The Bombsquad: Tech and Sampling

According to the WhoSampled database, Public Enemy used over one hundred unique samples ranging from numerous James Brown tracks, to funk like Funkadelic, to soul like Sly and the Family Stone, and other black artists. Without exception, black artist samples are used to craft their beats, often with track on top of track on top of one another. Chuck D once called Bomb Squad member Hank Shocklee, the “Phil Spector of noise.”

Public Enemy has to be brimstone and fire. Thunder and lightning. It can’t be soft and warm and familiar. Otherwise it won’t create agitation. So with each sample I was pulling up the high frequencies, in order to pull up, not just the snare of the guitar or whatever, but also pulling up the ambience, and even the imperfections in the vinyl itself. So that’s why people started talking about “noise”.

Kajikawa notes this effect in many of Public Enemy’s songs, “high pitched saxophone and drum break repeat relentlessly every measure… harsh timbres and clashing rhythms gave rise to the sound of insistence that Pareles described as ‘uncompromisingly confrontational’” (Kajikawa 76). Brief, repeated loops create a kind of attack through song, which fit Public Enemy’s rebellious messages.

From The Quietus interview with Hank Shocklee
The Bomb Squad consisted of Terminator X, Hank and Keith Shocklee, Eric “Vietnam” Sadler,” and briefly Professor Griff before he was fired from the group for anti-semitic comments. This band produced all the beats for ‘Fear of a Black Planet’ through heavy sampling, loops, and some live instrumentation. Photo from The Quietus interview with Hank Shocklee.

On “Who Stole the Soul?,” Public Enemy uses two Beatles samples from “Getting Better” and “A Day in the Life.” This and when  they use Hall and Oate’s “I Can’t Go for That (No Can Do)” on “Leave this Off Your Fuckin Charts” are the only times they use white artists, and it’s for a different purpose than building the beat. Public Enemy instead use these samples strategically to show appropriation, and then to re-appropriate the black music that the Beatles and Hall and Oates are deriving their sound from. The Beatles were indebted to early rock n’ roll and even girl group pop, but Public Enemy takes that and calls Shocklee the Phil Spector of noise, taking back the idea that a white producer whitened and commodified black artists.