‘Rebel Without a Pause’: Adam Yauch picked his favourite Public Enemy song
Everybody knows that the New York rap trio, the Beastie Boys, hold an essential place in hip-hop history. Initially a hardcore punk group, a shift to hip-hop across the mid-1980s saw a signing to the fledgling Def Jam label and the happy marriage of rock and rap on debut LP Licensed To Ill, featuring ‘Fight For Your Right’ and ‘No Sleep Till Brooklyn’.
Proving that they weren’t a novel one-album wonder, the Beastie Boys’ decamp to Los Angeles and production collaboration with Dust Brothers yielded the classic Paul’s Boutique, a landmark in sampling evolution that showcased Ad-Rock, MCA, and Mike D’s sophisticated musical palette.
With the following albums, Check Your Head and Ill Communication, Beastie Boys cemented their role as one of hip-hop’s essential innovators. Yet their pioneering effect is often less acknowledged. One of the earliest hip-hop groups to achieve success, having supported Run DMC on their Raising Hell tour and even opening for Madonna back in 1985, their invitation for an up-and-coming Public Enemy to join them for the Licensed To Ill tour in 1987 pushed the politically charged Long Island group to greater heights with the Beasties’ help.
Speaking to Rolling Stone in 2004, Adam ‘MCA’ Yauch singled out one Public Enemy song that made the biggest impression. He said: “I remember the first time I heard ‘Rebel Without a Pause’: We were on tour with Run-D.M.C., and one day Chuck D put on a tape they had just finished. It was the first time they used those screeching horns along with this incredibly heavy beat – it was just unlike anything I had ever heard before. It blew my wig back.”
The lead single of the defining sophomore 1988 LP It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back and the first track cut for its sessions, ‘Rebel Without a Pause’ takes a giant sonic leap ahead of debut Yo! Bum Rush the Show‘s drum-machine minimalism with a richer assault of dense sample attack via his Bomb Squad production team. It borrows everything from James Brown, Jefferson Starship, civil rights activist Jesse Jackson, and even their own 1987 Hammersmith set.
Chuck D shed light on the track’s distinctive whine to Keyboard in 1990: “In ‘Rebel Without a Pause’, we programmed that weird screechy sound. It was sampled to have a clean sound, and it just didn’t feel right, so we cut the amount of time in that siren sample, redid it with, like, a two-bit sampling rate, which made it really gritty-sounding, almost unpresentable, and then we looped that at a point where it was kind of imperfect. That’s what made the record have more soul, have more funk.”
A fan as much as a rap peer, Yauch was candid in his deep respect for the Public Enemy frontman and lyricist: “To me, Chuck D is the most important MC in hip-hop.” According to him, Chuck D’s skills put him at the very top when considering the history of the legendary MCs that have taken it up over the years.
He concluded: “Then if you take into account what he’s actually saying, it puts him on a different plane from any other MC. The combination of him and Flavor Flav is incredibly effective: Chuck is so straight and direct, and Flav brings this wild randomness to it. They complement each other perfectly.”
