Mary Love - Born to live with heartache (Elco)
Lee Shot Williams - Our thing is through (Shama)
Stratoliners - What do you want with my love (Federal)
Victoria Williams and J.B. Ledbetter - Show some sign (Verve)
Little Gigi - Take the bitter with the sweet (Select)
Wrapping Up
A genre ages out.
by Sasha Frere-Jones
October 26, 2009
Disco Weighing in early on what academics call “periodization” is a dicey proposition. If you try to locate the moment of a major paradigm shift, in the moment, perhaps by calling your album “Hip Hop Is Dead,” as Nas did in 2006, you’re slipping into weatherman territory. Will it rain tomorrow? Will another great rap album pop up? The life spans of genres and art forms are best perceived from the distance of ten or twenty years, if not more. With that in mind, I still suspect that Nas—along with a thousand bloggers—was not fretting needlessly.
If I had to pick a year for hip-hop’s demise, though, I would choose 2009, not 2006. Jay-Z’s new album, “The Blueprint 3,” and some self-released mixtapes by Freddie Gibbs are demonstrating, in almost opposite ways, that hip-hop is no longer the avant-garde, or even the timekeeper, for pop music. Hip-hop has relinquished the controls and splintered into a variety of forms. The top spot is not a particularly safe perch, and every vital genre eventually finds shelter lower down, with an organic audience, or moves horizontally into combination with other, sturdier forms. Disco, it turns out, is always a good default move.
Hip-hop, a spinoff from New York City’s early disco culture, has been a commercial proposition since the release of “Rapper’s Delight,” in 1979. That’s thirty years, a long time for any genre. If you want to be conservative and decide that mainstream cultural relevance kicked in toward the end of the eighties, with New York’s golden age and the quick follow-up of gangsta rap, the wildly popular genre from Los Angeles, that still leaves twenty years of cultural impact. This may be a fine time for hip-hop to atomize. The original form has done an awful lot of work.
“The Blueprint 3” falls in line with other recent mass-market successes in hip-hop. Compare it to Kanye West’s “Glow in the Dark” tour, or Kid Cudi’s breakout hit “Day ’n’ Nite,” and you will notice that this is hip-hop by virtue of rapping more than sound. The tempos and sonics of disco’s various children—techno, rave, whatever your particular neighborhood made of a four-on-the-floor thump—are slowly replacing hip-hop’s blues-based swing. It doesn’t matter if you’re talking about the rudimentary digital sound of New Orleans bounce or the crusty samples of New York hip-hop: this music wants to swing and syncopate. On major commercial releases, this impulse is giving way to a European pulse, simpler and faster and more explicitly designed for clubs.
A mildly entertaining patchwork of styles, anchored by lots of guest singers and rappers, “The Blueprint 3” is only tenuously connected to Jay-Z’s best work, and a patient listener will have to accept that. Gone are the autumnal poise and the tightly nested meanings, verses delivered with the bravado of someone who knows he could go all night but will bow out early to appear deceptively human. The new Jay-Z is a relaxed impresario, a Macher with A-list friends making safe choices. On the single “D.O.A. (Death of Auto-Tune),” Jay-Z mentions rappers that he previously overshadowed, an acknowledgment, perhaps, of a shift in hierarchy: “This shit need a verse from Jeezy, I might send this to the mixtape Weezy.” The latter is a reference to Lil Wayne, who publicly claimed the title of “greatest rapper alive,” while also stipulating that it used to belong to Jay-Z. Wayne was right, for a while, and then went weirdly silent, save for a few odd rock tracks. Wayne’s 2008 release, “Tha Carter III,” which included “A Milli,” a thick, psychedelic ramble tied to a thin, metronomic canter, was the year’s biggest-selling album—and probably the last moment when hip-hop was both popular and improbably weird.
“The Blueprint 3” features nothing as startling or vital as “A Milli.” (Jay-Z albums were once routinely loaded with three or four such songs.) The only tune that interrupted the summer flow of Michael Jackson songs in my Brooklyn neighborhood—not far from where Jay-Z grew up—was “D.O.A.,” a bit of a stylistic throwback, using a generous sample of an obscure 1970 rock record. It sounds more like vintage nineties Jay-Z, and it’s the only track in that mold. The rest of the album veers toward a pop median, giving synthesizers and R. & B. singers the last say. For “Run This Town,” that means Rihanna has to tackle a dreary and aimless melody that could be saved only by someone with a surplus of persona. (Mary J. Blige and Nina Simone come to mind.) On “Empire State of Mind,” Alicia Keys improves matters significantly, sending her voice high and strong: “Let’s hear it for New York! ” Why not?
The album begins, though, with “What We Talkin’ About,” which sounds like a cover of a slow Italian disco number from the seventies with a particularly tuneless chorus. “Young Forever” is genuinely European, a flat-footed remake of “Forever Young” by the German synth-pop band Alphaville. “Off That,” Jay-Z’s duet with the young rapper of the moment, the genial and deft Drake, works over a brisk computerized bubble that doesn’t necessarily sound as if it needed any rapping. None of the beats here are subpar, and Jay-Z is too smart to be boring, but there are few verses you’ll walk around repeating (unlike “The Black Album,” from 2003, which read like an alternate Bartlett’s, all pith and punch lines), and the music simply confirms that Jay-Z knows what’s happening in pop, not that he necessarily belongs there.
Other rappers will likely ride this new wave of club beats better than Jay-Z, but they have yet to emerge. It won’t be Kid Cudi, whose singsongy mumble does nothing to save “Already Home,” a sluggish number on “The Blueprint 3,” and whose début album, “Man on the Moon; The End of the Day,” manages to be both distracted and ill-tempered.
As the marquee names nudge rap into its transitional, synthetic phase, a host of traditionalists are doing strong work in well-known older styles. This movement reminds me of metal and jazz, areas where artists work in a larger number of established subgenres that do small but consistent business with loyal audiences. The claim to shock is traded in favor of a reliable form and a reliable following.
Raekwon, one of the Wu-Tang Clan’score members, just released “Only Built 4 Cuban Linx . . . Pt. II,” the follow-up to his 1995 début, “Only Built 4 Cuban Linx . . . ” It’s a sequel few thought would come and fewer thought would be any good. (Imagine if “Chinese Democracy” had been as good as “Appetite for Destruction.”) Raekwon has drifted between uninspired beats and retreads since the nineties. He seems to have found his voice by simply returning to where he started. “Cuban Linx II” sounds like an old Wu-Tang record: scraggly samples from soul records and rapid, gnomic bundles of rhymes about drug-selling and agitated encounters. Almost every skit involving Raekwon or his partner, Ghostface Killah, involves somebody yelling at somebody else. This is the Wu-Tang vision of living in the projects, “The Wire” before there was “The Wire.” Whether or not it really represents life as Raekwon and his bandmates know it isn’t relevant; this is the life that they know how to describe, and there’s an urgency here that’s entirely missing from the recent work of artists like Jay-Z and Kid Cudi.
Freddie Gibbs is the one rapper I would put money on right now. And, though it may be irrelevant to his gift, the criminal life that Raekwon raps about on “Cuban Linx II” is still very familiar to Gibbs. When I spoke to Gibbs on the phone, he told an unadorned story about growing up in Gary, Indiana. “We don’t even have a movie theatre,” he said. “We don’t even have a mall. I can’t ride around Gary and get inspired—we don’t have anything.” Several years ago, Gibbs was selling drugs out of a friend’s recording studio. He eventually decided he could rap better than the people coming in to record. His efforts found their way across the Web to Interscope Records, and Gibbs was signed. He moved to Los Angeles in 2005, and began to work at a relentless pace. “I was two hundred per cent into this rap thing,” Gibbs said. “Four P.M. to 1 P.M. the next afternoon in the studio.” When Joe Weinberger, the man who signed him, left Interscope, Gibbs was dropped.
Gibbs returned to Gary briefly, falling back into crime. Some friends encouraged him to return to California, and he did. He has now released five mixtapes onto the Internet, some using the material originally intended for Interscope. These are not quite like other hip-hop mixtapes circulating, where the standard practice is to record new material over other artists’ well-known beats. They are closer to fully formed albums, especially the newest one, “Midwestgangstaboxframecadillacmuzik.” The beats are almost all original and there is a minimum of filler. (Gibbs’s take on this approach is also a short summation of the music industry’s woes: “These rap motherfuckers giving you twenty-five songs with only five good ones—who is going spend their hard-earned money on that?”) Gibbs rhymes the way he talks, quickly and cleanly, with little sentimentality or exaggeration. After years of bloated expansion and leveraging of fantasies, “gangsta rap” has largely become a meaningless term. Unvarnished reporting delivered with a panache that balanced the pain—this was gangsta rap’s first achievement, not unlike the cry of mid-seventies reggae artists like Culture and Bob Marley. Somewhere along the way, the struggle to escape became a love of accumulation, and underdogs ended up sounding as smug as the authorities they once battled.
“I think rap is about to go back to the early nineties,” Gibbs told me. “You could do whatever you wanted, and radio had to play it.” Gibbs does not currently have a record deal, and he isn’t looking for one. ♦
GIL SCOTT-HERON
“Winter in America”
(Strata East/Get Back/Trem Azul)
“Look around in any corner/if you see some brother/looking like a gonner/it’s gonna be me…” Quando Gil Scott-Heron gravou estas palavras na canção “The Bottle”, incluída no memorável “Winter in América” (o seu único álbum para a “cult label” Strata East, originalmente editado em 1974), não podia imaginar que por esta altura haveria de estar a cumprir uma sentença de prisão por posse e consumo de cocaína. Diz-se que a arte imita a vida, mas no caso particular de Gil Scott-Heron parece que a sua vida cumpriu os desígnios que originalmente o inspiraram a escrever.
Scott-Heron é, sobretudo, um poeta que, como poucos, soube cantar a negritude na América, nunca se coibindo de expor os podres que avassalavam as suas ruas, apontando o dedo aos responsáveis de ambos os lados da barricada que delimita o “ghetto”. Neste álbum, por um lado, temos um profundamente irónico “H2O Gate Blues”, sobre o escândalo de Watergate denunciado pelo Washington Post, mas também se encontra “The Bottle”, um retrato agudo do vício dentro da sua comunidade. “See that black boy over there running scared/His old man in the bottle/He done quit his 9 to 5 he drinks full time/and now he’s living in the bottle…” Gil Scott-Heron, qual “griot” moderno, observa o pulsar do seu povo de uma esquina espiritual para depois disparar a pergunta “And don’t you think it’s a crime when/time, after time, after time, ‘people in the bottle?/There’s people living in the bottle…” Gil não fornece respostas, apenas se questiona, agitando bem em frente do seu próprio nariz um espelho que reflecte a complexidade de uma comunidade a braços com um novo género de devastação – interna, funda, dolorosa. Mas, como explica nas notas que assina no interior da capa deste álbum, “black people have been a source of endless energy, endless beauty and endless determination.” E realmente, a misteriosa beleza da arte de Gil Scott-Heron pode começar a explicar-se pelo facto da sua voz irradiar, a um tempo, dor e esperança, derrota e determinação.
“Winter in América” marcou o arranque da colaboração de Gil com o pianista e arranjador Brian Jackson, que o haveria de acompanhar até aos anos 80, através da sua discografia na Arista. A música que ambos criaram neste álbum é profundamente espiritual, descolando para um plano mais físico, como em “The Bottle”, quando as palavras adquirem a crueza de uma tentativa de abanão das consciências. Enleada na reverberação cristalina do Fender Rhodes, a voz de Gil Scott-Heron assume uma dignidade inabalável e, quase trinta anos depois da edição original, faz de “Winter in América” um presságio negro. Ainda nas notas do interior deste álbum, Gil Scott-Heron escreve: “We approach winter, the most depressing period in the history of this industrial empire, with threats of oil shortages and energy crises.” Os tempos não mudaram. E agora, é Gil que se encontra preso dentro de uma garrafa feita de grades. Peace go with you, brother! We will see you in the spring… RMA
FROM THE DETAIL-OBSESSED MIND OF EDAN COMES AN ASTOUNDING 30 MINUTE PASTICHE OF DANCE, RAP, AND PUNK THAT UTILIZES EVERYTHING FROM TURNTABLES TO TAPE ECHO, GLOCKENSPIEL TO GUITAR, MOOG TO KAZOO...Ever since the success of Edan’s 2005 sophomore release Beauty and the Beat (Lewis Recordings) the phones have been ringing off the hook here at Traffic Entertainment with questions from all around the world asking “What’s up with Edan” and “When is the new album coming out?”
After it became clear to us that a new Edan album was nowhere near completion we had a eureka moment. We approached Edan with a unique opportunity; full access to Traffic Entertainment Group’s extensive back catalog to mix and rework in any way he could imagine. We figured this would be a fairly quick and painless project that would be fun for Edan and also offer him some help in getting his name back out into the market while shedding some light on lesser known but full on dope titles buried deep in our back catalog. Two years and a new label later, Five Day Weekend and Edan have finally finished the project. What began as a simple mix, has grown into a colorful full on production album that features Edan as the musician displaying his skills on live instruments including synthesizers, guitar, percussion, echoplex… even glockenspiel and kazoo.
Echo Party has Edan’s personality intermixed with a wealth of amazing material. Elements are pulled from original multi tracks and these isolated accapellas and drum breaks have not been heard by any ears except the engineers and original artists that were in on the original sessions. Other portions are more identifiable though obscured by the filter of Edan's ever improving studio techniques. Only an artist like Edan with his borderline obsessive commitment to detail could have brought such a project to life. Echo Party promises to be one of 2009’s most celebrated releases.
The Jackson Find
This was supposed to be the story of the Jackson Five’s first single, cut in Chicago in 1967. But while writing it, Jake Austen picked up the trail of a tape nobody knew existed: the earliest known studio recording of Michael Jackson and his brothers.
By Jake Austen
Jackson Five photo from the collection of Jake Austen; photo of tape by Jim Newberry
The Jackson Five; the "Big Boy" reel from One-derful Records
When the world paused this summer to look back on Michael Jackson's extraordinary career, one chapter was missing from all the retrospectives, which skipped straight from the Jackson Five's formation in Gary, Indiana, to their explosive rise to stardom on Motown Records. Though every last recording by Elvis and the Beatles—the only other pop stars of Jackson's magnitude—has been meticulously documented, not even the most obsessive collectors have the whole story behind "Big Boy," the Jackson Five's first single.
Die-hard fans know it was recorded in late 1967 and released early in '68 on Gary's Steeltown Records. But most of the rest of the information out there is flawed or incomplete. The 1992 miniseries The Jacksons: An American Dream fictionalizes the session, placing it in 1966 and pretending, probably for licensing reasons, that the Jacksons recorded a cover of "Kansas City." Even Michael's 1988 autobiography, Moonwalk, gets most of the details wrong—not surprising given that he was nine at the time. And to my knowledge no published account has ever mentioned that "Big Boy" was cut in Chicago.
What you're about to read is not only a detailed account of the Jackson Five's Steeltown session but also convincing evidence that by then the group had already been in development with one of Chicago's most important black-owned labels—an episode previously completely lost to history. More compelling still, this label's efforts included an even earlier recording session. My efforts to jog the memories of the people closest to that session have resulted in the discovery of what many of the King of Pop's fans will consider the ultimate artifact: a studio master, by all appearances recorded by the Jackson Five, that predates the sides that for more than 40 years have been considered the group's earliest. In other words, Michael Jackson's first professional recording.
Anyone attempting to fill in some of the blank pages of the Jackson Five's early history will shortly find there are few facts upon which any two witnesses agree. Virtually everybody who encountered the group during its formative years, for instance, claims to have discovered Michael. Some claims are reasonable: Roosevelt High teachers Genevieve Gray and Yjean Chambers showcased the Jackson brothers in momentum-building talent shows starting in 1965. Others are ridiculous: Motown exec Berry Gordy fabricated Diana Ross's 1969 "discovery" of the group to whip up hype. Steeltown Records cofounder Gordon Keith, 70, is the man with the largest body of tangible evidence to back up his claim: he estimates that "Big Boy" sold more than 60,000 copies.
Many have made and lost millions on the backs of the Jacksons, but Keith's fortunes have remained largely unchanged since the mid-60s, when he founded Steeltown with four partners: Ben Brown, Ludie Washington, Maurice Rodgers, and Willie Spencer. The former steel-mill worker still lives at the Gary address that's printed on the first pressing of "Big Boy." These days most conversations he has about the Jacksons turn toward bitter reflections on the "double cross" he says took them from him—Joseph Jackson and Berry Gordy are the worst of many antagonists in these stories—yet he still sees their appearance on his doorstep as divine intervention. God, he says, gave him the gift of a group that was ready.
By 1967 Steeltown had released several singles without scoring a hit. Keith had seen enough Jackson Five show placards around town to convince him that the group was hardworking—he figured they might be the rare young act that combined talent with discipline. He got the family's number from a group that studied with the Jacksons' music teacher, Shirley Cartman (another reasonable claimant in the Jackson Five discovery sweepstakes), called patriarch Joseph Jackson, and was invited to the family's home for a private performance. Before they'd even played a note Keith saw something that convinced him Michael was extraordinary—something he says he'd never seen before and never saw again. "They were setting up in the living room," Keith recalls, "and Michael walked over to Tito's guitar cord, which was stretched between the guitar and amplifier, chest high to Michael, and I seen him flat-footedly jump over that guitar cord . . . not a running jump, flat-footed! I was pretty sold right there."
The boys' performance lived up to Michael's acrobatics, and Keith decided to negotiate with the Jacksons' management to take over their contract. Even then the question of who managed the group was complicated—Joseph would strike deals, often overlapping, with anyone he thought could help the boys get ahead—but two of the major players were WVON disc jockeys Pervis Spann and E. Rodney Jones.
In late 1965 or early '66 a triumphant Jackson Five talent-contest appearance at Chicago's Regal Theater had so impressed Spann that he and Jones offered to manage the act. (Spann also frequently takes credit for discovering Michael.) Keith remembers Jones (who died in 2004) claiming to have spent tens of thousands of dollars promoting the group to no avail. Keith thought that was odd, considering how polished they were and how influential Spann and Jones were, but he was thrilled to sign them anyway.
Gary had a recording studio, run by Bud Pressner, a saxophonist who in the course of a 50-year career as a performer and engineer worked on everything from his own Buddy Pressner Orchestra tunes in the 40s to raunchy late-80s house music. But Keith decided this recording deserved big-city gloss, and arranged for the boys to head into Chicago.
So after school one afternoon in November 1967, Michael, 9, Marlon, 10, Jermaine, 12, Tito, 14, and Jackie, 16, piled into the family Volkswagen with Joseph and rode across the state line to Chicago's West Englewood neighborhood, parking in front of Sunny Sawyer's recording studio on West 69th. Today that address is a vacant lot overrun by six-foot weeds, neighbored by the last surviving commercial buildings on the block—a tavern called Mitchell's that's attached to Rainbow Food and Liquor and a boarded-up pharmacy. But in the late 60s it was at the heart of a busy business district.
An ambitious entrepreneur, Sawyer was running a small record-pressing plant called Apex at 2009 W. 69th when, around 1965, he partnered with an older recording engineer, Vaughn Morrison, who designed and built a studio one door west. Most people knew it as Sunny Sawyer's studio and others simply called it Apex, but its proper name, painted on its glass-brick facade, was Morrison Sound Studio. In '61 Morrison had produced a top-ten pop hit, "This Time," for Indiana native Troy Shondell.
"Morrison was a genius," says legendary Chicago engineer Ed Cody, who often hired him to make stampers for his records. "Very knowledgeable." Though relatively small, maybe 1,200 square feet, the recording room had a rounded ceiling designed to disperse sound evenly. "Acoustically it was a live room, instead of a big dead-sounding studio," recalls Jerry Mundo, a musician and songwriter who frequently worked there. "It didn't suck up a lot of sound, so most of the things we did came off bright and very definite." The studio was stocked with high-quality Austrian microphones and an Ampex MR-70 four-track tape recorder, a costly top-of-the-line machine. "Unfortunately," Mundo says, "only three tracks were working, so we'd have to mix down and ping-pong. It was tedious, but it was better than having one track or two tracks."
By 1967 Sawyer had bought Morrison out. Early on he did some work as a vanity press—south-side gospel artists would pay to record, then take home 500 copies to sell or distribute at church. A good engineer with a good ear who'd worked at Universal, the top studio in the city, Sawyer also released rock 'n' roll, R & B, and blues records by artists like Mighty Joe Young, Fenton Robinson, and Josephine Taylor on his own labels, Palos, New Breed, and Betty—the last named after his wife, who along with another woman operated the machinery at the pressing plant while he ran the studio. Business was decent, but neighbors complained about booming bass leaking into their laundromat and grocery store. "Sometimes, knocking out the jams, you get up there in the dBs," Mundo says. "To get your hot sound, you're gonna have some bleed out the door." According to Mundo, business owners in the neighborhood—which was then predominantly white—were also intimidated by the steady stream of black bluesmen coming in for late-night sessions. By 1969 Sawyer's landlord had terminated the lease, forcing him to relocate to 72nd and Racine.
But it's unlikely any neighbors were intimidated by the visitors on that fall day in '67. "The Jacksons were little angels," Sawyer says, "and real professionals, doing their own stuff." Joseph had trained Tito on guitar and Jermaine on bass, and young family friend Johnny Jackson (no relation, though Motown would bill him as a cousin) was an excellent drummer. All three play on the recordings, but Keith supplemented Tito and Jermaine with adult musicians, including Richard Brown on rhythm guitar, Freddie Young on lead guitar, and Ray Grimes on bass. He brought in Lamont King on bongos and a conga player whose name he forgets (though he recalls he was a nephew of deejay Daddy-O Daylie). Keith and Steeltown co-owner Ludie Washington (who later recorded his own sides as Lou D. Washington and moved to California to act in movies like UHF and House Party) sang backup harmonies on "Big Boy," along with Gary vocalist Delroy Bridgeman.
Bridgeman had been a member of a 50s doo-wop group called the Senators, who recorded for Vee-Jay subsidiary Abner, and Sawyer's place was quite modest compared to studios he'd used in his heyday. "You could probably put the studio we were in into one of Universal's office spaces," he says. While many operations on Michigan Avenue's Record Row had offices, rehearsal rooms, and places for musicians to lounge, Sawyer's studio consisted of nothing more than the live room (where a piano and drum kit took up a fair amount of the space), a small control room, and a bathroom.
In a single lengthy session the group recorded four songs, all of which Keith says were already in their repertoire. "Big Boy" was by saxophonist Eddie Silvers, who at the time was playing in a group called the Soul Merchants and working as music director for Chicago R & B label One-derful Records. Its eventual B side, "You've Changed"—the only Steeltown track the Jacksons would record again for Motown—is by Gary native Jerry Reese. "We Don't Have to Be Over 21" was by Sherman Nesbary, a prolific Chicago writer who recorded under several names, including Verble Domino and Little Sherman & the Mod Swingers. Authorship of the fourth tune, "Some Girls Want Me for Their Lover," is unclear.
Though in Moonwalk Michael recalls being giddy to put on a pair of too-big headphones and sing in a studio with adult musicians, he was far from unprepared. In addition to exhaustively rehearsing at home and hustling amateur nights and talent contests with pristine ten-minute sets, the brothers had also been doing proper shows at Chicago nightclubs like Spann's Burning Spear and the Confidential Club, and they had a regular gig, sometimes playing multiple sets, at Mr. Lucky's nightspot in Gary. Joe had even bought a microphone for their home to help the boys get used to singing into one.
Despite the kids' professionalism, the session was grueling, in part because the Ampex's dead track meant they had to stop more often to mix down and free up space on the tape. As the night wore on the boys grew weary. "I remember looking at the clock—it was 10 or 11 at night—and looking at these young kids up that late who had been at school earlier," says Bridgeman. "I left the studio and went and brought sandwiches for them, because they hadn't eaten since I don't know what time. They had been too intense with the recording to stop to eat."
Though the Jacksons finished all their tracks at that marathon session, Bridgeman says he and two other vocalists, Solomon Ard and George Rias, returned to Sawyer's to redo some backups. Keith recalls bringing the tapes to Pressner's studio in Gary for mixing and mastering. In Moonwalk Michael remembers recording in a studio he identifies as Keith's on Saturday mornings after watching Roadrunner cartoons, but he was likely conflating trips to Pressner's with the recording session—the only thing the boys did at Pressner's, according to Keith, was observe postproduction. Keith sent the master to the Summit pressing plant in Willow Springs, Illinois, and when the records came back he set the single's official release for January 31, 1968. The Jacksons began selling 45s at shows, and Steeltown started working to get local radio to give "Big Boy" a spin.
"Big Boy" is by far the best song from the session. Its author, Silvers, had toured with Fats Domino (he contends he wrote the bridge to "I'm Walking," for which he was compensated one used pink Cadillac), Bill Doggett, and Ike & Tina, a job he says he quit because he was tired of refereeing the couple's brawls. An East Saint Louis native, he'd settled in Chicago around 1965, where his relationship with Saint Louis harmony act the Sharpees helped him move up the ranks at One-derful Records, from writer and arranger to the label's music director.
He'd composed the perfect song for little beyond-his-years Michael: with its combination of juvenile themes (skateboards, Mother Goose) and adult yearning, "Big Boy" would serve as a template for much future black bubblegum music. Silvers's excellent arrangements shine through the slightly murky mix and showcase the somewhat raw, soulful vocal style Michael had developed watching R & B veterans from the wings of the Regal. Though Keith contends that nine-year-old Michael was "a better singer then than what he ended up to be," it's clear from this recording that Motown's infamously rigorous training regimen still had something to offer him. All the same, his slightly nasal, borderline flat singing and odd enunciation (fairy tales is pronounced "fairy ta-wos") add to the single's considerable charm.
Impressed by regional sales, Atlantic Records struck a distribution deal for the single, and on March 5, 1968, Steeltown and Atlantic imprint Atco coreleased a new pressing. Steeltown president Ben Brown says he pushed the record to stores and radio and drove the brothers to promotional engagements. He recalls helping sell influential WLS disc jockey Art Roberts on the Jackson Five, landing them an appearance on Roberts's local Swinging Majority dance show in early 1968, on the same episode as Berwyn rockers the Ides of March. The record was a local hit, and the future looked bright for Steeltown and the Jacksons.
But in June 1968, just three months after the Atco deal, Motown artists Bobby Taylor & the Vancouvers (featuring future stoner comic Tommy Chong on guitar) played Chicago—some accounts say the Regal, others the Burning Spear—on a tour behind their biggest hit, "Does Your Mama Know About Me." Amazed by the kiddie-soul act that opened for them, the band made arrangements for the Jacksons to travel to Detroit and shoot a short audition film to be sent to Motown's new Los Angeles offices.
It wasn't the first time someone had called Berry Gordy's attention to the Jackson Five. Several Motown artists, among them Gladys Knight, had already been singing their praises. But Gordy wasn't interested in dealing with a kiddie act—not until after he saw that audition film, where Michael turns in a dazzling impersonation of James Brown (who also said he discovered the Jacksons). Gordy signed the group away from Steeltown, and Taylor became their first producer at Motown.
The Jackson Five's first Motown release wouldn't come out till fall 1969. Motown's story is that they were unsatisfied with the initial recordings and developed the group for a year; Keith says Atlantic kept Motown in court, waiting out the Steeltown contract. To this day he can't say exactly what happened during all this legal wrangling—Atlantic and Motown clearly considered him a small fish and didn't invite him to the table—but he's certain he got played like a fiddle. In the end Keith was left with nothing but the Sawyer tracks he hadn't yet released.
During this period the people who thought they were managing the Jackson Five could've fielded a baseball team. They included Keith, Spann, Jones, a Chicago policeman named Luther Terry, whom Spann describes as "an individual that had thought he had some latitude . . . but didn't," and New York lawyer Richard Arons, who reportedly struck his deal with Joseph when the boys went east to play Harlem's Apollo Theater in May 1968. It was their first pro gig at the theater, booked by soul singer Joe Simon, who takes some credit for discovering Michael as a result—but the amateur-night audience that applauded the Jackson Five to victory in August 1967, on their first visit, deserves at least as big a share.
After he got squeezed out, Keith says, he just tried to grab what he could. In 1970 he released "We Don't Have to Be Over 21" to cash in on the Jackson Five's Motown success, hiring Gary musician Wilton Crump (whose group the Mellow-Tones had played in Roosevelt High talent shows with the Jackson Five) to add string arrangements that echoed the group's first Motown singles. Keith held tight to his last proper Jackson Five track and instead put a true B side on the B side—a nearly inaudible rehearsal tape of the Jackson brothers and Joseph improvising an instrumental blues vamp, which Keith titled "Jam Session." Later that year he licensed the final side, "Some Girls Want Me for Their Lover," to Dynamo Records in New York. The song peaks with nine-year-old Michael imitating a girl (or perhaps some girls) screaming his name in ecstasy. "We Don't Have to Be Over 21" appears again on the flip.
This exhausted the pre-Motown recordings of Michael Jackson and his brothers—or did it? Though it's proved to be a less popular pastime than discovering Michael, you don't have to dig too deep to find people who say they've discovered a "lost" early recording by the Jackson Five. These claims are both encouraged and confounded by the fact that the Jacksons' 1969 breakthrough was followed by the emergence of hundreds of kiddie-soul groups, many deftly imitating Michael's vocal style. "Every aspiring kid singer wanted to be like Mike," says Ken Shipley of Chicago reissue label the Numero Group, whose 2007 compilation Home Schooled collected highlights of this subgenre. "He set off a copycat shock wave."
In 2006 an English record dealer sold an acetate that he claimed contained two unreleased Jackson Five songs, "Jackson Man" and "Take My Heart," in an online auction for £4,200 (at the time well over $8,000). The disc turned out to be a 1972 recording by the Magical Connection, a group from Chicago's Stateway Gardens housing project. The band later became the Next Movement—they still play Las Vegas showrooms—and in a recent interview made it clear that "Jackson Man" was not inspired by the Jackson Five's patriarch.
Similarly, though the Ripples & Waves' "Let Me Carry Your School Books" mentions a Johnny and a Joe, they're not the Jackson Five's drummer and daddy. But when Steeltown released the song on the band's only single—the group included one of Keith's nephews—Jackson mania was in full swing, and Keith wouldn't have minded if folks made that assumption. In fact he was hoping audiences would assume they were hearing a lost Jackson Five recording, and even renamed the group "Ripples & Waves + Michael"—technically accurate, since they had a vocalist named Michael Rogers. (When I asked Keith if he wanted people to think it might be Michael Jackson, he replied, "I sure did!") Some online sources still insist that Jackson sang on the recording, but Phillip Mack, drummer for the Ripples & Waves, confirms that it was Rogers.
There does exist a lo-fi collection of mostly cover songs done by the real Jackson Five on a cheap home tape recorder, probably in 1967. Keith thinks they were made in the basement of his home, though they may also be from the Jacksons' place—Joseph can be heard speaking and playing guitar on this muddy mess of a session, which just sounds like regular kids banging bongos and tambourines over sloppy guitar and bass. Another story has it that the session was at the home of their teacher Shirley Cartman, and that the tapes were stolen several years later when she had them transferred. This is unlikely, though, because the 1970 Steeltown B side "Jam Session" seems to be from the same recording.
This collection came to light in 1989, after Keith entered an ill-fated business partnership with Jerry Williams, better known as soul-rock eccentric Swamp Dogg. They released an album, The Jackson Five & Johnny: Beginning Years, that supplemented the four Sawyer studio songs with ten of the murky rehearsal tunes, which Williams enhanced with cheesy 80s backing tracks. It made little impact, but the rehearsal recordings surfaced again five years later, when Brunswick Records released Pre-History in advance of Michael Jackson's HIStory box set.
The liner notes of Pre-History, which also includes the four Sawyer sides, explain that Steeltown president Ben Brown produced all the recordings, working with the Jackson Five on weekends at Bud Pressner's studio in Gary, and claim that he later unearthed the master tapes at his parents' home. The notes also say the Jacksons were originally known as the Ripples & Waves, and both sides of the Ripples & Waves single are included as lost Jackson Five numbers. Of course none of it is true—except that Brown did in fact hold the title of president at Steeltown. Keith contends that Pre-History (excepting the Ripples & Waves material) was mastered from a copy of The Jackson Five & Johnny: Beginning Years, and it's hard to argue—Williams's 1989 backing tracks are still there.
Brown, billed in the press releases he sent out this summer as "The Man Who Discovered Michael Jackson," says he had nothing to do with the liner notes and tried to keep the Ripples & Waves songs off the album. "I guess the sound was so similar until they didn't believe me," he says. But he also says that his billing as producer didn't mean he'd produced the original tracks—he admits he wasn't involved with them till postproduction—but rather that he served as executive producer for the reissue project. Keith, for his part, denies that Brown had anything to do with the recordings, even in postproduction.
The Ripples & Waves single had already fooled others, most notably Jackson biographer J. Randy Taraborrelli, but Pre-History redoubled the problem. Because Brown, as a Steeltown founder, was in a position to know the truth, his involvement made the album's false claims that much more persuasive. The resulting flood of misinformation still clogs not just message boards, online forums, and wikis but print accounts as well. In 2000 Motown/Universal even released a compilation of early Motown material titled Ripples and Waves: An Introduction to the Jackson Five, which prompted Keith and his nephew Elvy Woodard (a Ripple) to sue the Jacksons for infringement on the Ripples & Waves name. Keith says the suit was settled in part by several Jackson brothers—Michael not among them—making a DVD in which they personally apologize.
This past July 5, Chicago soul historian Bob Abrahamian interviewed a guitarist named Larry Blasingaine on his long-running WHPK show (it's archived, alongside interviews with hundreds of members of local vocal groups, at sittinginthepark.com). At the time my best information said the Jackson Five had cut their first single at Sunny Sawyer's studio—I hadn't yet learned what it was called—but Blasingaine spoke confidently of a session with the Jacksons at One-derful Records.
Blasingaine, who now goes by both Larry and Hakeem, tells me that on a warm July day in 1967, he headed to the studio in the One-derful building at 1827 S. Michigan. All that year he'd been dropping in after his classes let out at Westinghouse High, and he didn't stop for summer vacation. Though only 15, he was already a brilliant guitarist and seasoned studio veteran, having honed his skills with a west-side community arts organization called Teens With Talent. He'd been recording since age 13 with his own group, then called the Four Dukes and later to be known as Larry & the Hippies. Though none of the members were old enough to shave, they served as house musicians for One-derful in the mid-60s and played behind Alvin Cash, Otis Clay, and Josephine Taylor, among others. They'd later back the Emotions and Jackie Wilson.
On the afternoon Blasingaine remembers, about four months before the Sawyer session, he went into the studio and found his friends the Jackson Five recording with songwriter Eddie Silvers and producer Otis Hayes. Blasingaine's band often crossed paths with the Jacksons—they played the same circuit, sometimes sharing equipment, and both were booked by Luther Terry. "Eddie Silvers was producing them," Blasingaine says. "He wrote the song they were recording, 'Big Boy,' and he saw me when I came in and said, 'Larry, I need you for a minute. I want you to show the bass player, Jermaine, how to keep his bass from booming.'" Then Silvers asked if Blasingaine had his guitar. "Eddie said, 'Grab your guitar, I want you to play this other part with them,' and I did." Silvers had written a melodic guitar part for the song's intro that was likely too difficult for the less seasoned Tito; Blasingaine recorded it and moved on. "I can't even remember if I was there when they sang. Once we finished recording I would go. I was young, you know. We had pop machines; we had other rooms."
Blasingaine's vivid memories of this session initially puzzled me. I'd never heard of any association between the Jackson Five and One-derful, and no collector, historian, musician, or disc jockey I'd spoken to by then had any idea such a session had ever taken place—including Spann and One-derful staffer Larry Nestor, who preceded Silvers as music director.
According to Keith, Spann and Jones had the boys rehearsing at One-derful—many young bands, including some not signed to the label, routinely did so—and had hired One-derful guitarist Jimmy Jones to mentor them. Spann doesn't recall such an arrangement.
But Keith also contends that when he signed the Jackson Five in 1967 he had to negotiate with four managers. He's positive that the boys had a contract not just with Spann and Jones but also with the Leaner brothers.
Though less renowned than the Chess brothers, the Leaners were two of the most important figures in Chicago R & B. From 1962 till it closed up shop in '69, George Leaner's One-derful Records—one of the city's few black-owned labels—was a respected resident of South Michigan's Record Row. While its neighbors were perfecting sweet, smooth Chicago sounds, One-derful released hard, funky, and sometimes crazily comic R & B by artists like McKinley Mitchell, Alvin Cash, Harold Burrage, and the Five Du-Tones, whose "Shake a Tail Feather" became one of the label's most enduring legacies.
George Leaner and his brother Ernie had learned the ins and outs of the business from their sister—they worked at her record store in the 40s—and from their uncle Al Benson, one of the most influential deejays in the history of Chicago black radio. The label's second-floor office, with its rehearsal rooms and its studio, Tone Recordings, became an incubator not just for the label's roster but for much of Chicago's R & B community. "George was a good-hearted guy," recalls Nestor, "and he just wanted to promote music in any way." But this was also good business—the first floor housed Ernie's United Distribution, which handled records from many local and national labels. It behooved the Leaners to have every label succeed, not just their own.
None of this necessarily illuminates the relationship between the Jacksons and One-derful. Spann is certain he did no business with the Leaners beyond picking up records at United, and it would have been unusual for the Leaners to have a contract with an artist and not release the record themselves. But songwriter and vocalist Billy McGregor witnessed a scene in 1966 that may cast some light on the situation. One day when he was at One-derful, working with Eddie Silvers on arrangements for his excellent debut single, "Mr. Shy," he saw Joe Jackson and another man (he's sure it wasn't Spann or Jones) bring Michael in alone for an audition. "He was a little boy," says McGregor. "He sang a cappella 'Tobacco Road' for George Leaner, who said he has talent but it would take a lot to put him out there because of his age—he'd have to have someone with him all the time." Though this suggests a theory as to why Leaner didn't release a Jackson Five record on One-derful, it doesn't explain why the group would've recorded a track at his studio, or what happened to that recording.
Ernie Leaner's youngest son, Eric, was able to help, though he'd turned five years old in 1967 and was unaware of any Jackson Five session at One-derful. He put me in touch with Otis Hayes, who was with the label from its inception as a producer, engineer, writer, and accountant. Hayes describes a previously undocumented chapter in the development of the Jackson Five. He recalls being approached about the Jacksons by Louis Jefferson, aka J.J. the DJ, who was one of the "Mellow Fellows"—a popular group of disc jockeys on the Chicago Heights radio station WMPP.
Though it was a low-power station, WMPP had an influence on black music buyers in East Chicago and Gary out of proportion to its wattage, and this seems to have led Joseph Jackson to enlist J.J. the DJ as yet another agent for his sons. Hayes says Jefferson brought the group in to audition for Hayes, Jimmy Jones, and George Leaner, probably in early 1967. Leaner was apparently more impressed than he had been when Michael auditioned alone the prior year, and according to Hayes he decided to develop the Jacksons at One-derful, intending to sign them to a recording contract.
George and Ernie Leaner circa 1949; Phyllis Newkirk and Eric Leaner
The Jackson family, including Joseph and his wife Katherine, would drive in from Gary after school three or four days a week, Hayes continues, arriving at One-derful around 5 PM—about when Larry Nestor left the office, which could explain why he doesn't remember any of this. Hayes, Silvers, and Jimmy Jones would coach the boys for two or three hours as they studied chord progressions and vocal harmonies, rehearsed their sets, or just jammed, impressing Hayes with their creative tweaks to popular songs. At times the adults would accompany the boys to gigs at clubs and record hops in Gary or Chicago. This went on for perhaps five months, helping transform a talented teen band into an act on the verge of greatness.
As Hayes remembers things, no outside management was involved after Jefferson set up the original audition, which might explain why Spann says he's never heard of this arrangement. "As far as I knew then," Hayes says, "there was no other agent. Joseph was the man. He was pretty strict on 'em." In Hayes's eyes this fatherly discipline was more constructive than problematic, turning the boys into perfect students. "They were all great kids, they would listen, and I think that's what carried them a long way. The father got that in them to learn and learn and learn."
Hayes was convinced that the Jackson Five "had what it took," and says George Leaner was impressed by their progress. "He probably would have signed them up," Hayes recalls, "but when it got into the legalities of it, there was a lot involved with them being minors. They have to have costs in there for tutoring and all that, in case they had to go on the road. Once he checked into it and found out what it involved monetary-wise, he wasn't able to do it at that time."
With the benefit of hindsight it'd be easy to characterize that decision as shortsighted, especially if One-derful already had some kind of preliminary development deal with the group. The label worked with other minors—Blasingaine's band, a young Deniece Williams, members of Alvin Cash's entourage—both before and after the Jacksons. But in all likelihood it was because Leaner realized how big the Jackson Five could get that he chose to be cautious—a runaway hit could bankrupt a small label, because up-front costs ballooned much faster than profits.
One of the strangest things about this chapter in the Jacksons' history is that the major players have kept it to themselves for so long. Discretion and humility often seem to be in short supply whenever the Jacksons are concerned; many of the people who claim to have had a hand in discovering them do so on the thinnest of premises. But Louis Jefferson appears to have taken the story of his role in the band's development to his grave in the early 70s. Amos Cobb, who worked in radio with Jefferson in 1969 and '70, the peak years of Jackson Five mania—and who himself boasts about being the Jacksons' driver, touting his role in their development—says Jefferson never mentioned it, not even privately. Otis Hayes, Jimmy Jones, and Eddie Silvers (who also died in the early 70s, reportedly during a session for Chess) have never gone on record about preparing the Jacksons for megastardom. And the Leaners never loudly lamented the Ones That Got Away, at least not in public.
Tony Leaner, another of Ernie's sons, never heard anything about a Jackson Five session at One-derful either. But he does recall that the label's dalliance with the group was family lore, something they would sit around the kitchen table and joke about during the 70s—he says with a chuckle that his brother Eric, ten years his junior, missed out on all the stories. In the label's waning days, Tony handled promo work alongside his brother Billy (now deceased), and he's quick to point out that his family knew it was far from certain they'd be able to turn the Jacksons into Motown-esque million sellers. "To think that One-derful Records could have had the same success would be a stretch," he says. "And remember, even Berry Gordy was reluctant to work with kids that young."
Because the group spent so many hours at the label's studio, Hayes didn't attach any great significance to the day they recorded "Big Boy" and strains to recall details. It seems unlikely that the session was just a casual rehearsal being taped, but it's not necessarily a given that it was intended for release. George Leaner might have wanted to hear how the band sounded in the studio, or Eddie Silvers might have been documenting his tune and arrangements, making something halfway between a demo for the group and a songwriter demo.
Silvers seems to have been approaching it as a serious endeavor, since he asked Blasingaine to help Jermaine muffle his bass. Blasingaine was certainly experienced enough in the studio to know the difference between a rehearsal and a real session—and if I were inclined to doubt his memory, I would've reconsidered when I saw how upset he was when it came up in conversation that his version of "Big Boy" wasn't the one that got released. For more than 40 years he'd believed that he played on the Jackson Five's first single. Though he'd always had a hard time accounting for the song's middling production quality ("It was kind of a rinky-dinky mix for a One-derful recording," he recalls), he'd never heard that another version had been recorded. When I told him he wasn't on the Steeltown release, he was seriously rattled.
While it's not totally impossible that Steeltown had access to the One-derful tracks, the label definitely had the group rerecord the song with Sunny Sawyer. Silvers could've passed his version along to Steeltown to use as a template, and Ben Brown claims he and Keith listened to it at Pressner's studio, but Keith says he never heard it.
After Ernie Leaner's death in 1990, his children inherited One-derful and its assets, and they've since organized and maintained an archive of more than 700 masters. Unfortunately One-derful's holdings weren't maintained to the highest standards between the company's demise in 1969 and George Leaner's death in 1983. Things got pretty grim in the late 70s, when they were opened up to deep-pocketed record collectors from Japan and Europe. English collector Rod Shard remembers a 1979 visit: "I'm mooching about and trying to avoid things and I've got tape all wrapped around my feet. . . . I try to extricate myself with little luck and I traced it back to a spool with 'Twine Time' written on it. I had to snap the tape to get out of it."
Though the reel Shard saw may not have been the master, Alvin Cash's "Twine Time" was the label's biggest hit. Many tapes less valued by the elder Leaners would've been recorded over or discarded and never even put into storage. The odds of the One-derful version of "Big Boy" turning up seemed slim.
After our initial conversations, Eric and Tony Leaner said they'd try to find the Jackson tape among the surviving masters. They'd just made a deal with a new music-administration firm to digitize their holdings, but though the tapes were finally well organized the brothers weren't optimistic about uncovering one that neither of them had known existed.
On the morning of August 17, though, I received an e-mail from Eric Leaner informing me that his sister, Phyllis Newkirk, had just found two very promising tapes in storage. One reel, dated July 22, 1967, was labeled "Jackson 5 band tracks" and "Young Folks band." (The Young Folk were a former Teens With Talent group with whom Blasingaine often played.) Unfortunately the tape itself looked to be badly deteriorated, warped and discolored and with its magnetic coating coming off in flakes. This made it all the more amazing that the other tape, dated July 13, seemed to be in excellent shape. It was labeled "Jackson Five—I'm a Big Boy Now."
It will likely be some time before anyone, even the Leaners, can hear this recording. Its significance necessitates high-level precautions to protect against damage or piracy. Even after the music is transferred to a digital medium, the Leaners would be wise to explore their options before playing it for the world. Its value—in both historic and monetary terms—is potentially huge. Because of Keith's prickly relations with both Joseph Jackson and Motown, Steeltown's "Big Boy" has never been included in any major-label Michael Jackson or Jackson Five box set or collection. If the unearthed One-derful tape turns out to be what it seems, the song might finally see widespread release—which could turn out to be a very good thing for Keith, especially if it sparks interest in the Steeltown recordings.
The find has also lifted a weight from Larry Blasingaine's shoulders. Still disappointed about the Steeltown single, he was very happy to learn that he played on what might be an even more important Jackson Five recording, and that his memories of the session—almost certainly the group's first—led to the discovery of the tape. When I told him the good news, he was at a loss for words. "Man, oh man!" he declared, the joy plain as day in his voice. "I don't know what to say."
The decades to come may well bring a wealth of unreleased Jackson songs, on par with the from-the-grave output of Hendrix or Tupac. But most observers expect this onslaught to consist principally of overproduced late-period jams, many of them unfinished at the time of Jackson's death and augmented posthumously. The possibility that the first unreleased track to surface will instead be a decades-unheard recording of the Jackson Five's first studio endeavor—a stripped-down 60s R & B tune, cut without adult ringers at a better studio than their debut single—is almost too good to be true. The One-derful session is worlds away from the slick and calculated work the Jacksons would soon do for Motown. It captures an eager, unjaded nine-year-old only months away from the end of his childhood, a childhood he would pursue for the rest of his life: Michael, a big boy now, soulfully lamenting that "fairy tales and wishful dreams are broken toys."
Many thanks to Bob Abrahamian, Rob Sevier, Wilton Crump, James Porter, Larry Nestor, and Robert Pruter for their assistance with this story.
The A-Z of Electro by David Toop
In its original incarnation, Electro was black science fiction teleported to the dancefloors of New York, Miami and LA; a super-stoopid fusion of video games, techno-pop, graffiti art, silver space suits and cyborg funk. Now that Electro is back, David Toop provides a thumbnail guide to the music that posed the eternal question: 'Watupski, bug byte?'
A
‘Al-Naafiysh (The Soul)’ stands as prime contender for the weird-titles-in-pop award. Released on Aldo and Amado Marin's Cutting Records label, Hashim's glacial, squelching track become a breaker's anthem in the UK. Also ‘Arkade Funk’ by Tilt, Trouble Funk's Washington DC hybrid of arcade games, Electronics, live go-go percussion, and Vocoded, pitchshifted lyrics: "I am an arkade funk machine... search and destroy".
B
Urban spaceman Afrika Bambaataa and producer Arthur Baker, plus musician John Robie, were the trio behind a musical revolution called "Planet Rock", Bambaataa's 1982 single with Soul Sonic Force. Following the impact of ‘Planet Rock’, UK groups made Electro-boogie pilgrimages to Baker's studio in Manhattan: Freeze's ‘IOU’ rocketed jazz funk into the infosphere but more significantly, New Order's "Blue Monday" launched indie dancing and sold massively on 12".
C
Cybotron, the Detroit brainchild of Juan Atkins and Rick Davies, alias 3070, creators of ‘Clear’, ‘Techno City’ and ‘Cosmic Cars’. Cold Crush Brothers were old-school South Bronx pioneers but they joined the beat wave with ‘Punk Rock Rap’ and ‘Fresh, Wild, Fly And Bold’. Captain Rock, Captain Rapp and Captain Sky did their space cadet thang, but nobody could go further out into the phunkosphere than George Clinton.
D
Davy DMX, Queens DJ, multi-instrumentalist and creator of ‘The DMX Will Rock’, named himself after the Oberheim DMX, drum machine of choice in mid-‘80s HipHop.
E
Electro-pop, British style: Depeche Mode, Ultravox, Human League, Gary Numan, Thomas Dolby et al. The one-finger keyboard techniques of Depeche Mode were an inspiration to a generation of scratch DJs across the Atlantic. 808 (as in Roland), the beatbox whose artificiality liberated Electroids from drum cliches.
F
Futura, Fab Five Freddy, Face 2000 and Phase II, all graffiti artists who recorded Electro-rap tracks on Celluloid. The Funhouse, Manhattan's temple of futurist Electro. Freestyle, late ‘80s New York dance music, very post-Electro/pre-Garage, Latin flavoured, frequently softcore (‘Talk Dirty To Me’, ‘Vanessa Del Rio’) as recorded by Corporation Of One, Bad Boy Orchestra and Tommy Musto.
G
After Grandmaster Flash and ‘Scorpio’ came Grandmaster Melle Mel with Electro hits – ‘White Lines’ and ‘Survival’ - followed by Grandmixer D.ST's ‘Grand Mixer Cuts It Up’, a storm of stereo-panned arcade bleeps. D.ST went on to perform live on turntables with Herbie Hancock's Rockit group.
H
With ‘70s albums such as Sextant, Thrust and Headhunters, Herbie Hancock anticipated many tropes and tricks of Electro. His Electro tracks with Bill Laswell - particularly the smash hit ‘Rockit’ - were not such a future shock, and his earlier music has aged better.
I
For glorious one-offs it's hard to beat ‘We Come To Rock’ by the Imperial Brothers, ‘Running’ by Information Society (a Latin freestyle prototype followed up by relentlessly dull quasi-"British" Electro-pop albums) or ‘Inspector Gadget’ by The Kartoon Krew.
J
Boston's Jonzun Crew, led by Michael Jonzun, were literally the most wigged-out Electro act of all, basing their stage appearance on Beethoven. For mutant cyberian phunk, their Lost In Space album, particularly the menacing ‘Pack Jam’, remains chilly the most.
K
Kraftwerk, the showroom dummies who caused Bambaataa to scratch his head and say, ‘'Scuse the expression, this is some weird shit’. For ‘Planet Rock’, Bam used the melody from ‘Trans Europe Express’. Over the distinctive 808 beat, the effect was spectral.
L
Central to the scene due to their Electro edits, Latin HipHop production and remixing were the Latin Rascals - Albert Cabrera and Tony Moran - who made the endearingly trashy Back To The Future album (titles include ‘A Little Night Noise’ and ‘Yo, Elise!’).
M
Miami Bass took up Electro after NYC had finished with it, turned up the sub-bass on the kick drum, filled cars and jeeps with woofers and tweeters, and drive around the hot streets of their Fourth World, postmodern city in a nomadic ecstasy of boom. Tracks by Bose and Gucci Crew II fetishised loudspeaker power, perpetual movement, Robocop and similar urban dislocations; DJ Extraordinaire And The Bassadelic Boom Patrol's ‘Drop The Bass (Lower The Boom)’ went over the edge with its info-bites; The Beat Club's ‘Security’ merged Planet Patrol and Human League into a heaving epic of sci-fi emotions; Maggatron, who combined awesome bass drum boom with rampant George Clinton influences, manic scratch 'n' sniff production, screaming Metal guitar solos and a selfless dedication to Electro cliches. Their Bass Planet Paranoia (1990) boasts titles such as ‘Pygmies In Devilles’, ‘Temple Of Boom’ (the original) and a cover of Clinton's ‘Maggot Brain’ that the late, great Eddie Hazel would have been proud of. Mantronix (Man + Electronix) came just after Electro. The musical combination of raps, vocoded choruses, sequenced basslines, clap delays and crashing beatbox snares suggests they were influential on ‘90s drum 'n' bass. Also hail Man Parrish for the all-time Electro classic ‘Hip Hop De Bop (Don't Stop)’.
N
Gary Numan, the eyelinered squadron leader of British Techno-pop, whose ‘Cars’ struck an unlikely chord in the hearts of Electro-HipHoppers. Buried in the archives but never to be forgotten: Nitro DeLuxe, who briefly fused Electro, experimental House and Techno, apparently without knowing it; Newtrament, whose ‘London Bridge Is Falling Down’ was the first (and one of the few) credible UK Electro records; Newcleus, whose ‘Jam On It’ can still bring nostalgic tears to the eyes of the chilliest Brit-based technocrat or hardass rapper.
O
Bobby O, New York (Mostly hi-energy) producer who released the awesome, surreal Beat Box Boys Electro-minimalist 12’s ‘Give Me My Money’, ‘Einstein’ and ‘Yum Yum - Eat 'Em Up’. Bobby Orlando also signed and produced The Pet Shop Boys in the same year.
P
‘Planet Rock’ for the party people convening on fonky Pluto, and Planet Patrol, a Boston vocal quartet shamelessly transformed into an extra-terrestrial mutation of The Stylistics by Arthur Baker and John Robie in order to sing Electro versions of Gary Glitter's ‘I Didn't Know I Loved You (Till I Saw You Rock And Roll)’ and Todd Rundgren's ‘It Wouldn't Have Made Any Difference’. Their ‘Play At Your Own Risk’ was one of the great Electro singles. RIP Pumpkin, "King Of The Beat", who played all the Electro-tech on Enjoy singles by The Fearless Four and others. Post-Electro, which has to include, for greater or lesser reasons, LFO, Black Dog, Shut Up & Dance, Metalheadz, Bandulu, Moody Boyz, Plaid, As One, A Guy Called Gerald, 808 State, Carl Craig, Bally Sagoo, Massive Attack, Tricky, Portishead, Depth Charge, Chemical Brothers, Underworld, The Shamen, Talvin Singh's Future Sound Of India, Future Sound of London, Jedi Knights, the Clear and Mo'Wax labels, and even, at a pinch, M People.
Q
"Queen Of Rox", otherwise known as Roxanne Shante, who bridged the gap between the Electro era and those crashing Brooklyn beats of the mid-‘80s.
R
‘Rockin' It’ by The Fearless Four was one of Electro's greatest moments. Iconoclasts who borrowed riffs from Gary Numan, Cat Stevens, Gamble & Huff and Herbie Hancock, they took Kraftwerk's ‘The Man Machine’ for ‘Rockin' It’, added a phrase from Poltergeist and created future R&B. John Robie was one of the musical architects of Electro, playing keyboards on ‘Planet Rock’, ‘Looking For The Perfect Beat’ and ‘Renegades Of Funk’, Planet patrol's ‘Cheap Thrills’, ‘Body Mechanic’ by Quadrant Six, C-Bank's ‘Get Wet’ and ‘Walking On Sunshine’ by Rocker's Revenge. Run-DMC may have sounded like stripped down, hard Electro when they started, but by turning the emphasis back on words and beats they blew Electro into the outer darkness.
S
Smurfs were diminutive Hanna-Barbera cartoon people for whom smurf served as a verb: ie ‘My potion is wearing off. We'd better smurf out of here.’ In 1982, Tyrone Brunson, a DC born bass player, made a dance craze record called ‘The Smurf’. More jazz fusion than Electro, ‘The Smurf’ was answered in an orgy of copyright-busting spelling variations by ‘The Smirf’, ‘Pappa Smerf’ and, with far more class, ‘Salsa Smurph’ by Special Request, ‘Smerphie's Dance’ by Spyder-D and ‘(I Can Do It... You Can Do It) Letzmurph Acrossdasurf’ by The Micronawts (an alias for journalist and eventually New Jack City scriptwriter Barry Michael Cooper). Also Shango, the Afro-cybernetic fusion of Bambaataa and Material; Sir Mix-A-Lot, an Electro pioneer who went ballistic with ‘Baby's Got Back’; Sly Stone, exploiting the machine feel of rhythm boxes on There's A Riot Goin' On back in 1971; all things spacey, such as Star Wars, Close Encounters, space suits knocked up from leather and tinfoil, and Sun Ra, credited on The Jonzun Crew's Lost In Space album. Not forgetting the itch to scratch and not excluding ‘Was Dog A Doughnut’, a rare fling at Techno-pop-fusion by Cat Stevens, transmuted into Electro by Jellybean and The Fearless Four.
T
Techno Techno Techno, the man/woman-machine interface, the inevitable spread of music inspired and haunted by technology. For an example of the Techno diaspora, listen to Off's ‘Electric Salsa’ - pure Electro, recorded in Germany in 1986 and featuring vocals by a young blond named Sven Vath. Tommy Boy Records was the New York company run by Tom Silverman and Monica Lynch that released a string of Electro classics, beginning with ‘Planet Rock’. Down in the sunbelt, Luke Skywalker's 2 Live Crew traded in tits 'n' ass, took Miami Bass to the masses, got sued by George Lucas, were taken to court for obscenity, pioneered rumpshaker videos, and generally gave Electro a filthy reputation.
U
UTFO, robot dancers for Whodini who progressed to a career as rappers by launching the Roxanne saga of the mid-‘80s. Also, UK House, whose roots, as early tracks by the likes of Hotline, Zuzan and Krush show, were as much in NYC Electro as they were in Chicago House.
V
Video Games from Space Invaders to PacMan, Defender to Galaxian. "We live in a time of extraterrestrial hopes and anxieties," wrote Martin Amis, looking for answers to questions raised by the so-called blank-screen generation, in his "Invasion Of The Space Invaders". Some vid-kids took inspiration from the alien voices, blips, squirts and mantric melodies of arcade games and made music from it. ‘Waaku-waaku’ went The Packman on ‘I'm The Packman (Eat Everything I Can)’. Amis wrote about Defender as having the best noises: "The fizz of a Baiter, the humming purr of a Pod, the insect whine of the loathed mutants as they storm and sting." Part Gorf command, part Kraftwerk effect, the Vocoder was Techno's primary instrument. A studio device that combines voice sounds and synthesizer, thus symbolising the human-machine interface.
W
‘Woof woof’, a barking noise made by B-Boys in lieu of applause when the Electro shuttle lifted off. Often preceded by ‘Hey buddy buddy’, ‘Wicki wicki wicki’ or similar. Warp 9, whose spacey productions by Richard Scher, Lotti Golden and Jellybean reached warpspeed on the ‘Light Years Away’ dub mix. West Street Mob, Whodini and Whiz Kid all saw their moment and grabbed it. Wildstyle: the film, the record, the mode of behaviour. Back on the beach, ‘Whoomp! There It Is’ by Tag Team was a ‘90s ‘Planet Rock’ soundalike that revived old-school Electro with a vengeance, selling more than four million copies to go quadruple platinum.
X
Xena's ‘On The Upside’, along with Shannon's ‘Let The Music Play’, were quintessential examples of the Mark Liggett/Chris Barbosa sound, the booming, jerky diva-Electro that launched Latin HipHop. Xploitation as in Jheri curl and Zapata-tashed soul bands such as Midnight Starr going for Electro hits. Also xploitation as in Spaghetti Westerns, kung fu, porno and science fiction, all of which provided Electro with its mise en scene. Down in Miami, R&B and disco veteran (soon to be Miami Bass entrepreneur) Henry Stone jumped on the ET boom of 1982 with the Extra Ts and their weird ‘ET Boogie’. "It hurts", said the Extra Ts; King Sporty's EX Tras answered with the stun gun Electro-bass of ‘Haven't Been Funked Enough’.
Y
Yellow Magic Orchestra, who inspired Afrika Bambaataa back in the days. YMO's cover version of Martin Denny's ‘Firecracker’ can be heard on the Bambaataa turntables on the notorious ‘Death Mix’ 12’. In fact, Ryuichi Sakamoto's ‘Riot In Lagos’ had anticipated Electro's beats and sounds in 1980, while Haruomi Hosono's 1983 Video Game Music took the musical use of game noise to a further, maddening conclusion: "Digital sound with body and spontaneity had game-character, no, is music as a game" (album notes).
Z
Zulu Nation, Afrika Bambaataa's vision of a global brotherhood linked by a passion for the cyber-street arts of HipHop culture. Inspired by Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and George Clinton's ‘One Nation Under A Groove’, it was the predecessor to today's invisible engloballed info-community of New Headz.
© David Toop, 1996
ELECTRO-FUNK - WHAT DID IT ALL MEAN?FOR FURTHER INFORMATION E-MAIL: electrofunkroots@yahoo.co.uk
Greg Wilson – November 2002
Electro-Funk is undoubtedly the most misunderstood of all UK Dance genres, yet probably the most vital with regards to its overall influence. Central to the confusion is the term itself, which during 82/83 (before it was shortened to Electro) was specific to the UK. From a US perspective this music would come under a variety of headings (including Hip-Hop, Dance, Disco, Electric Boogie and Freestyle), arriving on import here in the UK, mainly on New York labels like West End, Prelude, Sugarhill, Emergency, Profile, Tommy Boy, Streetwise, plus numerous others. Just as Northern Soul was a British term for a style (or group of styles) of American black music, so was Electro-Funk, and, like Northern, the roots of the scene are planted firmly in the North-West of England.
Although this has been documented in a number of books and publications down the years, often with a fair degree of insight, the subject is rarely approached with any true depth and attention to detail, the information all in fragments. Perhaps the main reason that Electro-Funk remains a mystery to so many people is because it’s audience was predominantly black at a time when cutting-edge black music (and black culture in general) was very much marginalized in the UK, and as a result essentially underground. To keep up to date with what was happening on the British black music scene in 82/83 you’d have had to have been a reader of a specialist publication like Blues & Soul or Black Echoes.
In the UK scheme of things Electro-Funk eventually took over from Jazz-Funk as the dominant force on the club scene, but not without major controversy and upheaval. The purists regarded ‘electronic’ or ‘electric’ (as they called it) with total contempt, rejecting its validity on the grounds that it was, in their opinion, ‘not real music’ due to its technological nature (although Marvin Gaye’s ‘Sexual Healing’ would put paid to that theory). However, as time went on and audience tastes began to change, even the most hostile DJ’s were forced to play at least some Electro-Funk. Despite all the resistance, the movement slowly but surely began to gain momentum, sweeping down from the North, through the Midlands and eventually into London and the South. The reason the Electro scene took so long to fully establish itself in the capital was down to the stranglehold the all-powerful Soul Mafia DJ’s held on the Southern scene. The Soul Mafia, with big names like Chris Hill, Robbie Vincent, Froggy, Jeff Young and Pete Tong, continued to play Jazz-Funk and Soul grooves (later referred to as ‘80’s Groove’). It wouldn’t be until 84 that their virtual monopoly of the clubs, radio, and the black music press began to erode as a new order of music replaced the old, laying the foundations not only for Hip-Hop, but also the subsequent UK Techno and House scenes.
As has often been said, Electro is the missing link of Dance music. All roads lead back to New York where the level of musical innovation and experimentation throughout the early 80’s period was quite staggering. It wasn’t one narrow style that never strayed from within the confides of an even narrower BPM range, Electro-Funk was anything goes! The diversity of records released during this period was what made it so magical, you never knew what was coming next. The tempo of these tracks ranged from under 100 beats-per-minute to over 130, covering an entire rhythmic spectrum along the way. There was no set template for this new Dance direction, it just went wherever it went and took you grooving along with it. It was all about stretching the boundaries that had begun to stifle black music, and its influences lay not only with German Technopop wizards Kraftwerk, the acknowledged forefathers of pure Electro, plus British Futurist acts like the Human League and Gary Numan, but also with a number of pioneering black musicians. Major artists like Miles Davis, Sly Stone, Herbie Hancock, Stevie Wonder, legendary producer Norman Whitfield and, of course, George Clinton and his P Funk brigade, would all play their part in shaping this new sound via their innovative use of electronic instruments during the 70’s (and as early as the late 60’s in Miles Davis’s case). Once the next generation of black musicians finally got their hands on the available technology it was bound to lead to a musical revolution as they ripped up the rule book with their twisted Funk.
Before Afrika Bambaataa & The Soul Sonic Force’s seminal Electro classic, ‘Planet Rock’ (Tommy Boy) exploded on the scene in May 82, there had already been a handful of releases in the previous months that would help define this new genre. D Train’s ‘You’re The One For Me’ (Prelude), which was massive during late 81, would set the tone, paving the way for ‘Time’ by Stone (West End),
‘Feels Good’ by Electra (Emergency) and two significant Eric Matthew / Darryl Payne productions, Sinnamon’s ‘Thanks To You’ (Becket) and, once again courtesy of Prelude, ‘On A Journey (I Sing The Funk Electric)’ by Electrik Funk (the term Electro-Funk originally deriving from this track, ‘electric-funk’ being amended to Electro-Funk following the arrival of Shock’s ‘Electrophonic Phunk’ on the Californian Fantasy label in June). However, the most significant of all the early releases was ‘Don’t Make Me Wait’ by the Peech Boys (West End), for this was no longer hinting at a new direction, it was unmistakably the real deal. An extreme chunk of vinyl moulded by Paradise Garage DJ Larry Levan, ‘Don’t Make Me Wait’ would quickly become a cult-classic, and eventually even manage to scrape into the top 50 of the British Pop chart, purely on the back of underground support (as would a number of subsequent Electro-Funk releases).
As the first British DJ to fully embrace this new wave of black music, I came in for a lot of personal criticism. Having already become an established name on the Jazz-Funk scene, I was seen as a heretic for playing these ‘soulless’ records, especially those that were regarded as the more ‘blatant’ ones (for example, the dreaded ‘Planet Rock’ and the rest of the Tommy Boys stuff, Warp 9 ‘Nunk’ (Prism), Extra T’s ‘ET Boogie’ (Sunnyview), Man Parrish ‘Hip Hop, Be Bop (Don’t Stop)’ (Importe/12), and Italian Zanza 12”, ‘Dirty Talk’ by Klein & MBO). I generally opted for the Dub or instrumental versions, mixing them in alongside the more orthodox Funk, Soul and Jazz-Funk releases of the time at my weekly residencies, Legend in Manchester and Wigan Pier, where the scene first took root. These venues, both state-of-the-art US styled clubs, would become central to the movement throughout the 82-84 period, attracting people from all over the country. The music would also gain further exposure via my regular mixes for Manchester’s Piccadilly Radio (beginning in May 82), and in August 83 I’d introduce Electro to a new audience, when I became the first Dance resident at the now world-famous Hacienda club.
Electro-Funk’s legacy is huge. It announced the computer age and seduced a generation with its drum machines, synthesizers and its sequencers, its rap, cut and scratch, its breaking and popping, its Dub mixes, its bonus beats and its innovative use of samples. Made to be mixed it inspired a new breed of British DJ’s to cut the chat and match the beats. Now legendary names like Grandmaster Flash, Tee Scott, Tony Humphries, Larry Levan, Francois Kevorkian, Shep Pettibone, John ‘Jellybean’ Benitez and Double Dee & Steinski became role-models for tuned-in DJ’s and would-be remixers, whilst pioneers of the new digital sampling technology, including New York producer Arthur Baker and his collaborator John Robie, British producer Trevor Horn (via ‘Buffalo Gals’) and, of course, the Herbie Hancock / Bill Laswell combination, with their Grammy winning ‘Rockit’ (Columbia), not only revolutionized black music but instigated a whole new approach to popular music in general.
Electro-Funk was the channel that finally brought the Hip-Hop movement, and all its various creative components, firmly into the UK mainstream, helping to spread its message throughout Europe and beyond. To all intents and purposes Electro-Funk pre-dates Hip-Hop in a British context, the term not coming into common use here until much later. We were more or less clueless when it came to Hip-Hop until late 82, when Charisma Records in the UK unleashed Malcolm McLaren & The World’s Famous Supreme Team’s ‘Buffalo Gals’ video, which came as something of a culture-shock to say least, bringing the full-force of NYC street-culture out of The Bronx and into our living rooms, and inspiring a carnival of breakdancing in cities and towns throughout Britain during the summer of 83. Eventually we’d learn of its origins with Kool DJ Herc, spinning his famous ‘merry-go-round’ of breaks for the b boys. Before this, most people had presumed that the break in breakdancing referred to the damage you might do to your bones if you got the move wrong!
Although the media gradually latched onto this ‘new dance craze’, the scene that surrounded it wouldn’t receive any serious attention here in the UK until 1984. This followed the runaway success of the Street Sounds ‘Electro’ compilations (Volume 1 released in October 83), which would take the music to a much wider audience, and result in The Face announcing ‘Electro – The Beat That Won’t Be Beaten’ across its entire front page in May 84, a full two years on from the US release of ‘Planet Rock’. This substantial delay in recognition went a long way towards obscuring Electro-Funk’s essential role in kick-staring the 80’s Dance boom, with many UK club historians bypassing the pivotal early 80’s period and mistakenly citing Detroit Techno as the trigger. Even the track that gave birth to Techno, the Juan Atkins / Rick Davies 12” ‘Clear’ by Cybotron (Fantasy), was regarded as an Electro classic here in 83, way before the Techno scene began to take shape, and would feature on the first Street Sounds ‘Crucial Electro’ compilation the following year. Little mention is ever made of the fact that its remixer, Jose ‘Animal’ Diaz, was immersed in NY Electro, with previous mix credits including ‘We Are The Jonzun Crew’ for Tommy Boy, and ‘Hip Hop Be Bop (Don’t Stop)’, which gained a new lease of life following his much sought-after limited edition mix for Disconet (the DJ Only format affiliated to Sugarscoop).
Electro’s star burnt very brightly, initially on the underground and eventually with the club masses. In 1984 the London scene took off in a big way, both in the clubs and on the radio, with the emergence of DJ’s like Herbie from Mastermind (who mixed the Street Sounds albums), Paul Anderson, Tim Westwood and Mike Allen confirming a radical shift in power on the capital’s black music scene. With the substantial weight of London behind it, the Electro movement quickly went overground enticing an ever-increasing number of switched-on white kids in its on-going search for the perfect beat. With a significant proportion of the British youth, regardless of colour, now grounded in Hip-Hop culture, the new UK Dance era was well and truly under way and it wouldn’t be long before musicians and DJ’s here began to create their own hybrid styles, most notably in Bristol where Electro was fused with the Reggae vibes of Dub and Lovers Rock, to bring about a unique flavour that would later be known as Trip-Hop. By the end of the decade cities like Manchester and London had become major players on the now global Dance scene, with the UK a veritable hotbed of creativity both in the clubs and the recording studios.
Electro-Funk was the prototype, and Hip-Hop, Techno, House, Jungle, Trip-Hop, Drum & Bass, UK Garage, plus countless other Dance derivatives, all owe their debts to its undoubted influence. Without it’s inspiration, it’s unlikely that British acts such as Coldcut, 808 State, A Guy Called Gerald, Soul To Soul, Massive Attack, The Prodigy, William Orbit, Goldie, the Chemical Brothers, Underworld and Fatboy Slim, to name but a few, would have emerged. When all’s said and done, Electro-Funk (or Electro or whatever people choose to call it) was the catalyst, the mutant strain that bridged the British Jazz-Funk underground to the Acid-House mainstream, Until this fact is fully recognized the UK Dance jigsaw will remain incomplete and confused, with countless clubbers, twenty years on, having no idea of the true roots of the music they’re dancing to.
© Greg Wilson – November 2002
Hip hop electrónico
Por Rui Miguel Abreu
Quem cresceu nos anos 80 sabe bem do que era feita a paisagem da época: computadores com nomes futuristas como Amstrad ou ZX Spectrum, monitores com luz verde, jogos de Arcada chamados Space Invaders, séries de ficção científica na TV – Galáctica, Buck Rogers – mais naves espaciais no cinema – Guerra das Estrelas, Regresso Ao Futuro, ET... Enfim, na época ninguém tinha a cabeça na lua, mas nos confins do espaço, “onde o homem nunca foi antes”. Esta “paisagem tecnológica” surtiu, obviamente, efeitos ao nível da música.
No início dos anos 80, jovens como Juan Atkins, por um lado, e Arthur Baker, por outro, começavam a dar os primeiros passos na produção musical. Maravilhados pela estética do P-Funk de George Clinton, ele próprio um confesso viajante do espaço cujos shows ao vivo incluíam naves espaciais e extravagantes fatos de astronauta, Atkins e Baker atiraram-se de cabeça à tecnologia mais básica existente na época – a caixa de ritmos DMX, a Roland 808 – e começaram a fazer ruído sincopado.
Paralelamente, nos bairros do Bronx, em Nova Iorque, jovens DJ’s começavam a inventar o futuro, tocando duas cópias do mesmo disco alternadamente para criar a ilusão de um break de bateria sem fim. No início, o electro procurava fazer a mesmíssima coisa com caixas de ritmos e sintetizadores: prolongar a batida até ao infinito, por um lado, e emular os sons produzidos por uma banda inteira de funk, capturando o espírito do groove nos circuitos integrados da maquinaria à sua disposição.
Juan Atkins criou, juntamente com Rick “3070” Davies o projecto Cybotron que, praticamente sozinho, lançou as bases do techno de Detroit em faixas como “Clear” ou “Techno City”. Paralelamente, em Nova Iorque, Arthur Baker ajudava a traduzir a visão de Afrika Bambaataa para música, criando, juntos, o hino “Planet Rock”, uma faixa de Hip Hop tão poderosa que haveria de desempenhar o papel no advento de variadíssimos sub-géneros de música de dança apoiada em tecnologia electrónica, como o Electro, o Miami Bass, o Freestyle, o Techno ou até o Acid House...
Quando o hip hop deixou de gatinhar e começou a andar pelo seu próprio pé, os artistas começaram a dispensar as “house bands” dos estúdios em que gravavam – responsáveis por um som ainda muito ligado ao funk e ao disco, nos primeiros momentos da década de 80: ouça-se, por exemplo, “Rapper’s Delight” da Sugarhill Gang – e a mexer directamente nas tais caixas de ritmos que começavam a invadir o mercado. O resultado foi um mergulho instantâneo no futuro, com um funk sintético e fluído, capaz de incorporar as influências vindas da cena “synth-pop” europeia (grupos como Kraftwerk, Yazoo ou Depeche Mode eram ícones para qualquer jovem negro dos “Boros” de Nova Iorque), aproveitando o vocoder ou a capacidade de alterar o pitch de uma voz para dar o ar robótico ás faixas que depois eram adoptadas pelos B-Boys nos seus exercícios de desafio da gravidade conhecidos internacionalmente como “Breakdance”.
Filmes como “Beat Street” ou “Breakin” fizeram muito para levar a sonoridade electro a todos os cantos do mundo. E por um breve momento, grupos como Jonzun Crew, Warp 9, Latin Rascals reinaram supremos, debitando funk cibernético e futurista em pedaços de vinil que hoje são verdadeiras peças de colecção.
O círculo completou-se quando Herbie Hancock, famoso pianista de jazz, resolveu levar ainda mais longe a sua paixão pela tecnologia já evidenciada desde os anos 70 nas suas gravações mais “eléctricas” (ouça-se “Sextant”, por exemplo) e editando, com a ajuda de Bill Laswell e do DJ Grand Mixer DST, o álbum “Future Shock” de onde foi retirado o mega-sucesso “Rockit”, um dos primeiros hits criados pelo poder da MTV. Com um scratch infeccioso de DST (que todos os turntablists apontam como a razão que os levou a eles próprios a tentar scratchar) e um groove electrónico irresistível, “Rockit” foi, porventura, o maior dos sucessos de um género que nos fez acreditar que no futuro todos os robots teriam groove!.
10 CLÁSSICOS DO ELECTRO
1. “Rockit” – Herbie Hancock
2. “Jam on It” – Newcleus
3. “Pack Jam” – Jonzun Crew
4. “Al-Naafyish (The Soul)” – Hashim
5. “Egypt Egypt” – Egyptian Lover
6. “Nunk” – Warp 9
7. “Clear” – Cybotron
8. “Hip Bop Don’t Stop” – Man Parrish
9. “Bassline” – Mantronix
10. “Death of a Rascal” – Latin Rascals
