Yo! Bum Rush the Show is released

Why it matters

Yo! Bum Rush the Show, the debut album from Public Enemy, came out on Def Jam on April 10, 1987. PE at this point was Chuck D, Flavor Flav, Professor Griff, Terminator X on the turntables, and the Bomb Squad (Hank Shocklee, Eric "Vietnam" Sadler, his brother Keith Shocklee, and Chuck himself) producing. The album was not a big commercial hit. It charted at #125 on the Billboard 200. It is not the album people mean when they say "Public Enemy" (the one they mean is It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, the year after this one). What Yo! Bum Rush the Show is, is the album that proved PE was a real thing, the album that gave the Bomb Squad the studio time to develop the dense, sample-stacked, chaotic production style they would perfect on Nation of Millions, and the album with "Public Enemy No. 1" on it, which is the song that originally got Rick Rubin's attention enough to sign them in the first place. You sometimes have to put out the first record so the second record can exist. Yo! Bum Rush the Show is that kind of record.