The Bomb Squad

From HitStory, the pop encyclopedia of School of Rock · Artist

The Bomb Squad was an American hip hop production team, best known for its work for Public Enemy. Its members included Hank Shocklee and Keith Shocklee, Eric Vietnam Sadler, Gary G-Wiz, Bill Stephney and Paul Shabazz. Chuck D of Public Enemy was also part of it, under the name Carl Ryder. Their first work was Public Enemy's debut album, Yo! Bum Rush the Show, from 1987.

Music and breakthrough

The team was known for a dense, idiosyncratic production style. On a single track they often stacked dozens of samples on top of one another, and they also used harsh, atonal sounds. The result was a wall of rhythm, sirens, scratches and fragments of older records, which sounded at once wild and precisely built. For Public Enemy they made It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back in 1988 and Fear of a Black Planet in 1990, and Fight the Power for the film Do the Right Thing in 1989.

Influence

The Bomb Squad also worked for other artists, including Slick Rick, LL Cool J, Ice Cube and Bell Biv DeVoe, and made remixes for pop artists such as Peter Gabriel and Janet Jackson. Their way of sampling made it clear that a producer could be a composer working with existing recordings. The dense, messy sound they devised remained a model for hip hop producers for a long time.

Listening

In School of Rock

The chapters, maps and magazine stories of School of Rock are currently available in Dutch only.

• Mixtape 6: Fear of a Black Planet^NL Reader