"Rebel Without a Pause" is released

Why it matters

"Rebel Without a Pause" came out as a single on July 1, 1987. It is the lead single from what would become It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, the album Public Enemy was building in the months after Yo! Bum Rush the Show. The Bomb Squad built the beat around a sample of the JBs' "The Grunt," specifically the squealing high-pitched horn loop that runs the length of the record. The loop is the song. Chuck D and Flavor Flav rap over it for four minutes. That horn-loop is one of the most recognizable sounds in rap history. You have heard it. You may not know what it is called, but you have heard it. It came from a 1970 James Brown band B-side and Public Enemy made it a permanent part of the language. "Rebel Without a Pause" is also the song that demonstrated, in the field, that the Bomb Squad's production style worked: dense, layered, almost industrial, more like noise music than the funk-loop tradition rap had been working in. The whole 1988-1990 PE catalog is downstream of this single. So is a lot of what hip-hop production becomes after.