Yo!

Here’s a post from the occasional series entitled records what I done rescued from my dad’s shed. Word up. Here’s Public Enemy Yo! Bum Rush The Show.

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I first encountered Public Enemy in their most perfect form, the concentrated cacophonous whirlwind, heat and anger flash that was It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back and worked forwards from there. I knew there was a debut LP and that it was less so but the drive with hip hop was and is always towards the next thing, the new thing* so I hadn’t explored backwards.

Enter that most hallowed repository of hip hop history, my dad’s shed. I liberated Yo! Bum Rush The Show from there and agreeing/identifying once and forever with the PE tickertape of paranoia message that THE GOVERNMENT’S RESPONSIBLE … THE GOVERNMENT’S RESPONSIBLE … took possession of their 1987 debut and fled back to civilisation.

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I thought their first LP was just nauseating misogynist shit

Richey Edwards, Manic Street Preachers

Yo! Bum Rush the Show kicks off with the best track on the LP, the Oldsmobile-tastic ‘You’re Gonna Get Yours’. All sampled tyre squeals and loosey-goosey bassline it really is as close to innocent fun times as PE ever got. It is a great fun, my-car’s-better-than-yours throwdown that has ‘Rocket 88’ and ‘Race With The Devil’^ locked up in its DNA.

Then we hit more problematic waters with ‘Sophisticated Bitch’ which really is nauseating, misogynistic shit to quote my countryman. Rather like GNR’s ‘One In A Million’ it is frustratingly the best thing, musically on this LP, with a great lyrical hook and guitar by Vernon Reid. Listen to it once and then skip it.

Interestingly burrowing into journo Simon Reynolds book Bring The Noise for an early PE interview Chuck D doubles down on the point of ‘Sophisticated Bitch’ as well as opining a touch fixedly on gay rights; as neither cropped up as issues again in PE’s cannon, I assume they outgrew these views as they progressed, lived and learned. Not all my idols are flawless.

Back to the music nothing stands out much before first side closer ‘Rightstarter (Message To A Black Man)’, which is a real barn-burner where PE up the tempo and the anger, effortlessly taking flight over the duller mid-paced offerings before. Some classic PE wake yourself up hectoring going down on this track.

The second side of Yo! Bum Rush The Show is the sound of a collective, reaching for but not quite nailing their sound – Flava Flav isn’t quite the comic relief clown he became later, Chuck D swears, the beats drag in places. The anti-crack ‘Megablast’ hits the target as does ‘Terminator X Speaks With His Hands’, as the PE production team start to hit their groove.

What is interesting to me are the sheer amount of lines that PE would later sample from themselves on later tracks, it’s neat, they build their own mythology on their own foundations.

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Yo! Bum Rush The Show is one of those LPs that justifies its presence in the 1537 as a clear stepping stone on the way to a masterpiece and a handy reminder genius needs working at and is rarely hatched, fully-fledged.

It was worth rescuing from the shed and ‘You’re Gonna Get Yours’ aside, I’ll look it up again in 2033.

1180 Down.

*and I’ve always loved that contrast with the dewy-eyed nostalgia-addled annals of rock**.

**and I say that as a dewy-eyed nostalgia-addled anus of rock myself. Note to self: check that ‘anus’ is indeed the singular personal iteration of ‘annals’.

^Gene Vincent & His Blue Caps not Roxx Gang, on this occasion.

From the Mighty Scrapbook Of Rock: Richey Manic