The Shock of the New
Four decades ago, Herbie Hancock’s Future Shock found bewildering commercial success with the cutting-edge grooves of the NYC underground. Two architects of this early hip-hop classic, producer and bassist Bill Laswell and pioneering turntablist GrandMixer DXT, remember how it all happened.
by John Murph
Credit: Bob Riha Jr./Getty Images.
Released 40 years ago, Herbie Hancock’s seminal LP Future Shock gave the keyboardist-composer’s career the jolt it needed. Toward the end of the 1970s and into the ’80s, he’d moved between progressive acoustic jazz and electric fusion. But his electric albums had started to stray further and further from the epochal work he recorded with his bands Mwandishi and the Headhunters. Instead of the Afrofuturist jazz-funk he explored with those groups, albums like 1981’s Magic Windows and the following year’s Lite Me Up found him immersed in sleek post-disco R&B that better resembled the highbrow boogie albums of Quincy Jones, George Duke and Webster Lewis. They weren’t awful, but none contained material that stoked the imagination like 1973’s “Chameleon” or ’74’s “Butterfly.”
Enter “Rockit,” the landmark hit off Future Shock. With its rhythmic jabs of turntablism and Oberheim DMX synth drums, the song announced a new chapter in Hancock’s career and in the interdependent histories of jazz and pop music — one that acknowledged hip-hop, then approaching its 10th year. Hip-hop culture was still in its infancy, but it was already demonstrating mighty staying power despite many big record companies’ reticence to embrace it.
Techno-funk and electro were already a foundational sound in early hip-hop, particularly on innovative cuts like Afrika Bambaataa’s Kraftwerk-indebted breakthrough “Planet Rock.” “Rockit,” however, was a Frankenstein monster of another kind. Somehow, it seemed equally avant-garde and pop-infectious.
Soon after the song’s pulverizing beginning, “Rockit” progresses with those scabrous turntable riffs and textures, a bassline appropriated from spiritual jazz, the industrial drive of Downtown dance music, percolating Afro-Cuban drums and Hancock’s sly, playful, hypnotic synth line. The groove proved a perfect soundtrack in the clubs and on the streets, where breakdancers were defining the athletic component of the hip-hop art form.
“Rockit” afforded Hancock a Grammy for Best R&B Instrumental Performance, and an opportunity to make Grammy history onstage at the 1984 ceremony. The song also hit No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot Dance Club Play chart. Its groundbreaking music video, directed by Kevin Godley and Lol Creme, swept the 1984 MTV Video Music Awards, earning five trophies. In 1994, Future Shock was certified Platinum. By any standard, this success was remarkable. For a jazz-rooted artist, however, it was miraculous.
But even though “Rockit” and Future Shock were game-changing hits for Hancock, in truth they came largely from the minds of bassist Bill Laswell and keyboardist Michael Beinhorn, who worked together as the production duo Material. At the time, the pair were on a fascinating trajectory matching pop excellence to music’s bleeding edge. (In 1982, they’d released Whitney Houston’s lead-vocal debut on a Material LP, featuring her alongside free-jazz titan Archie Shepp.) The two composed and constructed most of the music on Future Shock well before Hancock added his flair. Material also assembled an impressive crew of musicians that included the Cuban percussionist Daniel Ponce, reggae drummer Sly Dunbar, guitarist and Miles Davis alum Pete Cosey and singer Bernard Fowler. But the musician who was wholly essential to Hancock’s new direction was Derek Showard, then known as Grandmixer D.ST, now GrandMixer DXT.
DXT’s prophetic work on “Rockit” and the rest of Future Shock argued that a twin set of record turntables could be a brilliant musical instrument — capable of endless textural, rhythmic and even melodic improvisation. As trailblazing as DXT’s performance was, though, Hancock still recognized its forebears in the history of great Black music. “Scratching sounded avant-garde, like the kinds of sounds we were always seeking out during the Mwandishi days,” the jazz icon wrote in his autobiography, Possibilities.
“Before Laswell, Beinhorn and DST, I had been only dimly aware of what was happening in the Bronx,” Hancock wrote. “Now I was thrilled beyond words to be in the middle of it, working with guys who had skills I hadn’t even imagined before. This music was exciting and unpredictable, because scratching lets you change direction suddenly, cutting to another sound or groove. It was totally avant-garde but within the popular-music context. Exploring all these new possibilities made me feel more energized than I had in years.”
TIDAL spoke with Laswell and DXT about how Future Shock came together and what it means in hip-hop’s 50th year.
These conversations, conducted separately and combined here for narrative effect, have been edited for length and clarity.
Explain how the collaboration between Herbie and Material began.
Laswell: [Future Shock associate producer] Tony Meilandt was working with Herbie; he came to New York to find people to work with Herbie. He was really interested in Brian Eno, but Eno was not that interested in Herbie. Then, Tony found out that I had worked with Eno and [artist manager] Roger Trilling. Without Roger and Tony Meilandt, there would be no “Rockit.” They brought me to Tony Meilandt, and we decided I would do a couple of tracks and then take them to California, where Herbie lived.
Herbie came to New York before that, around 1982. We met at the Roxy, which is where everybody was going at the time. He got to hear a little bit of turntablism with electro beats. I am not sure if he even was listening, but he was there. A few weeks later, I put together some basic tracks and took them to California.
DXT, you were deejaying at the Roxy during that crucial time. Was that your first encounter with Herbie?
DXT: He did not have any access to me at that time, because I was spinning onstage inside of a booth. I met Herbie for the first time at his house. I just so happened to be in Los Angeles, and I was on my way back to New York and Tony Meilandt, his manager, brought me by his house to meet and discuss some of the ideas and what the future holds for this gathering of artists and musicians. That was basically it.
Were you a Herbie fan prior to meeting him?
DXT: Absolutely! I remember some friends and I had just finished watching [an episode] of Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert [featuring] Herbie and the Headhunters. It was the night he did that effect where he pretended he was magically making the synthesizer breathe when it was just a modulation. But he was moving his hands with the modulation so it looked like he was doing it magically. Later, my friend and I were sitting on a car in a parking lot, looking at the stars. We were young, like 13 or 14. We were talking about that concert and I said, “Man, one day I’m going to play with him.” I ended up living the dream.
Talk about the basic construction of “Rockit.” There’s so much going on, from the turntablism to the Afro-Cuban drumming and more.
Laswell: I did not hear that there was a lot going on [in “Rockit”]. [Percussionist] Daniel Ponce was in New York, and I was putting him on almost everything I did. He became a kind of fixture on the tracks that were coming out, and it just happened that I put him on that track.
I put the track together and recorded the turntable, recorded the batá [drums]. The track was basically done before Herbie heard it. Then, when we went to California, he just listened. I would give him references or suggest themes and things. It came together really quickly and was mixed really quickly, so Herbie did not have a great deal of input. When he played, it was the last thing going on tape, I think.
The producer and musician is seen here onstage in Europe in 1986. Credit: Frans Schellekens/Redferns.
DXT, talk about the innovations behind your improvisational technique, and how you crafted that immortal solo on “Rockit.”
DXT: I grew up around musicians, so when I was laying down that solo, I was thinking Ella Fitzgerald and Thelonious Monk; I was thinking improvisation. I was trying to be different than the other DJs from the Bronx.
Some DJs had already begun cueing out loud, meaning cutting records on time. You rub the record to make sure you are in the right spot. Just like when you are editing tape, you have to cue it; you rub it across the head, make sure it’s in the right spot, you mark it and you cut it. DJing is the same thing except you mark the record. That is the edit point.
Cueing out loud became fair game. It was implemented by Grand Wizzard Theodore when he decided to cue out loud purposely. Before, cueing out loud would be considered an accident. He made it so it was no longer an accident. For the most part, DJs would look at that as a technical application; my position on it was more of a musical approach. I was thinking of improvisation. I was just trying to stretch it out and be more creative musically.
Explain how you anticipated Herbie’s contributions when you were improvising on “Rockit.”
DXT: As a musician, I’m thinking that Herbie is going to hear what I have done. He is going to work around it, or even on top of it or under it or in between it. He’s a master. I wrote out my parts. No one explained to me what to do. I was the only person in the known universe doing that, so they just left it to me to create whatever I was going to do.
A week before [I recorded my parts for “Rockit”], I was robbed at gunpoint. Within seven days of that incident, I went to Brooklyn to record “Rockit,” and I was just hurt and angry. When it was time to pull the trigger on the solo, it was one take. I put everything into it — where I was, my feelings, my passion, my anger. And it freed me.
Today, I thank those three guys that robbed me at gunpoint. I actually refer to them as the three angels. Angels do not come in the way that you think. They come in the condition of your environment. They came with ski masks and guns, but they freed me.
What did you think of “Rockit” when it hit the airwaves?
DXT: In all honesty, when I first heard the final mix, I was not happy. I was like, “Man, they messed up my song.”
It just struck me wrong. It had to grow on me. It was good, but I was just thinking of something else. I was looking for breaks in it other than the turntable solo. I was hoping there would be a B-boy solo — just drums and then the bass would come in or something — but it went straight into the scratch solo. I would have loved to have done an extended version with a break solo. But I guess my scratch solo was the break.
For the record, that solo was done in one take. All the other phrasing and stuff I did, we tracked out. But the solo is actually one take. Still, I was too immature to understand the bigger picture. At first when I heard it, I was like, “What happened?” When it became a megahit, I loved it.
Future Shock’s title track is a cover of an early ’70s Curtis Mayfield song. Bill, who chose that song? Herbie or you?
Laswell: Everything was me. It sounds terrible when I say it, but it’s the truth. When we were going to do an album with Herbie after we had experimented with “Rockit” and “Earth Beat,” I looked at songs to cover. I was in a record store, and I found a vinyl copy of Curtis Mayfield’s Back to the World.
I was going to do a cover of “Back to the World,” because it meant that Herbie would be back in top form. His electric albums in the early ’80s were not that successful.
“Back to the World,” somehow it did not work, but the record kept playing. Then “Future Shock” came on. I thought, “Well, that is even better because this [album] will be a kind of future shock.”
Talk about “Earth Beat.” That also features GrandMixer DXT, but it’s far more avant-garde and eerie, with a lot of haunting electronic effects cascading across multi-layered global music.
Laswell: We used an Indonesian monkey chant. All those weird sounds are from Kecak monkey chants from Indonesia. Now, DXT did not know what the hell that was. I was already using [those kinds of “world music”] records and mixing them into beat-oriented music.
The huge success of “Rockit” inspired a tour. Bill, you were so integral to the making of Future Shock; why weren’t you in the touring band?
Laswell: I was by that time getting into all sorts of things — traveling to Africa and India. It was a good time. I did not consider going on any promotional tour for that music, but I helped to coordinate the musicians for the touring band. DXT kind of took over the band. That was really his band once they got rolling.
DXT, share your experiences being in the band with Herbie.
DXT: Some of us were already in Material, so that “Rockit” band was a byproduct of Material. Drummer J.T. Lewis, keyboardist Michael Beinhorn, guitarists Sonny Sharrock and Henry Kaiser. We also had Bernard Fowler, drummer Anton Fier, keyboardist Jeff Bova and bassist Wayne Brathwaite.
When “Rockit” became a megahit, and with this whole phenomenon of the turntable being used as an actual instrument, they decided to put me in the band — which was a huge step for Herbie and just the music world.
Then I had pedals. I had a complete guitar rack of pedals where I had a flanger, a Cry Baby [Wah], a phase, an Ernie Ball [volume pedal]. I was definitely going in. I was definitely trying to be as creative as possible. I also played keyboards in the “Rockit” band. I was spreading out.
Bill, Future Shock became the first part of a trilogy for you, in terms of collaborating with Herbie in the ’80s. The following year Sound-System was released, and Perfect Machine came out in 1988. During that period you also produced 1985’s Village Life, a duo album by Herbie and kora player Foday Musa Suso. And Herbie was featured on some of your work with Sly & Robbie, Bernie Worrell and Bahia Black, among others. Did you anticipate such an extensive collaborative journey?
Laswell: No, it was not part of any preconception. We did Future Shock and it started to be a big thing. Then all of a sudden it is like, “Let’s do another album.” I think that is how it went; we just kept doing that. By that time, I had continued into this other world. I created a label with Chris Blackwell called Axiom, and I used that label to release all the things I was doing. It was pretty diverse. We went from West Africa to Morocco and India, and then back to P-Funk people and Sonny Sharrock.
What do you think of Future Shock in its 40th anniversary year?
Laswell: I don’t think about it so much. In fact, I did not know it was the 40th anniversary until just a few days ago.
DXT: I think people should understand that Future Shock is an example of collaboration at the highest level in that genre of music called hip-hop. One of the greatest jazz musicians ever and the world’s first turntablist made a very clear statement that turntablists could become great musicians.
