When Public Enemy started the album that in the summer of 1988 became "It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back," they weren't thinking small.



"We got back from touring England," says Chuck D, Public Enemy's writer and main rapper, and we said, "Let's make a record like "What's Going On."


Aiming at Marvin Gaye's 1971 masterpiece set the bar high.  But "Nation of Millions" cleared it, blasting forward like a freight train with the message that black folks need to claim what's rightfully theirs.



Did we mention it scared a lot of people half to death?



While Chuck D packs considerable wit into his dense lyrics, what comes through first with "Nation" is its intensity, a thunderstorm of rhymes over the blitzkrieg production of Hank Shocklee's Bomb Squad.


"Chuck's a powerful rapper," says Shocklee. "We wanted to make something that could ­sonically stand up to him."


Chuck D is not surprised at the album's continuing impact.


"This was the first hip-hop album that held together all the way through," he says.  "At the time, hip hop was a singles medium. Most albums were a couple of singles and filler.  That's not what we wanted. This was also the first global hip-hop album, linking New York and L.A."


"Nation" came together in a lightning-fast six weeks, he says - "six weeks with 16 years of research and education behind them" - and he says Shocklee's production was a critical ­element.


"It was like when Smokey Robinson came into Hitsville and got together with the Funk Brothers," he says.


What "Nation" also demonstrated, says Shocklee, is that sometimes rapping conveys a stronger message than singing.


"When you're singing, you do things certain ways," he says. "You might need to work with the guitar. You say things differently. Chuck could be direct."


That directness, from Black Panther and ­Nation of Islam references to the tale of a bloody prison break, also drew some flak, which left Chuck unfazed.


"I wasn't a child when I made this record," he says. "I was 27, 28. I was ready.  Whenever you push the envelope, you get disgruntled looks."


Public Enemy never tried to duplicate "Nation," Chuck says: "What would be the point?"


But he's still talking about the issues it raised, everywhere from the 50 college lectures he delivers each year to the Web site www.publicenemy.com.



And no, he says, he's not discouraged that many of those issues remain unresolved.


"Seventeen years is a long time in the music business," he says. "But it's short in life. Many things are different now. There have been a lot of changes."