Louder Than a Bomb: The Bomb Squad

Behind the Boards: After revolutionizing the art of noise with Public Enemy, Hank and Keith Shocklee’s squad stays on point.

Words: Chairman Mao
Originally published in ego trip #13, 1998

Back in the days, I really thought rap would never die. That’s because before RZA brought the ruckus, before Cypress Hill scored ultraviolet dreams through bubbling bong water, Strong Island production terrorists, The Bomb Squad, were the be-all-to-end-all of organized noise. Originally centered around Spectrum City—the Roosevelt, NY DJ team founded by brothers Hank and Keith Boxley—this ensemble of MCs, personalities and audio philosophers channeled local fame and an unquenchable appetite for hip hop into a pioneering college radio mix show on Adelphi University’s now defunct WBAU. Somewhere along the line, Hank and Keith even snapped up a catchy alias from Clint Eastwood’s character (“Ben Shocklee”) in the cinematic action thriller, The Gauntlet.

But the action really got serious when Def Jam’s Rick Rubin displayed a keen interest in one of the radio jocks’ most popular on-air pause-tape jams. Said demo—later known to the world as Public Enemy’s “Public Enemy #1”—sounded like nothing that preceded it. Rooted firmly in the James Brown breakbeat tradition, yet catapulted by unprecedented, openly cacophonic abrasion, P.E.’s inaugural anthem paved the way for its production arm’s stupendous series of masterworks. Public Enemy’s first three classic forays—Yo! Bum Rush The Show, It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back (a/k/a The Greatest Hip Hop Album Of All-Time) and Fear Of A Black Planet—as well as Squad-helmed side projects like Ice Cube’s epochal Amerikkka’s Most Wanted, perfectly exemplified the order-through-chaos genius of Hank and Keith Shocklee, Eric Sadler, Chuck D and company; one in which the Panthers’ revolutionary rage, the Godfather’s grits and gravy, Dr. Funkenstein’s ideological framework and heavy metal’s banshee wail collided in a high-speed wreck somewhere on the Long Island Expressway.

After stepping away from hands-on console duties for P.E.’s later work, the members of the Bomb Squad amicably went their separate ways. Eric relocated down South, Keith began supervising the construction of the Shocklee siblings’ recording studio and Hank (after the disappointing dissolution of his early ’90s’ Sound Of Urban Listeners Records label) became the Senior Vice President of Black Music at MCA Records. Having recently returned to active duty by turning in some of the finer moments from P.E.’s He Got Game soundtrack, lanky Brothers Bomb, Hank and Keith, recently discussed the Squad’s music while shopping for keyboard hardware on a sunny spring afternoon in midtown Manhattan.

Tell me about the early days of Spectrum City.
Hank: Back when we started building our DJ unit, it was me, Keith and Professor Griff. But me and Keith were looking for an MC because [all the DJ crews] had an MC at the time. We went searching for one at a function at Adelphi University [in Long Island] because they used to have Thursday night gigs. But most of those motherfuckers was wack. We were bored out of our minds listening to these wack-ass MCs rapping. And then this one kid grabbed the mic and he made an announcement. And he did such a good job of making the announcement, it fucked me up. And that kid happened to be Chuck D. I liked the way his voice sounded so I said, “Yo, do you wanna get down with us?” I was throwin’ parties, so Chuck came down and lit it up.

Keith: We was called “Spectrum,” but when Chuck came along, he said we might as well call ourselves “Spectrum City” because we had our own little world. We had a whole crew with us. The Security Of The First World, [back in the day] they was actually our security at parties! Later, when we brainstormed the whole P.E. thing, we just put everybody to use. Everybody had a place and a position.

Hank: And that’s also how we created the Bomb Squad. Eric Sadler, Keith, Terminator X, Flavor Flav and Chuck was all a part of the Bomb Squad. But we would work like a conveyor belt. Eric and Keith would make beats, Terminator would come in with the scratch parts, Chuck would go find the spoken word parts, I would organize and shape everything and mix everything. And Flavor would come in and play whatever he could lend his expertise to.

How did that production process shape your collective vision for the group?
Hank: Public Enemy was never an R&B-based, runnin’-up-the-charts, gettin’-played-all-day-on the-radio group. It was a street group. It was basically a thrash group, a group that was very much rock ‘n’ roll oriented. We very seldom used basslines because the parallel that we wanted to draw was Public Enemy and Led Zeppelin. Public Enemy and the Grateful Dead. We were not polished and clean like any of the R&B groups or even any of our rap counterparts that were doing a lotta love rap. That just wasn’t our zone—even though when we were DJs we played all those records. We decided that we wanted to communicate something that was gonna be three dimensional—something that you could look at from many different sides and get information from as well as entertainment.

Keith: We never wanted to not be noticed cuz if you didn’t get noticed, you got passed by.

Hank: And we always looked out for the underdog cuz we were the underdogs. When Public Enemy first came out, we was ridiculed, we was dissed: “They have plastic guns onstage, Chuck D can’t rap, they beats is noisy and wack.” So we never really dined at the table of “hip hop elegance,” if you wanna call it that. That was [also] our whole situation [when we were younger]. We were the people that couldn’t get into the upscale parties. We were never really accepted. We was always the grimy motherfuckers. When we was going through college, we wasn’t the motherfuckers in frats.

Keith: We’d get in fights with frats! Yo, it was crazy!

Hank: We couldn’t get in their gigs so we had to bum rush the party. That’s where “bum rush the show” came from.

Keith: They would hire us to DJ and then wouldn’t want to pay us at the end of the night because we did such a good job. The frat always wanted to take over the show. They wanted to be the main thing.

Hank: But we were the highlights. So the frats got a little jealous. They used to be like, “We didn’t like the way y’all was playing.” We was like, “What do you mean? Motherfuckers was losing their minds all night long!” I mean, we had DJing down to a science to where we had highs and lows, we had tempo changes, ups and downs. It wasn’t just a steady [flow of] record after record.

That style was reflected in the hectic nature of your production as well—the interludes, the dense, multi-layered walls of sound.
Keith: I think that came about because we was excited about what we were doing and we wanted to keep everybody’s attention. Being DJs and understanding the dance floor, we knew that when your record’s not full, it becomes stagnant. We liked to put stuff in a record so later on, after you heard the record like 12 times, you’d be like, “Yo, I didn’t know they put that in there!”

But the thing was, we put in stuff that made sense. I seen a lot of people copy the stuff that we were doing, but it just didn’t fit their records. We never put anything in a record that didn’t fit the record. We went through a lot of samples. A lot of samples! We liked confusion, but we still kept it at a point where it was danceable, it didn’t crowd anything and you always understood the song.

You also had a knack for working fast. How did that develop?
Keith: We had a bunch of groups we was working on at the same time as P.E. We had Kings Of Pressure, this kid True Mathematics and we had the Leaders Of The New School in the background. So we had to keep that pace up. What we did then is a blueprint for what everybody is doing now. That’s why everybody came with squads—the Flip Mode Squad, Def Squad. Everybody has squads because we set the whole blueprint of the artist and the team behind it.

Hank: And it was also about making sure you constantly hear them—like with what Puffy’s doing right now. Once you get people’s attention, you can’t give ’em time to sit back and relax. You gotta hit ’em with the next joint. The only way you can do that is if you’ve got a team continuously working. While the group was on the road, we would send tapes to them. And then Chuck would call and say, “Yo Hank, I wrote something for it, I’ll be in New York tomorrow. I’ll lay a vocal.” He’d go in the studio, we’d mix the motherfucker up and it’d be out on the block while they were on tour.

Keith: What were we gonna do, wait for them to come back? Nah, we started doin’ remixes and stuff for other people.

Hank: We did Vanessa Williams while we was doing the P.E. record. We would just rent out Greene Street Studios—have both rooms runnin’ and then run back and forth between them. We was doing Ice Cube the minute we stopped doing P.E.

You mentioned people who tried to replicate your style. How did you feel when Cypress Hill first came out?

Keith: The way we was brought up, we was fans of hip hop. Cypress did their thing. I knew Muggs from way back cuz we [produced his first group] 7A3. When we [supervised] the Juice soundtrack, we was like, “We gotta put ‘How I Could Just Kill A Man’ in the movie.” Cuz it was hot and [there was] the perfect scene for it. That’s how we are. We think about what’s good for the situation. That’s why when people started doing our style, I didn’t mind. We was takin’ styles from everybody else too. But we just knew how to make it so it seemed like it was a Public Enemy thing.

There were no limits to people’s creativity back then also because of the less restrictive sampling laws.

Keith: Your freedom for expression was sky’s the limit. Like a lot of the stuff that we did then, you couldn’t do that now. Sample clearances would kill you!

Hank: We just finished He Got Game and it was crazy! Def Jam actually had a guy in the studio watching us! It was bananas! He was making sure [we limited] what we sampled—
Keith: —[in case] we might’ve slipped in a record that they don’t know about!

That’s just based on your track record—
Hank: —of sampling! The whole sampling thing has gotten out of proportion anyway because if you use one little lick from somebody, [the sampled artist is] claiming like 50% copyright! I tend to think that the laws should protect the entire composition. I understand that. But when you’re starting to protect licks, and [musical] phrases, now you’re getting to a [dangerous] point. That’s like saying, “Let me copyright the note ‘C.’” And anytime somebody uses it you’re like, “Oh! You usin’ ‘C.’ I should get some!” No! Because that might be part of what makes the song, but it’s not stealing the entire composition.

You shouldn’t be usin’ other people’s work and getting paid for it, but come on, man! I think there’s got to be a limit. You know, I’m happy for the old schoolers, the vets that didn’t reap much of the benefits when their music was out because the record companies was rippin’ them off. Now at least they get a chance to recoup their investments and hard work. It has its pros and its cons. But anything taken to an extreme just gets crazy.

Did anyone come after you retroactively for sample clearances?
Keith: Aaahhh…[laughs] There’s still stuff that we’re dealing with from back then.

Hank, I read this Keyboard magazine interview with you from 1990 where you told the interviewer, “We don’t like musicians. We don’t respect musicians.” Do you still feel that way?
Hank: It wasn’t like that. The guy that interviewed me [called me when] I was sleeping and I said that stuff cuz I didn’t really wanna do the interview.

We’ve always respected musicians, but just like anything there’s assholes in every situation. I didn’t necessarily like the elitist attitude musicians seemed to have [at that time]. You know, there’s always a rift between musicians and DJs. The musicians think that the DJ’s just fucking up they creativity. To me, all that shit is bullshit because what has happened with sampling and DJing and people that’s comin’ in from a non-musician perspective, [is that they’ve] widened the scope. Now all of a sudden everybody’s not fightin’ to be a leader in that 10% zone of “true” musicians. It’s a wider spectrum because a lot of the hip hop cats are into a more simplified version of music—because they can’t play the riffs and the runs, they can’t play the complex chords and structures.

And a lot of that [musicianship] isn’t necessary. When we were comin’ up we didn’t care about all that. We used to hire musicians to play a bassline or whatever and they would complicate the issue! We’d be like, “All we want is [imitating a bassline] ‘Bmmp-Bmmp! Bmmp-Bmmp!’ and they’re comin’ in like, ‘Buh-luhluhluhluhluhluh!’ And we’d be like, “No, no, no, no! Simplify it! Make it funky, and make it hot!” I think Prince is the most incredible musician on the planet, but the problem is that the motherfucker’s changin’ grooves and patterns and melodies and notes every three seconds! So you sit there and say, “Damn, I can’t follow this motherfucker!” I mean, yeah, the shit might be dope, but for who?! Most people like a simple groove, a simple melody. They’re not really trying to feel all those complex arrangements and things of that nature. When it gets too complicated everybody’s like “Eh…next!”

But couldn’t people turn that argument around on you guys too as far as the complexity of your arrangements?
Hank: Yeah, but the key was we made it all sound simple, even though we might’ve used a lot of elements. We only used them to make the music more expressive. A lot of music now has gotten to the point where it’s very simple but it’s lacking expression. For example, you don’t hear build-ups. You don’t hear second choruses that are a different variation from the first chorus. You basically hear a repeat. And then the vamp is nothing but those two choruses looped ’til the end of the record. We would not only build on vamps, our vamps might’ve been different from the chorus, and they still accentuated the main message in the record.

Do you think the more traditional format of songs like “He Got Game” may come as a surprise to your older fans?
Keith: It’s a surprise to people that are used to our older stuff—the chaotic, dissonant-type sounds. But one thing we have to realize is that the music has changed. It’s more musically oriented and not more of what I would call “beat” oriented. I just think kids have grown into understanding music more. When we came up, rap was still almost a new thing, so you could get away with everything. But now, since you got R&B stuff on rap, rap on R&B stuff, it’s become more musical. But it’s like back then we wore Wranglers. Now everybody’s wearing Boss and Hilfiger. That’s just the way of the times.

But while we understand we’re in a new age, we also understand this is still P.E. It’s not like we went off and did a ton of records that might have sounded like it came from the Bad Boy camp. We couldn’t do that because then everybody would know that we were fakin’ it and just tryin’ to jump on the bandwagon.

Hank, you were a part of a creative team that made an enormous impact on hip hop but as an executive, you’ve been relatively quiet. What are you looking to spearhead in music for the future?
Hank: I’m always on the side of the underdog, and R&B is the underdog right now. Hip hop is reigning supreme. What I want to do with R&B is bring it to where rap is. R&B is so fuckin’ homogenized. There’s no difference [between the artists]. In rap, whether Keith Murray sells a million records or 100,000 records he’s a distinctive motherfucker. That’s hip hop. It’s all about distinctiveness. Well, R&B lacks this. There are the Marys and K-Cis and JoJos, but everyone else is derivative.
We’re losin’ the creativity of the music because now it’s a cash game. There’s not many people goin’ into stores. Why should they go in there anyway—just to buy the same loop on five albums? I tell people right now in my present position, “I don’t listen to records, I feel ’em.” “Listening” to records, to me, is so nerdy, it’s so passive. Records are supposed to be in the background, and if they take your attention, then you know you got something. If not, then you know, you just gotta go back. So that’s what I look for. I look for that feeling that I get. Do I tense up when I hear it? Like when I hear DMX, I go, “Oh, God!” When you hear Canibus, you just get a chill. That’s what you wanna get from records.

1. • 3 Tha Hard Way: Classic 1998 Def Squad Interview
2. • WATCH: “Bushes (Bomb The Throne).”
3. • Fear and Loathing In Long Island: Press Rewind if Def Squad Hasn’t Blown Your Mind