Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos

Produced by the Bomb Squad — Hank Shocklee, Eric Sadler, Keith Shocklee, and Chuck D — and recorded in 1988 during sessions for Public Enemy's landmark second album 'It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back', the track features Chuck D delivering a first-person narrative about a draft resister imprisoned and escaping from federal custody, built over one of the Bomb Squad's most densely layered and sonically aggressive productions. Released in 1988 on Def Jam Records as part of 'It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back', 'Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos' was widely acclaimed as one of the album's centrepieces, with Chuck D's extended narrative lyricism and the track's cinematic structure drawing critical praise as evidence that hip-hop could sustain complex, long-form storytelling at the highest artistic level. The track has been extensively covered and sampled, most notably by Tricky whose 1995 trip-hop reworking brought it to a new audience and remains one of the most celebrated hip-hop covers in British music history; it is consistently ranked among the greatest rap recordings ever made and is a standard reference in critical literature on hip-hop as a narrative and political art form.