contemporary American culture. Hank Shocklee’s peers are not so much the other great hip hop producers as they are the likes of Brian Eno and John Zorn. It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, an Album by Public Enemy. Great record! Genres: Political Hip Hop, East Coast Hip Hop, Hardcore Hip Hop, Conscious Hip Hop. Genre: Hip Hop. You don’t have to risk anything. It’s always there lurking, festering, waiting until conditions favour a resurgence. Sometimes great records result from a singular vision, superbly realised (or even mis-realised, but with wonderful results). So it’s hard not to approach the 20th anniversary of Public Enemy’s sophomore album and magnum opus, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, with a little bit of bitterness and a lot of nostalgia.It was the first time a hip-hop album had topped The Village Voice’s Pazz & Jop poll, at a time when a major rap artist could say “Don’t believe the hype” without any hint of irony. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It's been getting a lot of rotations on my Audio Technica LP60 since I received it. PE, working in the pre-wired days, sought to create their own communications system. As much as that testifies to the album’s brilliance, it testifies even more to the abysmal realities of 2018. Rick Rubin has his imprint on this album and you can tell because it hits hard. As a wholly independent publication, we rely entirely on our ad bookings to keep The Quietus going. Don't post randomness/off-topic comments. The irony is that Jewish people could have told black people this: it doesn’t matter whether you climb the ladder economically and politically. I give it 5 stars and recommend you pick this up to relive some of hip hops finest moments! After viewing product detail pages, look here to find an easy way to navigate back to pages you are interested in. There was that arc of the moral universe, duly bending. That the long arc of the moral universe, bending towards justice, should have rendered its righteous fury redundant; should have relegated that aspect to its own time, left the record to be valued for its stunning artistry. That the long arc of the moral universe, bending towards justice, should have rendered its righteous fury redundant; should have relegated that aspect to its own time, left the record to be valued for its stunning artistry. Lately, I’ve been unable to read books or watch documentaries about recent European and American history with the same dispassionate fascination I once did. It is a fantasy, but not an implausible one, of unjust imprisonment, escape and guerrilla warfare. And here we are, sliding down the chute to Hell, with those at the forefront braying to the rest of us, dragged behind them, that paradise waits below. Had it on tape, then CD, then digital, now vinyl. Public Enemy set out to be unignorable, and by Christ did they succeed in that. This was, and still is, one of the best rap albums ever made. It is a bitter lesson when the letter of the law is at last wrested towards fairness, and prosperity (at least to some degree) comes your way, yet equality remains a mirage. So much for the pessimism; were PE not just fighting yesterday’s battle? (They did.) A nation of millions got hypnotized by this masterpiece. Their fury was more than matched by their focus. Your recently viewed items and featured recommendations, Select the department you want to search in, Reviewed in the United States on April 24, 2017. Great record! What can I say about this classic masterpiece, it's PE at their absolute finest. It was something else. There it is, then. There is another, broader and equally applicable interpretation, which is that you wanted it not to be radical because you wanted radical hip hop, 20 years on, to no longer be such a necessary and urgent reaction to the way things are. They championed Louis Farrakhan, the Nation of Islam leader whose noxious anti-Semitism (still prevalent in radical and black power movements today, where, for instance, his poisonous lie that Jews were the principal financiers and beneficiaries of the slave trade remains in circulation) would soon be publicly echoed by PE’s “Minister for Information”, Professor Griff. This will invariably alter in the writing, as it should; but I know where to begin, and I will discover where to end. If one thinks of it as a machine built for a purpose, at times it seems that purpose is, as with Jean Tinguely’s mechanical sculptures, to destroy itself in the most spectacular fashion imaginable. It also analyzes reviews to verify trustworthiness. Because this is a secondary issue, you can only catalog it in the native format (or writable media). As for the extremism, well: PE were overt black nationalists. If you go to see PE today, you’ll find a first-rate showband arranged around the remaining duo of Chuck D and Flavor Flav. Hank Shocklee, foreman of The Bomb Squad, famously and unimprovably described his intention as making “the voice of God” emerge from a “thunderstorm of sound”. As well as the unparalleled joy of keeping the publication alive, you'll receive benefits including exclusive editorial, podcasts, and specially-commissioned music by some of our favourite artists. Use the boards for extended discussion. Keep your comments focused on the release. Any spoilers should be placed in spoiler tags as such. The whole album is fire, and Amazon delivers a great copy of it to us in vinyl format. To find out more, click here. Also, the shipping was prompt and it was packaged appropriately and carefully for vinyl which is greatly appreciated. The message is radical today because it’s not really being said a lot. The same may be said of ‘This Is America’, the horrifying and (in every meaning) sensational tour-de-force song and video with which Donald Glover, as Childish Gambino, delivered such a shock earlier this year. Typical PE. Top subscription boxes – right to your door, IT TAKES A NATION OF MILLIONS TO HOLD US BACK, See all details for IT TAKES A NATION OF MILLIONS TO HOLD US BACK, © 1996-2020, Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates. Awesome album by political rap hip hop masters. Find helpful customer reviews and review ratings for IT TAKES A NATION OF MILLIONS TO HOLD US BACK at Amazon.com. Chuck D indicated as much to tQ on the record’s 20th anniversary: “Yeah, it’s [still] radical politically. (Many Jewish people had themselves succumbed to the delusion of security at that point, which would bring its own bitter lessons. In its themes and its rhetoric, Nation Of Millions prefigures the thesis of Ta-Nehisi Coates, in his book We Were Eight Years In Power, that slavery is America’s original sin, and can never be eradicated; that white supremacism is not an aberration to be eventually fixed by progress, but a structural foundation that will persist for as long as that structure does. Rather, that they created a new category; a thing that was sui generis. (There was.) I love this album and won't bother explaining why it is a must-own classic from the Golden Age of Hip Hop. Not with this one. I'm so happy to have this album to add to my collection. How Public Enemy Made ‘It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back’ Inside the making of PE’s loud, obnoxious, funky, avant-garde, political, uncompromising, hilarious masterpiece Public Enemy's It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back To find, at an impressionable age, a record that not only expands your sense of what music can do … It might be very far from a live recording, but it is very much an alive one. Reviewed in the United States on April 10, 2017. Must own CD and album for all. Be respectful! Reviewed in the United States on December 13, 2019.