Souled-Out

Public Enemy's 1988 album It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back was conducted into the academic canon in a conference last weekend at New York University's Clive Davis Department of Recorded Music. That good idea was ruined when a panel titled "Critics Weigh In" (I participated) was attacked by a bozo from The Source magazine. Griping that no "real people" were given the chance to speak, he pandered to NYU students and hip-hop heads who feel pop culture is theirs alone.

Hip-hop's biggest drawback is the arrogant entitlement that derives from a misunderstanding of PE's breakthrough. To hear Nation of Millions again is to rediscover youthful brashness, optimism, ingenuity and, above all, naive certainty about the world. Those things are the album's essence-both for thrill and ill.

It's inexact to say that the world of 1988 had never heard anything like Nation of Millions before. Even at the time, it most reminded me of Never Mind the Bollocks Here's the Sex Pistols. PE had the same effrontery as British punk-not to mention a title that was unwieldy yet lyrical, just like the Smiths. What PE gave America was a dynamized, estheticized version of black teenage impudence. Using terms like "sex for profit," PE spoke up for the disenfranchised youth with intelligence and purpose. PE took out a franchise on politics and intellection and made an irrefutable connection between black pop and modernist pop art.

Chuck D may have been rebelling in memory of the Black Panthers, but anyone with a wide-ranging record collection recognized that his nerviness was much more akin to the privilege of middle-class white rock 'n' roll. You didn't only hear James Brown and Isaac Hayes on the album but David Bowie, Tom Jones, Yoko Ono and Sonny Bono.

And this was a good thing; it saluted every American kid's heritage. But what 17 years' reflection makes clear is that Nation of Millions was mostly an original mix of impudence and social desire. (A direct connection can be drawn from the album's romanticism to Bruce Springsteen's Born to Run.) Like the romanticism of Godard's films about young people realizing their political identity in the 60s, PE suggested that the revolution of hip-hop would be deeper and more serious and more committed than it eventually turned out to be.

Nation of Millions remains a time capsule distilling a moment of political and cultural promise. My favorite track might be "Caught, Can We Get a Witness?" where Chuck, Flavor Flav and Professor Griff harmonize around the term "No Sellout!" Think how Snoop Dogg, Pharrell, Dr. Dre, Eminem, Lil Jon and some NYU students all snort at that today.