IT Takes A Nation of Millions To Hold Us Back - Legacy and Influence

Legacy and Influence

Widely regarded as the group's best work, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back has been claimed by various publications and writers as one of the greatest and most influential recordings of all time. Upon the album's remastered reissue in 1995, Q hailed It Takes a Nation as "the greatest rap album of all time, a landmark and classic". Also upon its reissue, Melody Maker called the album "bloody essential" and commented that "I hadn't believed it could get harder . Or better". NME dubbed it "the greatest hip-hop album ever" at the time, stating "this wasn't merely a sonic triumph. This was also where Chuck wrote a fistful of lyrics that promoted him to the position of foremost commentator/documentor of life in the underbelly of the USA". Mojo stated upon the album's 2000 European reissue, "Responsible for the angriest polemic since The Last Poets.... revolutionized the music, using up to 80 backing tracks in the sonic assault....to these ears PE sound like the greatest rock'n'roll band in history". In 2003, Rolling Stone ranked the album number 48 on its list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, making it the highest-ranked of the 27 hip hop albums included on the list. Time magazine hailed it as one of the 100 greatest albums of all time in 2006. Kurt Cobain, the lead guitarist and singer of rock band Nirvana, listed the album as one of his top 50 favorite albums in his Journals. In 2006, Q placed the album at number seven in its list of "40 Best Albums of the '80s". As of June 2010, It Takes a Nation of Millions is ranked as the top album of 1988 and the seventeenth greatest album of all time at AcclaimedMusic.net. In 2012, Slant Magazine listed the album at #3 on its list of "Best Albums of the 1980s" behind Michael Jackson's Thriller and Prince and the Revolution's Purple Rain.

In his 2004 book Appropriating Technology: Vernacular Science and Social Power, Ron Eglash commented that a sonically and politically charged album such as Nation "can be considered a monument to the synthesis of sound and politics". In 2005, New York University's Clive Davis Department of Recorded Music hosted a two-day retrospective called "The Making of It Takes a Nation of Millions." It featured a producers' panel that reunited Hank Shocklee, captain of the Bomb Squad, with the Chairmen of the Boards from Greene St. Recording. When asked in 2008 if the album would still be considered as radical if it were released two decades later, Chuck D said he felt it would "simply because it's faster than anything on the radio right now. And yeah, it's radical politically... because it's not really being said a lot. You want it to not be radical, but it is because it's totally different from Soulja Boy."

Public Enemy performed the album in its entirety as part of the All Tomorrow's Parties-curated Don't Look Back series. Music from the album has been sampled by various artists over the years, including (though not limited to) the Beastie Boys ("Egg Man"), Game ("Remedy"), Jay-Z ("Show Me What You Got"), Jurassic 5 ("What's Golden"), Madonna ("Justify My Love"), and My Bloody Valentine ("Instrumental B"). The album is broken down track-by-track by Chuck D in Brian Coleman's book Check the Technique.