Public Enemy - It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back

In 1988, Public Enemy set out to make a record that sounded like nothing else on the radio. Chuck D later said the goal was simply to "destroy music." What they delivered instead was the most confrontational and densely constructed album hip-hop had yet produced, and for many listeners it remains the genre's high-water mark.

The sound is the work of the Bomb Squad (Hank and Keith Shocklee, Eric Sadler, and Chuck D), who sifted through thousands of records for fragments of funk, soul, sirens, speeches, and raw noise, then stacked them into a wall of sound that feels chaotic and airtight at once. Over the top, Chuck D's booming, statesman-like delivery plays off Flavor Flav's manic energy while Terminator X cuts behind them. "Bring the Noise" and "Rebel Without a Pause" tear along at breakneck tempo, "Don't Believe the Hype" takes aim at the media, and "Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos" spins a prison-break narrative into a six-minute epic.

Arriving a year after their debut Yo! Bum Rush the Show, the album raised the tempo and sharpened the politics, confronting racism, media manipulation, and injustice with a directness rap had rarely attempted. It is routinely counted among the greatest albums ever made in any genre and is frequently named the finest hip-hop record of all time. Closing in on forty years later, its production still sounds radical.