Public Enemy's It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back: (33 1/3)

Christopher Weingarten's take on "Nation Of Millions" is a nuts-and-bolts account of how the Bomb Squad produced such a singular-sounding record - the engineering, sampling, scratching, constructing, deconstructing and reconstructing.How they re-sampled their own scratches to create "Bring The Noise", how they plundered and reconfigured their own composition for the proto-IDM splatter-collage of "Night Of The Living Baseheads". And, most importantly, how they played all the samples by hand - together in a room like like a rock band - creating a 'not quite right' tension that made the slick Reichian loops of Marley Marl look instantly dated (and by jacking a lot of the same breaks to boot).Through intense research and interviews, Weingarten delves into the original songs that were sampled and recontextualized forever.He finds out which of the four Bomb Squad members had the most personal relationship with each sample.Which records came from whose crate and why? Four songs sample 'Funky