It was twenty years ago today...

Well, not today exactly, but I just had to pick up Señor David's Beatles reference from the last post. Greetings, it's Delany Flushboy from Malmö, Sweden with some nostalgia for you.

I got my first CD player in late 1986 and in 1987 they started chronologically rolling out CD re-releases of the Beatles albums. To this day Rubber Soul conjures up memories of the green glow of the LED display from that old CD player. The hype culminated on June 1 when Sgt Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band was released exactly twenty years after the album was released. The event was tailor-made for headlines that read "It was twenty years ago today..." I remember thinking, "Twenty years. That was a whole other time back then. Before I was even born. The sixties." But this post isn't about the Beatles.

The next summer, on June 28, 1988, Public Enemy released It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back. The event went unnoticed by me – I was too busy chasing down soundboard quality Grateful Dead tapes blessed by Dan Healy. But you can't keep a good record down. Eventually PE's masterpiece made it's way into even my ear holes, hidden away in the Buffalo suburbs. My life, or at least my musical taste, has never been the same. Music itself has certainly never been the same.

Now it's been twenty years since PE released Takes a Nation of Millions on the world and I'm awestruck, but from the other end of time's flexibility. Can that really be what twenty years feels like? Seems more like Yesterday, but then I'm back to the Beatles so I'll stop and let Public Enemy tell the rest of the story.

Pitchfork, the online music magazine, recently hosted a forum with PE about the anniversary. They even made a little documentary about it. Let me hear you make some noise for Public Enemy...

PART ONE


PART TWO



PART THREE