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ELECTRIC FUNK vol. 2Filed Under: Music

The evolution of HIP-HOP Music

Go freestyle, 81 to 83 the years to treasure, beaches and pools were always packed. Radio stations were constantly being switched back and forth searching for the year’s best dance sides. Neighborhood DJ’s played the smoothly mixed tapes to get the ladies up and dancin. Ripped up shirts, parachute pants, you had to have a bamboo hat. "Hey Buddy Buddy Hey Buddy Buddy Buddy" do it California style. it wasn’t just an illusion everybody was walkin on sunshine.

"Dale webo mommy, don’t hurt nobody," get limbo with that webo dancin. Bond’s, Broadway 96, Gothams West, the Disco’s had crazy lines. Once you got in you broke camp on the dance floor. Freestylin with the music blastin, guys and girls goin off on each other. Up rock music brought the B. Boys wildin, you know they had to release that tension with the body expression. You sweat so much you could wring out your shirt…Play that song we’re gonna dance till we drop.

Ken Swift, Rock Steady Zulu Kings

When The Soul Sonic Force’s "Planet Rock" was unleashed in the summer of 1982, it helped reclaim for America the mantle of dance music creativity that had been held by European new wave/dance ads since the disco backlash of a few years earlier. It took a couple of years, but Arthur Baker & John Robie, two of the creative forces behind "Planet Rock," would eventually complete the circuitry that brought on a second disco boom.

Unlike mid-to-late ’70s disco, which was largely a diva-driven phenomenon, early techno-funk was largely a male preserve. It wouldn’t be entirely fair to draw a straight line between some of the street-derived songs included here and the early studio group hits of The Village People, but both did feature a lot of guys chanting. And you can certainly trace electro-funk’s early sound back to the tougher unison chanting of a less frivolous 1981 dance classic, "Body Music" by The Strikers.

Whatever the genesis of "Planet Rock," it was the clear inspiration for most of what followed during the next nine months to a year.

Then, in early 1983, two important transition records came along: Freeez’s "I.O.U.," produced by Baker, and C-Bank’s "One More Shot," produced by Robie. Both were fully-formed songs in a genre not quite known for them. And "One More Shot" took electric funk and added a passionate vocal by Jenny Burton, marking the first step back toward ’70s disco divas. If the beat itself was still minimalist, there was some singin’ going on here, for the first time in several years.

The difference, of course, was that the tracks were minimalist, and hyperactive. If Gloria Gaynor overpowered her ’70s tracks and Diana Ross bounced along on the Chic-produced "Upside Down," anybody who sang to techno­funk basically ended up duking it out with the music. This gave the records more bite and tension than much of the creamy ’70s diva music.

"Shot" and 1.0.U." were only club and R&B hits. Shannon’s "Let The Music Play" was the breakthrough record. If "Sexual Healing" and "Billie Jean" were the songs that forcibly re-integrated Top 40 radio in late 1983, "Music" and Madonna’s concurrent "Holiday" were the songs that forced Top 40 to play disco for the first time in nearly four years. By 1986-87, it seemed like Top 40 radio was playing little else. And "Let The Music Play" was clearly one of the records responsible.

As for the team behind "Let the Music Play": Chris Barbosa was a club jock who brought New York indie label Emergency Records an instrumental demo of a song that was initially called "Fire On Ice." He was teamed with Mark Liggitt, who had just produced a dance remake of the Police’s "Every Breath You Take" for Emergency. Brenda Shannon Greene was a New York bookkeeper in her early ’20s who auditioned for the pair once the song was written.

Whether "Let The Music Play" is the first "freestyle" record is open to debate. (I’d include "One More Shot" and I.O.U.") Nonetheless, its use of Latin rhythms and a totally syncopated drum sound (as opposed to the 4/4 sound of most previous techno-funk hits), was the blueprint for the freestyle sound that dominated dance music of the late ’80s.

One of the people who popularized the term freestyle was Miami DJ-turned-producer "Pretty" Tony Butler, who used it for both the name of one of his studio groups and an early single, "Freestyle Express." Besides a string of hits by female vocalist Trinere, Butler produced two of the songs featured here, Fast Lane’s "Young Ladies" (his first attempt at a rap record) and Debbie Deb’s 1984 recording "When I Hear Music."

The dominance of producer-driven creations here conjures up images of the C&C Music Factory/Milli Vanilli ’90s, with tons of samples, mix-and-match studio vocalists, and records that are more sound collages than songs. But it’s worth noting that most of the records here are relatively simple affairs. "When I Hear Music," for instance, was the product of one keyboard, one Roland 808 drum machine, and a Vocoder.

There was, however, a Vanilli aspect to "When I Hear Music." The first Debbie Deb was a session singer whose real name Butler doesn’t remember. A local booking agent claims that the first Debbie was too, er, full-figured to make the transition to club appearances; there were, he says, at least two other Debbie Debs. Pretty Tony has since recorded a new Debbie Deb project with another singer. He’s also doing another Trinere record that will bring back the early ’80s electric funk sound you hear here. (Tommy Boy is also starting to dabble with techno-funk again, having recently signed the British group L.P.O.)

The Debbie Deb syndrome wasn’t that uncommon at a time when the freestyle boom was making Miami into a little Detroit. (There are at least two other better-known Miami-born pop hits about which similar stories exist.) Connie Piriz, on the other hand, was certifiably a 21-year-old junior college student in Hialeah, Florida, when she and a Vocoderized version of herself dueted on 1985’s "Funky Little Beat." She still gets an occasional call to perform in the Hispanic markets, where "Funky Little Beat" was a hit, and she too is recording again.

Now for some more immediate progeny of "Planet Rock." A few months after that record’s release, New York-based Jive Records put out an album called "Jive Rhythm Trax," a collection of eight tracks similar to the breaks of current hits ("Tainted Love," "Forget Me Nots," etc.). "122 B.P.M." was based on "Planet Rock" and actually got played on New York’s R&B stations as a regular song.

Worth knowing: the writer’s credit goes to one L. Linn, as in the Linn Drum Machine. Also, one of the principals behind these tracks was Nigel Green, later a co-producer of Def Leppard.

Tommy Boy, meanwhile, came forth with Jonzun Crew, a vehicle for producer Michael Johnson and his brother Maurice Starr, later known for his work with New Edition and New Kids On The Block. If science fiction was the #1 influence on electric funk, "Pack Jam (Look Out For The OVC)" honors its biggest rival: video games.

I’ The year 1982 had begun with Buckner & Garcia’s bubblegummy "Pac Man Fever," for which the game’s manufacturer got a cut of the profits. Tommy Boy, fearing a legal hassle like the one that "Planet Rock" touched off with Kraftwerk, changed this song’s name from "Pac Man." (Ironically, Baker had turned it down for his own Streetwise label because it sounded too much like "Planet Rock." Then again, Silverman turned down Baker & Starr’s next project, New Edition’s "Candy Girl," because he was afraid of being sued over its resemblance to "ABC," so it went to the Streetwise label.)

The OVC, incidentally, was the Outer Space Visual Communicator, a device invented by one of Johnson’s M.I.T. friends. Johnson would go on to milk the sci-fi motif on a follow-up, ‘Space Cowboy," and a duet with production client Peter Wolf, "Mars Needs Women."

One of the musical forces that broke the grip of freestyle in the late ’80s and early ’90s was house music, a genre with an even more overt connection to ’70s dance. Juan Atkins, part of Detroit’s techno-house movement in the late ’80s, was also part of Cybotron, whose 1984 techno-funk hit "R-9" is included here.

Twilight 22’s "Siberian Nights" was synth-whiz Gordon Bahary’s follow-up to the more successful ‘Electric Kingdom." That song was fairly straight message rap, but with Middle Eastern rhythms. Here the beat goes back to the U.S.S.R. and the lyrics, with their references to nuclear winter, get wilder.

The Egyptian Lover was one of the DJs in Uncle Jam’s Army, the guys who mixed Saturday night on L.A. hip-hop powerhouse KDAY. "Egypt, Egypt" from 1984 is the sort of lightweight novelty that characterized West Coast rap in the years before N.W.A. If it seems a tad egotistical, note that the label credits on another of his singles reads "remixed by the (awesome) Egyptian Lover, drums by the (ultimate) Egyptian Lover, vocals by the (creative) Egyptian Lover, produced by the (genius) Egyptian Lover.’

Even by 1984, however, you could also hear more serious West Coast rap on KDAY. Ice T, who would eventually help bring West Coast rap into its own, makes a guest appearance on "Reckless" by Chris "The Glove" Taylor & David Storrs, the only rap on the soundtrack of Breakin’, in which he also appeared. Breakin’ was one of several Hollywood attempts at capturing the hip-hop movement. If those films weren’t as bad as the Lambada movies of 1990, nobody really thought Breakin,’ Beat Street or Krush Groove particularly captured the real street scene either. This one starred Lucinda ~censored~ as a middle-class jazz dancer introduced to poppin’ and lockin’ by Adolfo "Shabba-Coo" Quinones, later nominated by "drive-in movie critic" Joe Bob Briggs as "best actor who wears big animal teeth in his ears."

In late 1991, as Top 40 radio’s ratings declined, a debate raged between those who blamed the format’s troubles on an alleged rap and dance overload in the late ’80s and those who felt that rap and dance were the true youth music, as rock was in the late ’50s. The latter held that Top 40 hadn’t played enough dance or rap, and that teens would never again be interested in anything else.

By the time you read this, both sides of that debate will probably look pretty silly. (They do as I write this.) But it’s particularly ironic to note that only one of the songs on either this or its companion volume, specifically "Let The Music Play," was a Top 40 hit. Even with a novelty rap, the best the multi-generational gang from Newcleus could do was #55.

"Computer Age (Push The Button)" was actually intended as the first Newcleus single, but producer Joe Webb liked another song, "Jam On Revenge," better. That was the first single. "Jam On It" was the sequel, and the bigger hit. If "Computer Age" kept the sci-fi theme of "Planet Rock" going, "Jam On It" goes back even further to the early, early days of rap when almost every rapper had some variant on the rhyme about duking it out with Superman. (Perhaps because this is a family act, they forego the part about subsequently having their way with Lois Lane, something that ended up even on one female rap record.)

The best "Jam On It" could do back in the mid-’80s, before Yo! MTV Raps forced Top 40 radio in the heartland to deal with rap, was to become a pop hit in the big cities. It did have an interesting afterlife, though. In the late ’80s, the word "jams" became the nickname for a lot of R&B and dance stations, many of which signed on by playing "Jam On It" for several hours. Or days. The Newcleus kids have finished school, incidentally, and at the time these notes were written had just released another song, "Jam On This." That is as good advice for the enjoyment of this package as any.

RAINmaker

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