Hip-Hop's Greatest Year: Fifteen Albums That Made Rap Explode

Public Enemy, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back
Release Date: June 28, 1988
Key Tracks: "Bring the Noise," "Don't Believe the Hype," "Night of the Living Baseheads"
What Caught On: Having already established their sound on 1987's Yo! Bum Rush the Show, the production team known as the Bomb Squad (led by Hank Shocklee) hit their stride in '88. The tracks on Nation of Millions... aren't simply samples layered over backbeats — rather, the samples are stacked on top of each other, crowding each other out and swirling into a chaotic, noisy stew. Chuck D didn't invent righteous belligerence, but he certainly got it on MTV. "Our two big singles coming into this record ["Rebel Without a Pause" and "Bring the Noise"] had really brought the speed of rap music up a notch," Chuck explains. "We wanted the songs to move faster to match our intensity, and that made me more intense in turn. That was the foundation of that record."
What Didn't: If there's one thing that Public Enemy proved, it was that rap groups have a hard time sustaining more than one dynamic personality. Chuck's razor-sharp raps are sometimes derailed by the turned-to-eleven goofiness of Flavor Flav.

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