Welcome to Week 8 of our Book (Album) Club! This weeks album is It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back by Public Enemy
Please give the album a fresh listen and give us your thoughts, opinions and possibly hot takes.
Doesn’t matter if this is your 100th time listening to the album or you listen to the album the first time right before posting!
November 14th: The Blueprint by Jay Z
November 21st: Blac Sabbath by Blacastan
November 28th: Ready to Die by The Notorious B.I.G.
December 5th: Sincerely, Detroit by Apollo Brown
December 12th: Unstoppable by The Reminders
This is a busy day/week for me at work, so I’ll have to keep this short.
This album is very much a product of the time, so before I start I’ll mention some obvious stuff that doesn’t hold up super well. The beats can be repetitive and the rhymes/flows, my modern standards, are terrible. If a modern rapper came out sounding like this, nobody would buy that album.
Now that that is out of the way, I love this album. When I first got in to rap (outside of weird underground stuff), this is the sort of stuff I listened to. I was in my “modern rappers just rap about bitches and money, old rapers rapped about real stuff” phase. While I outgrew that phase, it is nice to hear some blatantly political rap. I checked and this was the fifth best selling rap album of 1988, beaten by “Straight Outta Compton”, “Eazy-Duz-It”, “He’s the DJ, I’m the Rapper” and “Life Is…Too $hort”. Not bad to be behind NWA, Eazy-E, Will Smith (and DJ Jazzy Jeff) and Too Short. I also fucking love the scratching on some of these beats. That old school sound of a DJ scratching records always gets me hype.
Favorite track is Bring the Noise and Show 'Em Whatcha Got. Bring The Noise is a classic and I just really like what they did with the saxophone sample on Show 'Em Whatcha Got.