Speaking of 20 years, there’s no way I can just let this one ride with the rest of em. This record is too important. In fact, there is no record more important to me than this one.

Pitchfork Media has a three-part video special on it.

The thing to take away from it, especially for people who never really dug hip-hop, is the detail with which the Bomb Squad discusses the architecture of what they were doing. This ain’t Soulja Boy makin beats on a computer, puttin it on youtube, and gettin famous. These are dudes who knew records and what made records work together. Maybe that’s why the album resonates with me at the level it does, because it’s a record lover’s record. To really get the science on it, you’d hafta hear Hank Shocklee break down, in exacting detail, how different labels miked the snare differently and why a given label’s sound worked on a specific record.

Like, peep this from Hank Shocklee’s Red Bull Music Academy lecture:

Hank Shocklee: »Yeah, and it’s funny because we have learned a lot to that process because, I mean, the average drum… First of all the one thing that I have learned was that it’s very difficult to try to recreate a live drummer that’s not going to any timing and trying to have a drum machine that’s going to quantize the time in some numerical value. It may be very loose but it’s going to put it in some sort of a numerical value. And that numerical value is very difficult to try to make feel like a natural cat that’s playing, that’s playing out. And then the other aesthetics also is the sound. You know, what type of room were they in, was there any compression that was on, how many microphones did they have on the drum because one of the things that I find out is that if you – in a lot of the newer recordings is that cats started micing drums with two overheads capturing the stereo ambient room, they’ll have a mic on the top snare, a mic underneath the bottom snare, a mic inside the beater, and then on the kick, and then another mic that’s getting the drum of the kick, and then mics on the tombs and everything else. When you listen to the sound quality of all those things working together, everything is so tight and so precise, then the micing level is so correct that it loses it’s kind of ambient feel. And if you go back to a lot of those old ’70s records, they was like maybe two microphones: one in the kick area kind of, and another one overhead. They didn’t have like ten tracks devoted to drums and micing. So, when you listen to those records, those records had a perspective and a feel, you’ve always felt the perspective of the snare drum coming from somewhere – it’ll be to your right side as you were listening to it because the snare was on the left side of the drummer. So, and then those ghosting snares that you are listening to is the timing of the sticks striking the snare and the reverb and everything else and the little tabs in-between. And all those things in-between were stopped and were very very difficult to try to recreate with a drummachine. So what our device was we said: ”Well, why don’t we just lift it? You know, somehow.“ So then the soul search was to figure out a way to record just that snare. And the ghosting stuff afterwards. That’s why we noticed that when you listen to most of the Public Enemy records, they sound a little off, alright? They don’t sound as tight as other records that you hear because the truncation of the snare is not as precise as the records that you hear today. Today the records are truncated so correct that you hear like one uniform sound, while with the Public Enemy records, I specifically did not want that sound. I wanted a looser feel. So, if the snare hit you hear like a ’ta’ and then you hear something like ’ta krch’ and that little ’krch’ is what I was looking for is because all it does is add a little more character to the sound. And I think that anything that you could do to add more character and more colour to your sound is going to put you in a better space. Because now people are going to recognize you for that ’ta krch’ as opposed to just the ’ta’. It’s just like anything else, if everybody is doing the same thing, how are you going to get known doing it? And the other big thing that we always wanted to do was – I always wanted to create my own sounds. If you listen to those records, those records are a combination of three to four different snares, three to four different kicks, the hi-hats were doubled and trippled, just to come up with that sound that you hear. So that when you listen to it that sound does not sound like anybody else that just happened to get a 1200. Well, you can have a 1200 but you are not going to have those sounds because we created those sounds. So, it offered that and or you can take the record, you can go and lift the record you think that we took, let´s say we took Impeach The President snare that everybody uses. As I call it: if you are baking a cake, you got to have milk and eggs. Well, there is certain things when you are making a record I consider to be milk and eggs. The Impeach The President snare is like milk, you just got to have that in there somewhere. You know, James Brown’s Funky Drumme’, the more ’pickle-on-a-can’ kind of snare, that’s more like eggs, that gives it an extra little flavour. But the meat and the gist of everything is that Impeach The President snare. But we never would have the Impeach The President snare laid out there all naked like for example Marley Marl would use. So Marley Marl would have that snare buttnaked, and that would be out like ’ta’, you would be like: “That’s from Impeach The President, you know that.” Me, I want to do something more subtle. I would layer that with a bunch of different sounds. Sometimes I pull a stock sound from a DMX and layer in there, sometimes I take it from a Linn Drum drum, sometimes it would be laid in with a clap, so it’s all different ways, you know?

That, my friend, is not random knowledge.

And then there’s Rebel Without A Pause. The number one song in my library. Not the most-played song anymore, but still in the top 25, with both the vocal and instrumental versions having over 85 plays each since April. If Nation of Millions is the most important album to me, Rebel is by far the most important song. I’ve written about it before, so I won’t do it again, but suffice it to say that for me, this is just that record. Period.

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