BY BRIAN McCOLLUM
FREE PRESS POP MUSIC WRITER
You won't hear a lot of Afrika Bambaataa on the airwaves these days. It's been years since the last hot single by the New York musician, who has settled into a steady career of globetrotting DJ gigs.
But when you turn on a radio in 2009, you'd better believe you're hearing "Planet Rock."
Here's the thing about Bambaataa's biggest hit: It wasn't even really a hit -- not in traditional terms, anyway, having failed to crack Billboard's Top 40 when it was released in 1982.
But the distinctive, infectious party track has endured as far more than a piece of music. It was a cultural statement, a game-changing work that stands as the cornerstone of both hip-hop and electronic music such as techno -- the rare song that can lay claim to multiple genres. And its influence continues to resonate through popular culture, shaping both the sounds we hear and the mindset behind them.
"Planet Rock" will be in the set on Memorial Day when Bambaataa, 52, makes his first-ever appearance at Movement, the electronic music festival that's notching its 10th year on the Detroit riverfront. For veteran fest-goers, it will be a familiar experience. Perhaps no groove has drifted across Hart Plaza more often than the eerie, sci-fi funk of "Planet Rock," a staple in the arsenal of DJs.
"I've been amazed at so many different versions, how they've stripped it down to the bone to be played in so many other thousands of records," says Bambaataa. "There are the remixes, and the re-remixes, and the re-re-re-remixes."
What Chuck Berry's "Johnny B. Goode" was to rock, what Muddy Waters' "Mannish Boy" was to the blues, so "Planet Rock" is to modern popular music: the song that served up the essentials, pointing the way forward and providing a well of inspiration to generations of musicians.
The track, produced by Arthur Baker and performed by Bambaataa and his Soulsonic Force, had timeless elements. The haunting Kraftwerk melody. The elementary but elegant beat. The synthesized orchestra blasts. The robotic rap chant: "Rock, rock, planet rock -- don't stop."
"For almost 30 years, every producer has tried to touch that record at some point -- sampling it, re-creating it, looking for ideas from it," says Marc Kinchen, a Los Angeles producer. "It's a song that doesn't go out of style."
Kinchen was an 8-year-old Detroiter when he first heard "Planet Rock." He was struck.
"It was one of the first songs I paid attention to sonically. I noted all those different sounds, and always wondered what they were," he says. "I was just intrigued by everything in there, from the drums to the keyboard, even the effect on his voice. It took me a long time to figure it all out."
One quirky sound especially puzzled Kinchen, who went on to work with artists such as the Pet Shop Boys and Will Smith. He eventually got it: It was a cowbell as simulated by the Roland TR-808 drum machine -- the device that "Planet Rock" established as rap's go-to instrument.
Bambaataa and Baker have long hailed "Planet Rock" as the first hip-hop record to feature an 808, which amounts to launching the electric guitar. So far, nobody has challenged the claim.
Rap had thrived for years on the New York streets when Bambaataa and Baker burrowed in a studio to craft what became their magnum opus, nicking the melody and beat from records by the progressive German group Kraftwerk.
Others had already been toying with a link between organic black music and the electronic cutting edge. Parliament's "Flash Light" had rocked clubs four years earlier, and groups such as Zapp & Roger were doing it on the R&B side. Bambaataa, a former gang member turned rap spiritualist, was keyed in to European synth acts such as Gary Numan.
But it was the machine music of Kraftwerk that most fascinated him. The geeky German act definitely had the funk, he says.
"It was how they made the drum patterns, how they made the sounds: 'pow, ch-ch ... pow, ch-ch,' " he says. "It was the ultimate funk. It used to just kill at the early hip-hop parties."
Add Kraftwerk to James Brown and the New York rap vibe, and you got "Planet Rock."
"I was trying to make a song that played to the hip-hop and the punk rock audiences. That's the stage I was at in my life. So I crashed the two together," he recalls. "We didn't know it was gonna take off and reach the rest of the world."
'It's about making people dance'
There's a retro futurism to "Planet Rock," a glimpse of what tomorrow was supposed to sound like in 1982. But for all the sci-fi trappings, there was a street-level grit to the track. Years before authenticity became a hip-hop mantra, Bambaataa's single nailed the trick of keeping it real while sounding unreal.
When Marvin Jabiro set out to name his new record store a decade ago, he sought something upbeat, catchy, consummately hip-hop. And so was christened Planet Rock Music.
The Detroit store's namesake song gets plenty of airtime at the Springwell Street locale, where Jabiro says it still perks up the ears of shoppers. They also hear bits of "Planet Rock" in other songs, popping up in work by everyone from Common to Nelly to Three 6 Mafia.
"It's the beat -- you can't get it out of your head," he says.
But the song's true impact wasn't just its familiar four-bar motif. It was the very idea.
A teenager in 2009 has grown up in a world imprinted with the "Planet Rock" approach. He takes it for granted; it's the cultural air he's breathed since birth. Mixing and matching musical bits, repurposing obscure sounds, creating new context for old concepts -- they're the basics of a sampled, remixed, YouTubed life.
But in 1982, it was revolutionary stuff.
" 'Planet Rock' was the epitome of what hip-hop could do," says DJ Z-Trip, who will play Movement. "Take anything, run it through a prism, flip it and make it bigger than it could have been. That's what we have today. It's all an extension of that one thing."
Bambaataa's song had a particular resonance in post-Motown Detroit, where a clique of young black artists was hunting for a new sound.
"That song started Detroit techno," says Kinchen. "It sparked it 100%."
Juan Atkins, Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson took the "Planet Rock" model, dropped the rap, played up the Kraftwerk and launched the sound that would change dance music.
"Once the electronic stuff got put into the mix -- once people realized you could put blips in the mix -- they realized you don't need a studio band to create music," says Z-Trip. "That's what pushed the boundaries. Producers like Juan Atkins realized this was something different."
For his part, Bambaataa is pleasantly low-key about his role in transforming music, content that he never became a celebrity like many of the artists who followed him.
"Really, it's about making people dance," he says.
Others are happy to provide the applause.
"He ran it to a whole new level," says Kinchen. "He gets everybody's ultimate respect. There are certain people who are untouchable. And he's one of them."
No comments:
Post a Comment