The Making of Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back
There’s an informative, but much too brief article on the Rolling Stone website which tells the story of how Public Enemy made what, for many critics, is their masterpiece. It seems to my ears, though, that the writer got an important detail wrong. 
The sound at the beginning of “Rebel Without a Pause” is not a backwards sample from the “The Grunt” by The J.B.’s: it’s simply a sample. In that sense, after so much time, Mark Dery’s September 1990 piece in Keyboard magazine—“Public Enemy: Confrontation,” pages 81–96—remains the best piece on the Bomb Squad’s production methods (it’s also available in That’s the Joint: The Hip-Hop Studies Reader, edited by Mark Anthony Neal and Murray Forman). Still, there’s something to be gained from reading Chuck D’s reflections on the album long after the fact. Click through to read them for yourself.