The classic album that left Rick Rubin in tears: “It just took on a whole new level”
Every music producer is there to do a job when working with a band. They might like to call the shots a bit whenever working on a specific track, but the producer’s job has always been to serve the song and try to pull something out of the artist that even they didn’t realise they were capable of. No producer has a heart of stone, though, and Rick Rubin remembered being reduced to tears the minute he heard It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back by Public Enemy.
Before he became the wise musical guru that he’s known as today, Rubin first got started as a young punk living in New York City. After putting together his first few bands, Rubin knew that he would be better suited to fostering someone else’s talent, usually serving a background in whatever project he was working on.
When you sign on Rubin as a producer, you’re not going to get the guy who twiddles the knobs and occasionally says, “Sounds great, guys” from behind the glass. Rubin is a song man, and he’s going to make sure that whatever makes it onto the record is one of the best things that you have ever made.
Although punk may have been the most authentic sound coming out of the late 1970s, Rubin was just as interested in the emerging hip-hop scene, becoming an early advocate for Run-DMC and Beastie Boys. Those were still songs that could be played at parties, but Chuck D was looking to hit you over the head the minute you started listening.
That curiosity is what always set Rubin apart from the pack. He wasn’t tied down to any one scene, and the more different something sounded from what he already knew, the more it seemed to pull him in, whether that was the raw aggression of punk or the stripped-back pulse of early hip-hop. Where other producers might have stayed in their lane, Rubin was already thinking about how all of these sounds could sit next to each other and still feel dangerous.
So by the time Public Enemy came along, it wasn’t just another project to get behind. This was something that felt urgent, like it had a point to prove, and Rubin could sense straight away that it wasn’t going to sit quietly alongside everything else coming out at the time. The noise, the density, the sheer force of what Chuck D and The Bomb Squad were putting together felt closer to a statement than a collection of songs, and that was exactly the kind of thing Rubin had been looking to be part of.
Inspired by every hard genre under the sun, Public Enemy was the hip-hop answer to a band like The Clash, taking the hallmarks of the genre and using them as a tool to enact political change. They just needed someone to help tie everything together, and Rubin was just the guy to bring It Takes a Nation of Millions to the next level.
Working heavily with Chuck and the production team, The Bomb Squad, the entire album features tracks that feel like a movie playing in your head. After getting bludgeoned on pieces like ‘Bring the Noise’, you can find yourself analysing lyrics and laughing at the same time on songs such as ‘Cold Lampin’ With Flavor’.
By the time Rubin finished, he was on the verge of tears, saying, “I was on an airplane listening to it, and I remembered I cried. I was so proud. Because to me, it just took on a whole new level, and I just remember crying, thinking this was such a beautiful thing… That’s all I wanted from music, and I wasn’t getting it from rap at the time.”
Rubin wasn’t the only one wanting to push the envelope with rap. Whereas most of the previous hip-hop hits were about creating a nice groove to keep the beat moving, this was the kind of record that had to be dissected on many different levels, all while still being able to keep the groove going whenever you listened to it.
And if you think about the current state of conscious rap, many of them wouldn’t have started without Public Enemy. Artists like Common may have been known as some of the first to make message songs, but if it weren’t for Chuck D speaking up for the first time, who knows where hip-hop would be today?
