The album Björk called “one of the best of the century”
Nothing that Björk ever made has been described as ordinary or by-the-numbers.
The entire point behind all of her records was trying to take risks that everyone else was afraid to take, and no matter which record you listened to, each song seemed to exist in its own little world for the few minutes that it was on. So when Björk saw other artists that were casually taking risks like that, she always wanted to shine a spotlight on what they were doing.
Granted, it does help when you have the kind of vocal chops that Björk does. A song like ‘Joga’ might be one of the greatest songs that she has ever written, but if it weren’t for her delivery, it would have been a tough sell for anyone to turn a song with changing time signatures and sweeping strings into one of the biggest hits of their career. It was a game-changer whenever she made a new record, but she was more focused on the raw sonics of the album than worrying about every single note sounding perfect.
While she has rarely sung a bad note in her life, the beauty of her catalogue lies in seeing the way her voice intermingles with the rest of the instruments. There are pieces that seem like they could fit just fine over a trip-hop beat, and there are others that are worthy to stand with some of the greatest classical singers of all time, but it was all a part of the same musical stew for her. Genres were nothing but barriers to her, so seeing someone use samplers was wildly exciting when she started her career.
After all, the idea of sampling a track and building it up to be something completely new is what music was all about. There might still be people who consider the practice “stealing”, but if you compare that to what Public Enemy did with all of their samples, they weren’t trying to leech onto a legendary tune. They were making something transcendent, and It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back was almost psychedelic in its sound design.
It’s almost impossible to focus on anything else when Chuck D is on the mic, but The Bomb Squad outdid themselves when trying to find different sound effects to put under him. Some of them might be a perfect match, like that riff that runs through ‘Bring the Noise’, but ‘Rebel Without A Pause’ is one of the most avant-garde beats the hip-hop scene had ever made up until that point. It didn’t always make sense, but what it did have was character, and that was all that mattered to Björk.
She could have easily stuck with listening to more sophisticated music, but what Public Enemy were doing was beyond comprehension for her, saying, “I think that their album It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back is one of the best albums of the century. And I’m talking about all contemporary music all over the world, everything. Such a gorgeous, gorgeous masterpiece, so brave, so changing, and so completely contemporary. It’s a classic. I don’t think people will realise that until the next century.”
But even decades on, the reason why people still cite Public Enemy as one of the best hip-hop acts of all time is because of what a record like It Takes a Nation of Millions meant. It didn’t come in with a knowledge of music theory, but the emotion and raw anger on the record is what people will be remembering for decades to come, whether it’s in the nu-metal bands that started because of them or what a band like Run the Jewels is doing in the modern age.
Was Björk going to end up throwing a rap verse onto one of her songs because of them? Absolutely not, but her later collaborations with people like Timbaland stemmed from learning what hip-hop producers could do in this capacity. Rock and roll had limits on where it could go, and it was much more exciting putting together a beat and having no idea what you would end up with.
