People have been experimenting with using recording playback devices as musical instruments for a hundred years, but the concept didn’t explode into mass consciousness until the rise of hip-hop turntablism in the early 1980s. The breakthrough moment for a lot of people was Herbie Hancock’s song “Rockit” from his 1983 album Future Shock. The song includes turntable scratching over a blend of live and programmed drums and synths, along with some heavily processed robo-vocals. Future Shock is named for the Curtis Mayfield song, which is itself named for the Alvin Toffler book. The basic gist is, “Too much change too fast is stressful for people.” Herbie, at least, has managed to get some pleasure from his future shock.
Herbie is a particularly complicated figure in electronic music because he was revered as a towering master of acoustic jazz before he ever touched a synthesizer. A lot of his early fans were distraught when he crossed over. Herbie himself was ambivalent about electronics at first. In interviews, he says he was reluctant to try electric piano, and only relented when his then boss Miles Davis insisted. Herbie was convinced and then some, eventually becoming a pioneering adventurer with a variety of synths and other gadgets.
In the early 80s Herbie started collaborating with Bill Laswell, another electronic adventurer. They wrote and constructed “Rockit” together with keyboardist and drum programmer Michael Beinhorn. The track includes turntable scratching by Grand Mixer DST.
The record he’s scratching is “Change Le Beat” by Fab Five Freddy featuring B-Side. It’s an oddity among old-school hip-hop records because it’s mostly in French. Fab Five Freddy laces the track with heavily vocoded interjections, and it ends with his robotic voice saying “This stuff is really fresh.”
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This phrase has been scratched and sampled a zillion times. It’s in four different tracks each by Eric B & Rakim and the Beastie Boys. On “Rockit,” Herbie answers DST’s scratched vocal with some vocoded speech of his own.
Here’s a live performance of “Rockit” from the 1984 Grammy Awards. I love the breakdancing robots.
Since Herbie loves electronic music and hip-hop, it’s no surprise that they love him right back. He’s been sampled many times, by musicians ranging from Tupac Shakur to Deee-Lite.
Jazz is in a tough spot right now. It’s been the worst-selling genre of music for years. A lot of jazz musicians and fans loathe electronic music, especially hip-hop. This makes me sad. My formal music background is in jazz, and I absorbed plenty of prejudice along with all the music theory. When I started meeting and working with some hip-hop musicians, I discovered that they mostly love jazz and are deeply reverent towards it. Some of the best hip-hop musicians come from jazz training. For instance, Rakim Allah trained as a bebop saxophone player; you can hear its impact on his linear, intricate flow.
Many jazz cats have a hard time returning the affection. A lot of jazz musicians don’t like the extreme harmonic and rhythmic minimalism of hip-hop and other electronic forms. I’ve heard jazzers deride repetitive dance music as “dumb” or “unmusical.” What’s ironic is that classical musicians used to say exactly the same thing about jazz. For its first few decades, jazz was dance music.
In my own music-making experience, hip-hop is every bit as challenging to create as jazz. Simpler, highly repetitive music has its own discipline. You have to mercilessly reject most of your ideas in order to identify the most intense and compelling ones, the ones you want to hear repeated sixteen or thirty-two or sixty-four times. Such strict editing can be uncomfortable after the relaxed effusions of post-bebop jazz soloing. It’s easier to deride new music as dumb than to admit that it’s evolving past the limits of your skill set. I admire Herbie for having the humility to being willing to keep learning, to keep subjecting himself to new constraints.
I believe in practicing what I preach, so here’s my remix of “Rockit.” It includes some samples of Herbie’s Chameleon and the movie Scratch.
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This stuff is really fresh!
See a followup post about Herbie’s relationship with synthesizers.
4 Comments
awesome entry
Thanks man!
Classical musicians had a point about jazz. As may be the case with this “minimalist” stuff, there were other points to make about jazz, but I feel no need to deride the skll set of those classical musicians that even today reject jazz even though I ultimately disagree with them. I understand their point and, if articulated properly, it is quite valid – I just don’t agree with it.
The degree of difficulty only has so much to do with it. There are a lot of things in life for which I have no particular use that I recognize are difficult to do. Art is about choices; proficiency gives the artist more options but whether one salutes the artist’s work or not more often than not depends upon agreement with the artist’s choice of options. I’m not trying to be standardized, homogenized and mechanized, so I’m not at all thrilled with the choices made by most of what occurs in hip-hop, techno, etc. I don’t care how much skill it takes to create something that leaves me cold, it still leaves me cold for very specific reasons.
I “get it”; I just don’t care. And. why should I? I grew up on some of the most redundant stuff imaginable but it still had soul. This stuff doesn’t. That stuff grooved. This stuff doesn’t; it just has a beat. There’s a world of music, repetitive, minimalist and otherwise that has a certain “engendered feeling” that most of this stuff simply lacks. I would go along with your evloving skill set hypothesis if what you’re talking about existed in a vacuum, but it doesn’t. There’s just too much basis for comparison on the same grounds that you’re using to tout it.
As for the abysmal sales of jazz (and the disappearance of a lot of other things), everything goes extinct at some point. Oh well, that’s capitalism. The market tends to underproduce social good and overproduce pollution. That’s why McDonalds is so big – their product is the output of trained culinarians by the way, so even that crap isn’t easy.
I’m sorry to hear that electronic music leaves you cold. Plenty of folks agree with you. I encourage you to keep your ears open, though. There’s as much variety in quality and skill among drum machine programmers as there is in drummers. I experience heat and excitement from Jam Master Jay’s drum programming that I don’t feel from plenty of human drummers (and have been bored or put off by tons of boring drum programming, and excited by plenty of human drummers.) The adjectives “standardized” and “homogenized” likewise can be applied just as well to plenty of classical music and jazz, sometimes more accurately than electronic music. I’d rather go hear a happening DJ spin than hear a bored orchestra running through an overplayed Mozart sonata for the zillionth time. It all depends on the performer, the people in the room, all the other contextual details.
Anyway, thanks for the comment. I like it when people care enough to disagree with me in long, thoughtful form.
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