Noting the enthusiastic response toward their live shows, Public Enemy intended to make the album's music at a higher tempo than their 1987 debut Yo!

[9] Since its initial reception, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back has been regarded by music writers and publications as one of the greatest and most influential albums of all time.

Bum Rush the Show, while acclaimed by hip hop critics and aficionados, had gone ignored for the most part by the rock and R&B mainstream,[13] selling only 300,000 copies, which was relatively low by the high-selling standards of other Def Jam recording artists such as LL Cool J and Beastie Boys at the time.

"[17] In order to ensure that their live shows would be as exciting as those they played in London and Philadelphia, the group decided that the music on Nation of Millions would have to be faster than that found on Yo!

Public Enemy began making the album at Chung King Studios in Manhattan but ran into conflicts with engineers prejudiced against hip hop acts.

[17] Initially, the engineers at Greene Street were also apprehensive about the group but eventually grew to respect their work ethic and seriousness about the recording process.

[17] Recorded under the working title Countdown to Armageddon, the group ultimately decided on It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back instead, a line from their first album's song "Raise the Roof".

[15] When the group began planning the second album, the songs "Bring the Noise", "Don't Believe the Hype", and "Rebel Without a Pause" had already been completed.

[25] Instead of looping the break from James Brown's "Funky Drummer", a commonly used breakbeat in hip hop, "Rebel Without a Pause" had Flavor Flav play the beat on the drum machine continuously for the track's duration of five minutes and two seconds.

Hank Shocklee decided to flip the sides just before the mastering of the album and start the record with Dave Pearce introducing the group during their first tour of England.

[27] Music critic Robert Christgau noted these elements and wrote that the Bomb Squad "juice post-Coleman/Coltrane ear-wrench with the kind of furious momentum harmolodic funk has never dared: the shit never stops abrading and exploding".

[29][30] On the album's content, music journalist Peter Shapiro wrote "Droning feedback, occasional shards of rock guitar, and James Brown horn samples distorted into discordant shrieks back the political rhetoric of lead rapper Chuck D and the surreality of Flavor Flav".

[29] Ethnomathematics author Ron Eglash interpreted the album's style and production to be "massively interconnected political and sonic content", writing that "[the Bomb Squad] navigated the ambiguity between the philosophies of sound and voice.

Public Enemy's sound demonstrated an integration of lyrical content, vocal tone, sample density and layering, scratch deconstruction, and sheer velocity that rap music has never been able to recapture, and that hip-hop DJs and producers are still mining for gems".

"[23] Hank referred to Chuck D as being the person who would find all the vocal samples, Eric Sadler as "the one with the musical talent," and noted that his brother, Keith Shocklee, "knew a lot of the breakbeats and was the sound-effects master.

[23] Asked years later if replicating the number of samples used on the album would be possible [due to increased clearance costs for copyrighted material], Hank Shocklee said while possible, it would be far more expensive.

[32] Throughout the album, Chuck D delivers narratives that are characterized by black nationalist rhetoric and regard topics such as self-empowerment for African Americans, critiques of white supremacy, and challenges to exploitation in the music industry.

directly addresses the issue of sampling in hip hop and copyright violation from a perspective that supports the practice and claims entitlement due to "black ownership of the sounds in the first place".

[33] "Rebel Without a Pause" exemplifies the faster tempo that Public Enemy intended for the album,[25] while incorporating a heavy beat and samples of screeching horns,[34] the latter taken from the J.B.'s' "The Grunt" (1970).

"[33] Lyrically, it eschews the traditional verse/chorus—verse/chorus song structure, with 12 bars of Chuck D's aggressive rapping, punctuated by Flavor Flav's stream of consciousness ad-libs.

In his review for Rolling Stone, David Fricke described the album as a "Molotov cocktail of nuclear scratching, gnarly minimalist electronics and revolution rhyme" and complimented its "abrupt sequencing and violent sonic compression of rapid-fire samples, slamming-jail-door percussion, DJ Terminator X's tornado turntable work and Chuck D's outraged oratory".

[44] Los Angeles Times writer Robert Hilburn said that the album incorporates some of the dynamics of early rap records such as Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five's "The Message" (1982) and Run–D.M.C.

[45] Writing for NME, critic James Brown said that "Nation of Millions... is impressive because it moves, it uses and it's a music—not the acetate-thin barrage of whingeing and boasting that so often passes for rap",[46] while in Q, David Sinclair called it "an unimaginably urgent album seething with vengeful rage and booby trapped with incendiary musical devices".

[48]Despite writing that it "sounds powerful, fresh and galvanizing", Mark Jenkins of The Washington Post found its lyrical content inconsistent, stating "Aurally, 'Nation of Millions' is intoxicating; Hank Shocklee and Carl Ryder's bold production will likely prove among the most distinctive of the year, not just in rap but in any pop genre.

For their work to pack the political wallop they crave, however, the members of Public Enemy need to think for themselves, not just attach themselves to the thought of whichever black nationalist is currently drawing big crowds".

[50] In its year-end list of 1988's best albums, Q called It Takes a Nation "a blistering collage of beat box [sic], rock guitar, police-radio chatter and high-velocity rapping.

[58] Readers of Hip Hop Connection voted it the best album of all-time, prompting the magazine to comment, "Even 'Rebel Without a Pause', a definite contender for best rap single ever released, failed to put the other 12 [sic] tracks to shame, such was the high standard throughout.

"[67] Mojo stated upon the album's 2000 European reissue, "Responsible for the angriest polemic since The Last Poets....[they] 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".

[27] 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.

"[77] The album's revolutionary attitudes also influenced musician and activist Kathleen Hanna of the seminal riot grrrl band Bikini Kill.