It influenced It Takes A Nation when we finally had all our songs done. I had this tape of our live performances in London to intersperse within the album. That was the first album that was broken up. We used live excerpts from that point on. De La Soul had done it with skits, but we wanted to present an experience, so all of those elements went into it. You hear that on the beginning of “Countdown To Armageddon.” It starts with audio from a London concert. We called it the ‘London Invasion’ when we went over there with the Def Jam Tour. We had the recordings to let people know that, ‘Look, you might not be on to what we do, but we have a whole entire world on to what we do.’ So, it takes a nation to hold us back. The album title was actually conceived from an interview from Now Magazine in Toronto, where they used it for the headline of their article. It comes from a line from a song that’s on Yo! Bum Rush The Show called “Raise The Roof.” Originally, the album was going to be called Countdown To Armageddon, but myself and Hank Shocklee, who was the other wall of noise, saw the interview together. It was so crazy long that it was actually kind of dope ‘cause it stood out. Hank actually was working in a record store - he was the manager of Sam Goode up in Queens. One day he showed me Iron Maiden and he says, ‘Yo these dudes are dope.’ That stuck with us when it came down to marketing Public Enemy, like their titles and themes. One of my favorite remixes you did was “Bring The Noise” with Anthrax. I know Rick Rubin did that with Beastie Boys and Run-DMC did that with Aerosmith, but did hardcore metal seem like a risk at all? On It Takes A Nation, there a lot of metal samples in there. We knew these sounds and we knew it worked. We understood groups, records, and sounds. ![]() We knew turntablism makes them all come to the forefront. ![]() I read you tracked down a lot of the voice samples yourself. The scratching on the album comes from two DJs, Terminator X and Johnny Juice Rosado - the unacknowledged hero on the turntables on both Yo! Bum Rush The Show and It Takes It A Nation. Terminator X had a scratching style that was more of a funk rhythm and Johnny Juice was a sharp executioner. When we felt like certain scratches weren’t going to work, Juice would knock them out.
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