Young Galaxy’s Stephen Ramsay on defining his punk rock through Public Enemy’s Yo! Bum Rush the Show

By Stephen Ramsay - Young Galaxy

I would like to tell you about how hip-hop, and specifically about how Public Enemy’s debut album Yo! Bum Rush The Show  was my very own punk rock, and the jumping off point for my mini-rebellion, and enduring love of subversive, challenging art. But first, here’s a little preamble to help contextualize things.  

I was born and raised in the mill town of Nanaimo on Vancouver Island, B.C., which by all accounts is the cradle of a white, blue-collar existence. The Internet was still a top-secret government experiment (or something), and culturally, the kids were neatly ordered into little sub-genres. In high school I grew up amongst jocks, druggies, heads, and a very tiny smattering of goths and punks. AC/DC and Led Zeppelin blared from every truck stereo and beer blasts at the ‘wastelands’, a giant abandoned gravel quarry, was the preferred activity of the teenagers in my town. In the 19 years I lived there, I think I met about 7 black people. I mean it - this town is seriously white.

Restless from the homogeneous, predictable nature of my town early on, it was therefore easy for me to fall under the spell of anything that reared its head from outside the bubble of my everyday existence. From an early age I had a thing for pop music, British pop, specifically, as my Scottish cousin started sending mixtapes of the BBC chart rundown when I was about 9 years old, and it all seemed so irresistibly exotic. They featured bands like Duran Duran, The Jam, Wham!, etc… I was a full fledged “Durannie” by age 10, the only boy in my school to be so. They seemed like a gang, wore leather pants, had haircuts like tropical flowers and besides,  who doesn’t want to drink hot pink martinis underwater with super models (Thanks for coming out AC/DC – the allure of your matching, dusty jean vests was sadly not as aesthetically powerful…)? By 12, I was dabbling in punk and post-punk. I had heard and liked the Sex Pistols, Bauhaus, The Smiths (which could be the subject of a whole other essay) and Joy Division (ditto). By the time I was exposed to rap music and hip-hop, I was predisposed to hunt down representations of otherness in art to look for expressions of what could be deemed otherworldly. Indeed, it was for these reasons, as well as its newness and subversive, challenging nature that rap music excited me like no other musical form at the time. 

My best friend Niel (no ‘sic’ needed – he spelled it that way) and I had seen a one-hour Much Music special on rap music, and it’s growing popularity. We were both instantly enamored by the exoticism and other worldliness of it – here was a voice coming from completely outside our cultural experience. We started to fervently collect any rap albums we could – which weren’t many in Nanaimo, but nonetheless trickled in on the strength of features in major music magazines like Rolling Stone and Spin. We started with groups like Run-DMC, LL Cool J and The Beastie Boys… it was, in retrospect, our punk rock. It was totally outside the realm of what our parents understanding of music was. It was in-your-face, alien, minimal, artless, immediate, and of our time. It was pure declaration. Even actual punk rock had come from a different time than our own, and had guitars, etc. so it was more instantly relatable to our parents, who had experienced the guitar-fuelled revolution of the 60s. Plus, in my mind, it seemed a bit cartoonish to be taken seriously: a sullen, adolescent lashing-out which, through the examples of Sid Vicious and a few other sorry types, seemed more about self harm and provocative fashion than actual rebellion when the chips were down.  

It was Public Enemy’s Yo! Bum Rush The Show that really changed the way I saw the world. I felt stirred. For the first time, I wasn’t hearing the lets-party-braggadocio of the rap that preceded Y!BRTS, but rather, the voice of a community - the voice of intelligent, angry black youth. A rap album that let you know rap music was not a flash in the pan, but rather, a cultural phenomenon that would allow previously disenfranchised people a platform to let others know what life is really like for a great amount of people in the world. It was a wake up call to our sleepy, middle class existences. A massive FUCK YOU. Y!BRTS is an album dripping with real menace, not the playboy, make-believe menace of LL Cool J, for instance.  

Take the album cover, for starters. The Public Enemy logo is a black man in the crosshairs of a rifle scope. It features the group with their hands all in as if to make a collective declaration, evoking Black Panther-like solidarity. They are lit by what appears to be a kind of interrogation lamp in a darkened, garage like space. The group is wearing militaristic berets and Chuck D is dressed in what vaguely looks like Islamic garb. Nobody is wearing gold chains, which at this point is ubiquitous in rap music. Along the bottom of the album is the repeated line of ‘The Government’s Responsible’ on a kind of billboard ticker… clearly, we are not in Kansas anymore. In the age of ubiquitous geometric 80’s neon ‘action tortilla’ album designs as (my friend calls them) - this is as provocative as it gets.  

The music of Y!BRTS is a combination of minimal, low-crawling, menacing beats, industrial noise, and dark, lumbering funk. I think Y!BRTS is Public Enemy’s funkiest album in many ways. The wah-wah stabs of 'Time Bomb,'  the filtered chicken pickin’ guitar sample in ‘You’re Gonna Get Yours,’ the low-riding grind of ‘Miuzi Weighs A Ton’ and the angular bass hits of the title track all speak to DJ Terminator X’s deft ear for a great sample. PE came to be known for many things – their political stance, the call-to-arms clamor of their later material, their army like presentation, etc. but on Y!BRTS the focus is a lot more on the groovy nature of the samples.  

As well, the album features some early attempts at the sonic experimentation they became renowned for on later recordings such as ‘Bring The Noise’ and ‘Rebel Without A Pause.’ ‘MPE’ features a noise sample like a saw being run. ‘Public Enemy No.1’ has a squelchy drone running through it that sounds like a bumblebee on Quaaludes. The title track features a sample of what sounds like a Canada goose being dropped on a piano repeatedly and randomly, followed by the blast of a whistle. Awesome stuff.  

And then there is that voice. In the voice of Chuck D, you have the perfect representation of the unflinching, all encompassing voice of an angry young black man. It’s booming, assured and most definitely ready to challenge the whitebread preconceptions of pop culture that were predominant at the time. It is a voice of pure challenge. I absolutely love Chuck D’s voice. Without it, Public Enemy may have been nothing more than a cultural footnote in the history of hip hop – their success revolves completely around Chuck D’s overwhelming vocals. Sure, his and the group’s most refined moments may have come on subsequent albums, like It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back, but on Y!BRTS he never sounded more menacing and urgent. Throughout the album, his vocals are slap backed and claustrophobic, adding to the album’s air of intimidation. You would be hard-pressed to find more explosive energy in his voice than in ‘Rightstarter (Message To A Black Man),’ one of the first call-to-arms for black culture in rap history. On tracks like ‘You’re Gonna Get Yours’ and ‘Public Enemy No.1,’ he’s never sounded so animated and youthful – it’s the kind of excitement that comes with committing your first recordings to tape. These are amongst Public Enemy’s most playful recordings – they had yet to refine the super-serious, politically driven material that defines their career, yet when Chuck D. booms ‘Out that window/middle finger for all’, you get the sense that he is not to be trifled with. He sounds huge and terrifying – even if he’s just rapping about how awesome his 98 Olds is! Incredibly, there is barely any swearing on this album – one gets the sense that Chuck D. is fully aware of the power in his voice and by not swearing keeps up a palpable level of tension, as if to suggest that he is not even close to exploding, and that you should be very, very careful not to provoke him.              

Then there’s Flavor Flav. The archetypal modern sideman, he’s a cryptic, vaguely ridiculous counterpoint to Chuck D’s mesmerizing vocals. He’s a squeeze of lemon or a sprinkle covered ice cream cone to Chuck D’s 30 oz. Filet Mignon. Throughout the album, he helps to cut the intensity in the air a little, reminding you that, yes, this is still indeed showbiz. Yet on one of the album’s most compelling tracks, ‘Megablast,’ which is about crack addiction, you get to see behind the veil of his clownish personae for one of the few times in his career. His voice has never sounded more genuine or serious on any other P.E. record.            

Yo! Bum Rush The Show was a watershed moment in my development. It was the moment when I figured out that I too could make music if I felt like it. That was the beauty of rap music, ultimately. In one fell swoop, it broke down the last vestiges of formalism in music making, as punk had begun to in the 70s. All you need was a voice and a beat. Fuck the training - you just need to have something to say, and to say it creatively and confidently. Soon after hearing Y!BRTS, my friend Niel and I began to write our own rap songs under the cringe-inducing moniker ‘Conflict Of Interest’. We couldn’t have been more than 12 or 13 years old. My name was conversely DJ Slam, MC Hurricane or Steve Treach, depending on the day of the week. Niel still has the tapes to this day somewhere – I think we taped over a store bought Abba tape with our own songs. Once, I remember doing ninja rolls across the field of my elementary school in the middle of the night so that we could spraypaint ‘Conflict Of Interest Posse’ on the side of the gymnasium. It literally took weeks to work up to this act of subversion, so well trained we were as good, suburban kids. This excursion ended all too quickly, as the paint can jammed on the first ‘C’ in ‘Conflict’. To this day, there is probably a little blue line still visible on the wall of that gym.  

Sadly, my all-consuming love affair with hip-hop was fairly short lived – because, as is the norm these days especially, rap was quickly subsumed by the mainstream, and suddenly every song had a token mid song rap in it. That’s right Bobby Brown, I’m looking at you. In my mind, rap was becoming increasingly watered down and formulaic. Niel on the other hand actually had something of a career in hip-hop, so profoundly effected he was by it. Google ‘Finesse & Showbiz’ – that was his short-lived pop-rap group he formed in the 90’s, and you’ll see what I mean. He went on to become a renowned DJ in Vancouver known as Mr. Rumble, too. I on the other hand, found my refuge in indie rock, though I probably should have gone into heavy metal, because that’s where the money is…      

Stephen Ramsay- July 2010

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Stephen Ramsay lives in Montreal. He is a practicing astral projectionist, an expert fencer and a fair shot with most weapons. He also plays in the band Young Galaxy, whose album Invisible Republic comes out in the U.S. July 27th on Paper Bag Records. They are touring in the U.S. in August. Go to www.myspace.com/younggalaxy for details.                   

Comments

[Lee]

Trippy fire, dude.
Def Jam forever.