May. 28, 2008 - Issue #658: Beija Flor

BACKLASH BLUES - The Bomb Squad drops bass

The lineage between modern music and the roots that influenced it can be difficult to discern. Due to the international nature of music and the way people can be influenced by things indirectly, it’s hard to properly distribute credit for certain ideas or concepts. The Bomb Squad (comprised of Gary G-Wiz, Chuck D, Eric “Vietnam” Sadler, Keith and Hank Shocklee) was the primary production team for Public Enemy during the group’s most productive period, crafting the sound for classic albums such as Yo! Bumrush the Show, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back and Fear of a Black Planet.

Their sound was arguably the first in rap music to take seemingly arrhythmic or abrasive sounds and combine them with upbeat, funky elements. Last Sunday in Dublin, Ireland, while opening for Public Enemy, they took those two tenets of their sound (abrasion, funk) and filtered them through the futuristic lens of dubstep.

Though they seemed somehow confused by the terminology (Keith referred to the music being played as “dub bass,” “wobble wobble” and “terrorist frequency music”) and the audience’s knowledge base (he occasionally mentioned how people in the crowd “haven’t heard this before,” even though dubstep is actually mostly made by Western European producers and enjoyed by a mostly Northern English/Irish fanbase), they understood the purpose of the genre and its connection to their own legacy.

Pummeling the crowd with track after track of relentless bass synth and off-kilter drum programming, the fact that they were playing an hour long set of weird instrumental electronic music dawned on me. I only started to reconcile what was going on midway through the set, when they played a dubstep remix of “Slow And Low” by Beastie Boys. There is a logical connection between the drum machine minimalism of early ‘80s proto-rap production and today’s regimented, bass-heavy dubstep school of beatmakers. It makes sense that the same people who looped a high-pitched kettle blow of a saxophone from the JBs’ “The Grunt” into a hip-hop classic in ‘88 (“Rebel Without A Pause”) would also be interested in the high-low interplay of dubstep in their later years.

When I talked to Hank, he mentioned that he wasn’t interested in playing the stars of the scene when he DJed, purposefully eschewing Skream, Rusko and Benga. To me, it seemed like he wanted to keep a uniformity in the music he was playing, to really relay the sense that dubstep is a movement. The speakers rattled in Tripod that night at several different times, but during this set by the Shocklee brothers, one couldn’t help but feel like they were using the speakers in a way that is homologous to a tank shooting its cannon: heavy artillery from old generals. V

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