Herbie Hancock gets future shock
Herbie Hancock is a musician's musician. He pushed the boundaries of acoustic piano in the sixties. He found a uniquely personal voice on an array of synthesizers in the seventies. And in the eighties, he helped bring turntablism into the pop mainstream.
People have been experimenting with recording playback devices as musical instruments for a hundred years. But the concept didn't cross into mass consciousness until the rise of hip-hop turntablism in the early 1980s. The breakthrough moment for a lot of people was Herbie'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.
Many fans of Herbie's acoustic jazz work were distraught when he crossed over into the land of synths and other high tech. 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. Here's what his studio looked like at the time of Future Shock's recording.
In the early eighties, 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 DST is 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 the robotic voice of Bill Laswell's manager saying "Ahhh, this stuff is really fresh." This phrase has been scratched and sampled uncountably many times.
Here's a live performance of "Rockit" from the 1984 Grammy Awards. I love the breakdancing robots.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0DaG7QQ_kT0
Since Herbie loves electronic music and hip-hop, it's no surprise that they love him right back. He's been sampled 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.
https://soundcloud.com/ethanhein/rockit-remix
See a followup post about Herbie's relationship with synthesizers.