During a quite a well appointed panel of producers and artists that included Don Was, Peter Asher and Linda Perry, I asked Public Enemy producer Hank Shocklee about one of the enduring mysteries of rap: the excitable mayhem of the track “Rebel without a Pause.”
On a panel for “SoundBreaking: Stories from the Cutting Edge of Recorded Music,” which comes to PBS series premiering Nov. 14, Shocklee said the accelerating screech that starts the track is not, in fact, a tea kettle.
“Actually, no, it wasn’t,” he said at last. “I would love to be able to tell you everything that was in the record, but the statute is kind of like murder. There is no statute of limitations. So I have to refrain from telling you what it actually is.”
(It turns out to be the opening notes of The J.B.’s “The Grunt.”)
But he did say how “Rebel Without a Pause” arose.
“I was listening to a record that Eric B. & Rakim made, and it was called, “I Know You Got Soul.” And I heard that record for the first time on the radio station, and the DJ played it. I think it was Mr. Magic DJ played it. He was on WBLS, in New York.
“And when he played that record, I was furious. I was supposed to go into the movies with my family,” he says, “but I stayed in the car and they went into the movies just listening to the record. They played it like three times, and so after it got off, I called Chuck up and I said, ‘Chuck, did you hear?”
“He says, ‘Hank, I heard that record. I hate that record. It is the worst record out there,’ because that record was so incredible that we wanted to make something that was going to top that record.
“So immediately after I got out of the movie theater, I took my family home, went to the studio, and then we just came up with ‘Rebel Without a Cause,’ which was the answer to, ‘I Know You Got Soul’ by Eric B & Rakim.”
The track in fact also sampled “Funky Drummer” and “Get Up Offa That Thing” by James Brown, “I Don’t Know What the World is Coming To,” by the Soul Children featuring Jesse Jackson, “Rock ’N Roll Dude” by Chubb Rock, and “Pee-Wee’s Dance” by Joeski Love.
“Rebel Without a Pause” was sampled in hundreds of tracks, including 2Pac’s “Holler if Ya Hear Me,” and Public Enemy’s own “Bring That Beat Back.”