Public Enemy's It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (33 1/3) by Christopher R. Weingarten Page A

wanted to say on a three-minute side of a Stax 45, so he let himself stretch out for 18-minute workouts like “By the Time I Get to Phoenix” — a song Public Enemy no doubt found inspiration in for their MLK Day screed “By the Time I Get to Arizona.”
Hot Buttered Soul
was as unlikely an album as they came during a time when most R&B albums were just cobbled-together collections of singles and covers.
Hot Buttered Soul
dripped with extended jams that challenged the radio-single format, slurring strings in sharp contrast to the spare Stax output, showing a bassy bravado that wallowed below the timbres that R&B fans were used to. Plus, it had no singles or promotion to speak of until a month after its release. Nevertheless, it single-handedly changed R&B from a singles genre to an album genre after it sold a million copies, landing simultaneously on the R&B, pop, jazz and easy listening charts. Part of its unique appeal was a result of Hayes pulling from a slew of disparate sources, much in the way that P.E. would stack Slayer and Spoonie Gee. Hayes originally heard “Phoenix” on the radio as performed by country-pop artist Glen Campbell, and none of the Bar-Kays in his backing band were too excited about it.
    Out of the four songs on the album, Hayes wrote only one himself, the nine-minute sex romp “Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymistic.” “We wanted to tease one’s intellect,” said Hayes about this juicy jabberwock. “It only meant that I had a roll in the hay and wanted an encore. All of those extensive words, all those syllables — I had a nice roll in the hay, and I want some more.” 65 After some lexual healing and a line about hearing a “discussion about a racial relationship,” Hayes plays a six-minute piano solo, including five seconds that are looped for the tense nail-biter of a beat for Public Enemy’s “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos.” A Hayes track talking about his “gastronomical stupensity” and “love asphixiation” may have seemed better suited for Flav getting brainknowledgeably wizzy than Chuck D mounting the greatest jailbreak ever put to wax. But P.E.’s use of the only Hayes-penned song on R&B’s creative breakthrough represents the importance of autonomy and self-reliance that Public Enemy stress both creatively and politically.
    Isaac Hayes was one of Chuck’s heroes, his “musical godfather” who appeared on records bought by his aunts, uncles and parents. He was a figure whom Chuck has described as larger than life in his childhood — “like Superman, black Superman.” 66 Chuck had picked out the Hayes sample for a Bomb Squad production in 1987, but not for Public Enemy. It was originally intended for a track by True Mathematics,one of a handful of Hempstead MCs whom the Bomb Squad were managing at the time. Yet Chuck wanted it for himself and quietly prayed that Mathematics couldn’t handle it. As fate would have it, the track quickly ended up in Chuck’s more able hands. At that point, Chuck reached back to the years when Hayes was at Stax for inspiration.
    The Vietnam War weighed heavily on Chuck, who, around 1967, saw one of his uncles come over to his grandmother’s house to pick up his draft papers. At age 7, Chuck couldn’t understand much beyond the look on everyone’s faces. He had relatives who were drafted out of high school — when they returned, they had Purple Hearts. One had shrapnel in his leg. In “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos,” Chuck plays a conscientious objector who was imprisoned because he tossed his draft notice. The track’s escape plot, somewhere between story rap and gangsta rap, offers vivid imagery and violent solutions that stand in sharp contrast to the rest of
Nation of Millions
— the corrections officer who catches a slug in the track stands as the only person whom Chuck has ever killed on a record.
    When it came time to lay down vocals, Chuck was hesitant to record them because he had a cold, but the tense,