One Song - Herbie Hancock's "Rockit"

Episode Date: October 2, 2025

How did a jazz innovator help bring hip-hop into the mainstream with one groundbreaking instrumental? Diallo and LUXXURY explore Herbie Hancock’s 1983 hit “Rockit,” the electro avant-garde experiment that elevated scratching as an art form and ushered jazz into the future. One Song Spotify Playlist Songs Discussed: “Rockit” - Herbie Hancock “I’m Not In Love” - 10cc “Billie Jean” - Michael Jackson “Bring Down the Birds” - Herbie Hancock “Groove Is in the Heart” - Deee-Lite “Watermelon Man” - Herbie Hancock “Escapism (Gettin’ Free)” - Digible Planets “Cantaloupe Island” - Herbie Hancock “Cantaloop (Flip Fantasia)” - US3 “I Thought It Was You” - Herbie Hancock “Buffalo Gals” - Malcolm McLaren and The World’s Famous Supreme Team “Change the Beat” - Beside “Upper and Lower Egypt” - Pharoah Sanders “It’s Just Begun” - The Jimmy Castor Bunch “We’re Gonna Groove” - Led Zeppelin “Get Lucky” - Daft Punk “Planet Rock” - Afrika Bambaataa & The Soul Sonic Force “Going Back To Cali” - LL COOL J “Paul Revere” - Beastie Boys “Peter Piper” - Run DMC “Mere Jaisi Mehbooba” - Bappi Lahiri “Top Of The World” - 8Ball & MJG Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Luxury. Today, we're diving into a pioneering record that proved you could mash jazz with hip-hop, with Afro-Cuban rhythms, and electronic music, and land a major hit. Take that one, Marcellus. That's right. And to do all that genre-bending successfully without any vocals and hit number one on the dance charts, and win a Grammy for Best R&B Instrumental Performance. I mean, come on! And by the way, this song's success came in no small part, thanks to its avant-garde music video, which stole the show at the 1984 music video We're going to get into all of that and more. We're talking one song and that song is... by Herbie Hancock.

I'm actor-writer-director and sometimes DJ Diallo-Riddle. And I'm producer, DJ, songwriter, and musicologist luxury, aka the guy who whispers... And this is one song. The show where we break down the stems and stories behind iconic songs across genres and tell you why they deserve one more listen. You will hear these songs like you've never heard them before. And if you want to watch one song, you can watch this full episode on YouTube and Spotify. And while you're there, please like and subscribe. So, Diallo, when was the first time you

heard Rocket? Oh, man. It was probably when I saw the video on MTV. It featured the sexiest pair of robot legs of all time. Wait, what? Not to mention a creepy bird. Yeah. There was a creepy bird robot. There's a lot of creepiness. The sexiness I'm not sure I agree with. Well, listen, you know, you weren't raised in my house. I don't want to robot shame you. Sorry about that. All of these creations were created by British artist Jim Whiting. It was kind of like a wild fever dream. Let's look at a little clip of this classic video. Why does that still sound? It's like it's still

even though it's old technology. Yeah. The robots are so... That's what I like about it. I love how... 50 years ago, it's still like affects me. It's the uncanniness of it all is still really strange and weird and emotional. I love the vision of the future that we had in the 80s where everything was like on a tron-like grid.

Even the album cover of Future Shock has that tron-like grid. We just... But what's interesting is, even back then we sort of predicted the dehumanization of the world because like it's a houseful of robots and yet they're still watching TV with humans like Herbie Hancock on the screen. It is a little dystopian. I've never thought about what the narrative is in this video, but it's a little bit creepy when you say it that way. Yeah. We were living in a Max Hedrum was a thing. Right. Oh my God.

It was very much like trying to figure out where the line between humanity and technology is right. And Herbie in this video is sort of trapped in the little video like a pet. He's either trapped like a pet or he's like some gauzy sepia tone, you know, relic from a time when humans walk the earth. That's true. Maybe he's just a vision of the past in the future. Okay, I like to think of it that way a little better. But that video was everywhere. That video was everywhere. It was definitely my first exposure to the song. You have to remember, this is early MTV. And MTV as a way of hearing new music is suddenly a thing. Right. I mean, it was certainly on the radio as well. But seeing it and hearing it at the same time was definitely why it gets so embedded. And that's probably why it's such a special song, maybe to both. of us is that we had this experience. Not only was it a video, it was this video. This video.

Yeah. So this video is directed by the British duo of Kevin Godley and Law Cream from the band 10CC. They also directed. They're not in love. I'm not in love is one of the songs they wrote. It's true. They were part of that in the early 70s. But then in the 80s, they went on to become really iconic directors that shaped the visuals of the time. So they did videos for Frank. He goes to Hollywood and the police and Durrano. Duran Duran. So these guys, unlike some other one, episodes where we've talked about making the jump from the 70s to the 80s, these guys did it successfully. Yeah, but they did it from behind the camera, which is interesting. It's worth mentioning that this video came at a time when black artists were rarely getting played on MTV. And MTV could totally make or break your career. We've talked about that on the show a lot. Speaking of Duran, Duran, yeah, so many bands that became huge because of MTV. Yeah, absolutely. And an artist that we just associated with the 80s like Michael Jackson, even a Michael Jackson had a hard. hard time getting his video for Billy Jean played at this time. It was only after the president of CBS Records threatened to remove all his other artists from MTV

that they agreed to play Billy Jean. And the fact that a black jazz artist like Herbie Hancock was getting his video played on MTV in 1983, that was groundbreaking. Like that shows you the ability of MTV, almost like Netflix today, the ability of just one media a company to absolutely break an artist. Right. Well, don't forget, M.T. wasn't, they weren't just like racist. They were also ages. So the fact that Herbie Hancock, he's 43, right?

You know, this is an era. To be fair, this is an era where the ability to have a hit at 43 is beginning to wind down. It hadn't ended altogether, but it's still pretty unusual that in a sea of, you know, young Madonna's and young Duran Duran's, we do have a 43-year-old jazz, you know, musician. When they were able to break down those doors at MTV and get a Michael Jackson on and, get a Herbie Hancock on, it was almost like a message went out like, hey, you may not be the typical MTV artist, white rock star, but if you come up with an interesting video, there might be a chance. And with Herbie, he clearly took advantage of that opportunity. In fact, that video won

five MTV Music Video Awards, the song, the video, they really came out at about the right time. Before we go on, can we back up a little bit and talk about Herbie? I think that for those of you who don't know Herbie. Herbie Hancock is just one of the most iconic jazz artists of all time. His work spans so many decades, so many genres and styles. He was originally a part of the Miles Davis Quintap, and he went on to dabble in more acoustic and famously funk styles as the 70s pushed on. He's doing everything. He's doing albums. He's doing soundtracks. One of my favorite compositions by Herbie Hancock is the soundtrack to blow up by Michelangelo Antonioni. Let's hear a little bit of Bring Down the Birds.

And yes, of course, you are hearing the famous Ron Carter baseline, by the way, that was used in D-Lights, sampled in Groove is in the heart. A whole episode, one of my favorites, go back and check that out of the Ar-Qaeda. And go back and check out the song that they sample, because that whole soundtrack to me just sounds like a really groovy party in 1967. It's a swing in 60s party, that's right. I can see the clothes. I can smell the cigarette smoke in the furniture. Absolutely.

And that's just one example of, in fact, my exposure to Herbie Hancock was through samples. I probably heard most of his hits because they were sampled in songs that I. I was listening to another example of that. Besides the delight one we just talked about is a watermelon man. Yeah. Which is sampled in Digable Planet's escapism. Great album. Such a great album.

Of course, we love Digable Planets. And that was my first exposure to what I now know to be one of his most popular, most iconic songs. He gets sampled a lot. And another song we've talked about on this show a few times, generally not in the most favorable light. but the original is incredible is, of course, Canaloupe Island, the original, which is incredible, and sounds like this. Once Us Three got a hold of it for Cantaloupe Island, Flip Fantasia, that's when things went south for me personally. You know what? Come to one song for the facts, but stay for the Us Three Shade.

Us Three slander. But by the way, if Us Three ever wants to come on the podcast, we would love to have them on show. I feel like they need their chance to defend themselves. You know what? For the first time ever, I'm going to gatekeep and say they're not welcome on the show. Wow. They are not welcome on my show. You can spin off have your own version, but God damn it, not. I'm just kidding. Us three, please come on. I'm going to do a US3 chit-chat with Dialla Riddle. You have to put mustaches on and hide them from me. Another thing to point out is that all the things that Herbie Hancock is, he's not a singer, and he'll be the first to admit that.

And this is important because in the 70s, in this era where he's evolving and jazz and funk are starting to be merged. And there's a disco era that starts to come into play before this song. He's seeing a lot of his contemporaries, Patrice Russian, George Benson. So many of our favorite artists. Who we've done episodes about. Yeah. I mean, like, we've talked about George Benson. We've talked about Donald Bird.

We've never done a Donald Bird episode, but him and Donald Bird are very close. But they all pick up the microphone and they start singing. Yeah. If they hadn't been from the beginning to begin with. But Benson in particular. But Herbie is not a singer, and I found this really charming footage. He figured out a way to sing without singing, essentially. So here's Herbie Hancock.

This is footage from 1979. It's a live version of a song called I Thought It Was You from the Sunlight Record. And he's figured out how to sing, quote, unquote. Let's listen and then talk about what he ended up doing as a solution after we listen. It's so punk rock, though. That's so DIY. You know what? They hadn't invented it.

They hadn't invented the key tar, which would solve this problem. I'm looking like you're selling pop rock. and peanuts at the game. I love that footage. It looks like a man desperate to solve a problem. It's so DIY. It's so punk rock. He's, for those of you who are...

I think punk rock, I think one-man band. But yeah, they're kind of the similar things because it's just like, how do I get out there and perform? I love that footage. I mean, like, to me, it's just, it speaks to that technology at that time

that people were just figuring stuff out on the fly. That's really interesting to me to see him try and use a vocoder live. Has Peter Frampton? Was he using a vocoder? No, he's using a talk box. Okay, a talk box. I feel like on early,

episodes of the show, we used to talk about, is it TalkBox? Is it Vocoder? Is it Autotune? You know, we used to break down those different types. Well, I can give it to you real simple. A vocoder, the main difference is that the vocoder makes the human voice sound like an instrument. Uh-huh. And a Talkbox makes the instrument sound like the human voice. Oh, interesting. There's more to it than that, but that's the easiest way to tell. If it sounds like a robot, but it's got like kind of human like shape to the sounds that are being made, that's probably a vocoder. Yeah. So just really simply explain. I'll demonstrate to you with my trusty vocoder here. I've got a microcorg which is a synthesizer,

which you can use as a vocoder. So I've plugged a microphone in, and I've got my fingers on the keyboard. And when I speak into the microphone, which is plugged in as the vocoder, with an... And obviously what you're hearing me say is different from what's coming out of the vocoder. The sound, the notes are the notes I'm playing on the synthesizer. So I'm playing an A minor. And when I play it, and talk, even if I'm talking normal in, it just gives you a minor. So Herbie Hancock, when he sings Rocket in the song, he's playing two notes on the synthesizer. It's G to A. Rocket.

Rocket. That's it. So the beauty of the device for Herbie Hancock is because he has full control with his fingers of the notes he wants people to hear. He can make his voice match. what the synthesizer is doing. But if you're hearing what sounds like a voice, but the sound itself doesn't really sound human, that's more likely to be the talk box.

The talk box, interesting. At some point, we have to do a Peter Frampton episode because Frampton Live was the Jaws, was the Star Wars of the record. Bon Jovi Living on a Prayer, anything Chromeo, Bruno Mars 24-Karrat magic. All that stuff is Talkbox. But Mr. Blue Sky by ELO and, you know,

a lot of da punk stuff, that's going to be the vocoder. And the song we're talking about today also, has a votecoder. It should be mentioned. So as we entered 1983, Herbie's kind of done it all, from disco to electrofunk to pop. Even though he wasn't reaching the heights of headhunters, he was constantly searching for new genres of expression. And he's kind of at a crossroads when he hears a song Buffalo Gals by Malcolm McLaren, and he hears scratching for the first time. Let's hear a little bit. Around the outside, round the outside. World famous Supreme Team scratching it up there, early days of scratching. And the first record, a lot of people heard scratch.

watching on. You know, I got to point out, I'm a little bit jealous of the underground hip-up of the early 80s because, like, there were so many new things that they could just casually try. And now we almost have, like, too many things we could casually try. And it's just confusion. But, like, back then, like, you could just do something as simple as just, oh, blah, blah, bo- And it's like, whoa, what are you doing here? It's a really good point. And it's some great foreshadowing of our episode and from Rockets, because the innovation of scratching, yes. These are new techniques and new sounds, which hadn't existed before and yet gave you the ability to use any sound that it ever existed before and put it in your song. This is before there were samplers.

You could cut and you could scratch and you could get some of those sounds into your material. And I also have to imagine, like Malcolm McLaren, you know, down there, you know, hearing these sounds. You know, Malcolm McClare, for those who don't know, white British producer, he basically knew about scratching because he happened on a block party being thrown by the Universal Zulu Nation. Yeah, Malcolm McLaren, famous culture vulture who gave us the sex pistols, gave us bow, wow, wow. He was managed the New York dolls for a while. He gave us Vogue before Madonna,

real legendary character, but also someone who hip to trends and gets to market sometimes before the next guy. Give him some props. He's like one of those people who like has an insane playlist to play for you and he's just like, oh man, check this out. Check this out. Like, I kind of respect that

because, you know, for those of us who don't always make music, if you have incredible taste, and what's out there and what's brand new. I mean, it's sort of what we try to do on one more song here. We try to just put people on. Malcolm McLaren is putting people on. Complicated legacy, this guy, but one of my heroes, but also just complicated legacy.

Oh, no. Incredible musical. Can I give it flowers to somebody? No, no, no, no. I'll support that he deserves flowers for his taste. Uh-huh. Not necessarily his business methods. Oh, no.

Okay. Well, that sounds a lot. All right. Let's get back to Harvey for a second. So he was at the time in 1983. He was being managed by a 20-something who had his ear to the ground in New York City, the Amangar. His name was Tony Milan. And he's an unsung hero of this episode. There is no rocket without him. And literally his ear to the ground meant that he was hip to what

was happening on the scene, the producers, the sounds. And we've talked about New York in the late 70s, early 80s, many times on the show. Sonic Youth, Blondie, among others. There's a special convergence of sound. It's hip-hop meeting punk rock, meeting post-punk, meeting, meeting everything, meeting salsa for that matter. So having your ear to the ground in this case. case means he hears about a duo named Material, which at the time, it's a floating group of musicians who at the time was Bill Aswell, who's the main guy to this day, and Michael Bynhorn. The two of them, he heard through the Great Vine were like the guys who were doing some special stuff, and maybe Herbie should connect with them. Maybe they can write a song with him. Yeah. I mean,

to hear Bynhorst said, he said that they approach the music with kind of a, what would Herbie do approach. I want to give some flowers in particular to Bill Aswell, who moved to New York in 177. and had the good luck of getting a rehearsal space where Steve Gad, the drummer, the Ramones, James Chance, all these incredible musicians were there, and it blew his mind. And he started to formulate this idea of what he called collision music

where you would cross-pollinate genres and cross-pollinate instruments and rhythms and geography for that matter. Again, I wish that I were a fly-in-the-wall in 1980, 1988, New York City. And I love the idea of all these, like, you know, rock musicians or a lot of these white musicians, looking up to a guy like Herbie, like at this time,

Herbie was a musician that already had an expansive career as an innovator. And so, you know, I love the idea that they were wondering how would Herbie build on that and incorporate, you know, a new form like hip-hop. What a cool opportunity, right? You're given kind of a blank slate or a canvas, if you will, of somebody with this incredible career and skill set, but looking to do something new. Let's bring some no wave into it.

Let's bring some Lydia Lenton. That by Freddie wants to work with orchestra. Harlow. Steve Rice, you know, all this cool stuff that's happening in New York at the time. Well, listen, we're going to take a quick break. But when we get back, we're going to dive into the stems of this groundbreaking track. We're going to hear how Herbie composed the melody in just 15 minutes. And we'll answer the question, what are they scratching on this song that gives us those classic scratch moments?

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Welcome back to one song, Luxury. We're about to get into the stems. And just to give us some context, this song was recorded across three studios. Let's start with what they recorded in OAO Studios in Brooklyn. That was the studio that was. run by Bill Laswell and engineer Martin B.C. That's right. I think they had some funding from Brian Eno at some point, too. There you go. One of my favorite people on the play.

One of our favorite people, absolutely. A year with swollen appendices, one of my favorite music books of all times, his diaries from the 90s. His work with Blur in the mid-90s, perfect. His work with Roxy music, pretty good too. All right, well, let's start with the drum programming, which was done by Michael Beinhorn from Material, who we talked about earlier. This is the Oberheim D. This is one of the big hip-hop machines at the time, but it's also the drum. machine you may recognize from Blue Monday by New Order.

Here's the main beat that Bynhorn programmed. I love how it stops right there. And here comes one of the fills. I love how the fills in this song, the like kind of rhythmic motifs are part of like their hooks. You kind of can't wait for it to get to that part, that fill. It's like as gratifying as a melody might be. And by the way, no attempt to make that simple part sound like it was played by a human.

Like that is definitely like a robot just going. Yeah. And it's also relevant to say that we're a year after Planet So Planet Rock would have been literally just would have been out, would have been a huge hit on the dance floor. They didn't have the 808. They had the DMX. So you're getting a drum machine, but it's a different drum machine. But we are definitely in the post-electro era now where these sounds are hugely popular in the clubs. And just as an example of what I was saying before about the motifs being like drum fills. Here's another one. I just love it.

It's so exciting. I can't pop and lock. But if I could, that would be the sound of me popping in lock. Yeah. Put some 16th notes in there. It is perfectly the soundtrack. to break dancing as you're pointing out. You're right. All of these changes and rhythmic kind of stutters, moments like that are perfect for a human body to do the kind of activities. That's right.

So there's a few more iconic fills. I think this snare crescendo qualifies. And fun thing to listen for in here is that it's somebody turning the volume up imperfectly. It's not like a perfect crescent, like straight line on the snare. The little human touch on a drum machine like that kind of does something. Let that play for a little bit?

I love that. Never apologize for asking to play a DMX. I love that little pause right there. Bye-p-ba-ba. Another electronic instrument in the mix was the sign air. Now, a sign-air is a super iconic, like, late 70s, I would say. Sign air. Sign air, yeah.

It's very disco-sounding. It's that pew! It's the pew-pew! We've got some pew-pews in here. I'll play it isolated, and then I'll add it to the mix. That's so electro, too. It's so electro, it's so craftwork. It's so...

Tiga. Not to be confused with TIGA, but TIGA from the electro-clash period. Oh, really? He did a lot of... What is that supposed to sound like? What is that... What instrument were they going for? It's like a Tom, but it's meant to sound electronic and maybe hearkened to a craft...

It sounds like my spaceship got destroyed on Galaxia or something like. No, it definitely has that in the late 70s. This sounded like the future, but now it doesn't kind of thing going for it. Yeah. Whatever character I'm controlling on my Atari 2,600, just got shot. Make the sound? It's very eight-bit. It's very limited.

It's very early, but it sounds cool, and when you blend it with the beat, you get this. In the beatboxing air, that sounds like the human mouth going, boom. Which would definitely get the party started.

It certainly would. And there's one more piece of electronic percussion to add to the blend. And that's, I think, been made on a minimo, but I'm not positive. But the 16th note

that mirror the high hat 16ths and are speaking of craftwork to my ears very craft-vucky, right? Sounds like machine gunfire. Yeah. Sounds like we're in the Falkland Islands with our... That would have been. What it was on everybody's mind. Yeah.

In 1983, Argentina. So I love how on top of the electronic drums that they also added actual acoustic drums. That's really cool to me. specifically this drum called the Batat, which was played by a Cuban-American percussionist named Daniel Poncée. And apparently he's playing this drum, the Batat, and the rhythms he played

are associated with the Aruba religion from West Africa. That's right. This family of drum usually comes in three different sizes, and you would normally have three different players, but Ponce was such a professional. He played all three of them in different passes, and it sounds like one performer doing all of it. I love it.

And that's what you're about to hear. That's what you wanted. That was the sound. you're looking for? Well, let's layer it with some Oberheim and some crafty 16ths. Do you say crappy 16th? Crafty. Yes, those are crafty. I thought those were wood blocks.

You know, like, to me, the woodblock is also something that comes to prominence in the New York me of the late 70s early 80s. The sound is very similar. It's a two-headed drum. There's skin on both sides. And, you know, again, there's a small, medium and large. And you're hearing all of them together right there. Love the batah. I feel like we got to get some batah up in here sometime. Hell yeah.

Let me just say one thing I love about the batah is that when we went back and listened to this song this week, that was the one percussive instrument where I was like, oh, this reminds me of break dancing. This reminds me of all the moves I could not do. That's interesting, right. It's true because there's drum machines and there's break beats, but there's also percussion. There's also a big part of like hip hop as I mentioned salsa earlier. There is a lot of Latin percussion that's a big part of both being added to machines, but also just in those early James Brown break beats. Yeah, to me, that percussion is what makes me see guys like, you know,

spinning, you know, doing the windmill, doing the head spins, like that sound. I can hear that in my mind's eye too. Absolutely. So one of the most legendary parts of the song, aside from Herbie, of course, is the scratching. And we want to talk about that. The scratching was performed by the legend himself, Grand Mixer, DXT. Let's hear a little bit of the intro. Okay, so iconically, Grand Mixer DXT, born Derek Schoard,

starts the song by scratching and it's layered with the drums. But let's just hear his part first and then I'll add it back. That what boom? It's so iconic to me. You can't hear it without thinking about Rocket. Right. If you don't rocket. I imagine the Oberheim was programmed first and his scratching was to that already

programmed Oberheim. So let's hear what was programmed that he would have been matching with his... Or I actually thought you're going to say the opposite. I thought you're going to say he did that and they programmed the drums to match him. That's also possible. So here is just the Oberheim DMX with the same rhythm. It sounds very robotic and rhythmic.

Yeah, but not very human. But when you add the scratches together, it kind of gives it a little bit, something different, something new. I don't know. We don't know which came first, but to me, like, that hand movement sounds very organic. I think people intuitively understand

that that's the sound of a record being scratched. But what not everybody knows, and I certainly learned in the making of this episode, is that the origin of that, The idea of using it as a sound is Grandmaster Flash, one of the first to do it, talks about. The idea of using a record scratching as part of the entertainment. Because normally a DJ is doing that behind the scenes. They're queuing it up in their headphones. They're hearing that sound when they're finding the start of the next song.

The history of scratching is out there. And there are a couple of places to get it that are fun. One of my favorite places to get it is if you go to the OK player account on Instagram, Questlove has his timeline, ironically, from drunk history of scratching, from point A all the way to point Z. And it's really entertaining. And it's really informative. It talks about, like, who is the first person to cue it?

Who's the person to do the helicopter scratch? Who is the first person to edit? It's a pretty amazing story. That might be a fun, sort of like, extra credit assignment for some of our listeners who want to get into that. For extra credit on one song. Extra credit on one song. Go watch this Instagram wheel.

Now let's hear DXT's scratch solo that he recorded in just one take. Let's do it. I'll play it for you, and then we'll talk a little bit about what you're actually hearing. I mean, when that part of the song comes in, it's almost like the moment in 2001 a Space Odyssey when the ape throws the bone into the sky. Yeah. The world changes. And it comes down as a satellite.

Like, if you can remember what it was like to hear that coming out of like cars just driving down the street, everybody's like, yo, what's that sound? What is that sound? And it was like big and it was like important. And it kind of changed what people thought of. not just hip-hop, but like, well, we were capable of producing sound-wise. There's so much going on here. I'm so glad that we're... Let's slow down for a second because it's a new tool.

So, instrument, the turntable as a tool. But also the specific sound, which we're about to reveal what the sound is, where it came from. Yeah. And how it's being manipulated. Yeah. All of that is new in this moment. It's so exciting sounding. And one really cool thing about this song, over the course of the song, it's kind of a call-and-response between rhythm and melody.

Like, there's no harmony in the song. There's no chord changes. What you have is rhythmic motifs that interplay with the melody that will be soon hearing from Harry Hancock. So all of this stuff to me is just as hooky as an Eddie Van Halen guitar solo with actual notes might be. It's funny. I was thinking about our episode on Little John where he was like, everything's a hook. You know, like this is one of those songs where like, there's so many different parts of it that could be a hook.

You know, I have to say just because I'm, I've just turned in in my 80% done manuscript on the book. And one important thing that I'm finding is I try and do a taxonomy of all musical borrowing throughout history is how much rhythm is like this kind of secret sauce. We think of melody as being so important in the world and it is. But melody are just what the notes

are. How the notes exist in time, the rhythm is so much. How they escape from the speaker actually has much bigger. And you can do this experiment with almost any song. You can go, da, da, da, da, da. You can almost like kind of rhythmically do twinkle, thinkle little star.

Kiss me in. I'll kiss you. back? There's a lot of songs, right? There might be multiple versions of melody. You gotta do, that do, that do, that, do, that. You kind of know what genre you might be. To evoke a melody by itself. So anyway, all this to say that in this moment, we're getting the scratching. And let's talk a little bit about the sound source here. This sound that you're hearing is a single moment from a single song, and I'll play it for you now. All right. So the origin of the sound you're hearing is just a very tiny moment at the end of a song called, Change the Beat or Change the Beat by B-Sy.

We talked about this song on a previous episode, I think Chemical Brothers. And this is a remiss, actually, to a Fav-Five Freddy song called Change the Beat. Exactly right. And at the very end, there's a moment. Interestingly enough, this song is created by Bill Louswell and Michael B-Nhorn. This is a material production with Fad F5 Freddie and B-Sides.

Which makes sense that you would scratch on a song that you had created. It was there at the studio. That was the vinyl when DXT came into the studio to work on the tune. Yeah. They had a stack of vinyl. that they had made themselves. And this was one of them. Without further ado,

here is the moment that he used. So what you're hearing, actually, interestingly enough, is Bill Lazzell's manager, Roger Trilling, through a vocoder, saying, ah, this stuff is really fresh. He was making fun of a record label executive. But that sound fresh is one of the most sampled sounds in all of hip-hop. Absolutely.

Hi-pop history. And actually, it's in Britney Spiris. It's in lots of things that aren't hip-hop. About 3,000 uses according to who sampled. Yeah, if you've ever listened. it to much old school hip hop. You'll hear that fresh everywhere. Iconic. This is the origin of it. It's like the lineage. When you use it now, it's 40 years of lineage going back to 1982 when it was first used in this song. And how smart of them? I mean,

they had no idea that hip hop would become what hip hop became, but how smart of them to essentially sample themselves because they were able to get away, you know, legally, you know, financially from a publishing point of view. Which wasn't probably really on the table, to be honest. No, they were thinking about it. Good luck. But it was also, yes, it was their good fortune that they did that. And like you said, most people at this point know that like scratching is just, you know, basically there's a sound on that piece of vinyl and you're rubbing the needle over it back and forth and forth. Scrabbing back and forth. Right. And it's funny because the second that we realized that, you know, on our laptops now you can kind of do that. We're like, can we duplicate, rocket?

Right. And it would sound something like this. Something like that. That's so cool. What I love about this is you've really, demonstrated getting into the head of Grandmaster Dxt, who talks about this sound and how important it was to him as a maker of music. He said, quote, it was just the right sound. It became like my bow. I refer to the turntable as a turn fiddle, in other words, like an instrument. So my bow was the change the beat record. This sound became an iconic part of his arsenal, his instrument. It was his instrument. The turntable was like an instrument and this was like a patch on a keyboard or something. I love that. And I don't know how I never thought about a turntable and

your fingers is sort of being like a bow and the fiddle. Like that's kind of a... I love that. I don't know why I hadn't thought about that, but that makes a lot of sick. I love it too. And I feel like it really gives proper credit to the art of the sound that we're making coming from this new tool, the DIY nature of it, the punk, I keep saying punk rock. It's DIY and that you're taking the tools you have access to and the skills you have innately to make music with.

And you don't need necessarily to have a keyboard or to have a drum kit or to have access to a studio. So Grandmaster DXT is making me. music, which is a substantial part of this song using that sound. The other thing that I like that DXT said was that he was trying to, in his scratching, channel Ella Fitzgerald and other jazz great. So he's really thinking about the whole, the musicality of what he's doing in the studio. He's thinking rhythmically of placing notes. The notes just happened to be this sound.

Yeah. So there's one more thing they recorded at OAO's studio. And that's the electric bass. That was played by Bill Laswell. Can we hear a bit of that? This is Bill Laswell on bass. playing, I think, a Steinberger, which is your classic 80s bass, where it's just the neck. Like the body is like the size of the neck.

When you picture the 80s base, that's what he's playing here. It has a very distinctive sound, too. An interesting thing that he's done here, I'll play it for you, and then I'll tell you where he got not quite interpolation, but it's very close. Interpol. It's an interpolate. It's an interpolate. I'll put some drums in just for fun. Two things.

First of all, Lazzwell has talked about his influence for that baseline many, many times across study interview. But even if he hadn't, even if this was like secret knowledge that we're revealing, what's interesting about what he borrowed is that it's completely outside of the realm of what would be remotely considered infringement. It's not a melody. It is not a melody. It's just a rhythm. We were talking about extracting the rhythm before. He's extracted the rhythm from another piece. This is Pharaoh Sanders' Upper and Lower Egypt from 1966. Listen and see if you can tell what was reused or borrowed or shared. Right? Do you hear what was borrowed from that?

I do not, actually. It's so subtle. It's just the rhythm of what he's scatting. I'll play the baseline again. But he assigned different notes to the rhythm. Absolutely. In theory, he assigned some notes. The scatting was bordering on melodic. Here's that baseline again for comparison. It's so subtle. Lazzwell also cites for the second. and bass line at the very end, which is kind of a coda.

He plays this and he cites the source. I'll tell you what that is in just a second. But see if you can tell what it is. Which, as Laswell points out, was borrowed from the Jimmy Caster Bunch. The song is, it's just begun. And we talked about evocation combinations before, like playing two notes on the bass. Like it's might evoke another song with two notes on the base, but nobody can own two notes on the base.

What's your expression, evocation? Evocation combination, but when it's small like that, two things, rhythm plus sound. Yeah. The baseline, but the same rhythm. Evocation minimum. People seem to like that, by the way. I know.

We read the comments, unfortunately. We talked a little bit about how that fresh came from another album, but there's another sample. That's right. What can you tell us about that? Again, Lazzwell talks about a really funny story, how he went to sample Led Zeppelin's Koda, which is their worst record. And at the very beginning, it starts out with a drum fill, and he wanted to isolate one

of those snares. He wanted to get a John Bottom snare sound. Now, who doesn't want a John Bonham? snare sound. But he didn't have a sampler. And actually, I do believe he worked with Martin B.C. on this. It's unclear, actually, who of them who's pushing the buttons. But they didn't have a sampler. They had this delay. And a delay, what it's doing is it's repeating a sound. That's what a delay device does. So in a way, it's like a little mini sampler. By using the repeat hold function, you can kind of cheat a delay if you can't afford a ferrelight or a sclavia. You can use it kind of

as a sampler. So he was trying to grab this snare sound and he missed. He went a little too late. and he grabbed a guitar stab instead, which is what we're hearing when we hear this. And to be clear, this is public information. So here's what we hear in the song. What's interesting, too, when isolated, is that that happens three or four times, but they're all a little bit different

because every single time they had to queue up this device to kind of grab it. So it's never the same sample twice. It's not just pushing a button like we would do now or pushing a note on the keyboard. It's like what old DJs would like cue tip can do. It's like a little. drop. It's very akin to what

is happening elsewhere in the song with the fresh sample. It's the same thing. It's going to be a little different every time. So he says that it was from the album Coda. I went through the whole thing and I wasn't able to exactly find it, but I think I got close. This is the song We're going to groove. Starts with the drums, which would map

to his story of trying to grab a snare. There's the snare he wanted. But I think that's where he actually hit the button. I think he hit it right there. I'll play it again what I think he did. And if you pitch that down, I was going to say he must have slowed it down, right? Well, again, you're using this delay, this lexicon delay device.

So how he did it, I'm not really sure. But I think he must have fixed it down. It sounds slower. Which sounds an awful lot like the Zeppelin. With some filtering added, it's 8-bit, so you're not sampling at the full resolution. I'm pretty sure that's the piece. It definitely maps to the story. It's got a lot of grain to it.

And I think they softened it by cutting the EQs, the high EQs. You can hear a little bit of that percussion. that drum, da-da-dun. And I'll play it for you in the context of the song. It's just a little moment. Just that one step. And again, that would be pitched up from and then pitched up.

I think I nailed it. Oh, man, that's amazing. Listen, after they added these final touches, the ones you just played, Bill and Michael delivered the track to Herbie at his home in West Hollywood. Bionhorn says, when Herbie listened to the track, he didn't know what was going on.

But you do that the song needed a melody. So they stood outside Herbie Studio for like 15 minutes humming together, composing a melody on the spot. I love that. If there's a through line on the show, and is that your biggest hit will probably be composed in 15 minutes. I don't know what it is. Let's hear a little bit of the melody they composed.

And what a melody they came up with. Now, Herbie played that three times actually layered. It was the Rhodes' Chroma, I think a mini-mogue. And here's another layer, and then I'll add them together for the, thickness. And together. I will say, man, that speaks to the genius of Herbie Hancock, because I love, obviously, all these other parts, but it really is that synth, in my opinion, that melody, that's the hook. You know, that's what draws in, you know, the kids watching at home in Atlanta or the,

or the mom in Iowa. Like, you need that part to make Rocket happen. I think one unique thing about this song, just in our hundred songs that we now talked about is like there isn't it's not driven by a lyric or a melody or storytelling or chord changes or harmony this is a song that's an interplay between we just heard a lot of rhythm yeah and some interesting sounds and now we're hearing a very simple melody repeated several times with no harmonization at all there's no chords underneath it the melody itself's not harmonized and that's the whole song but across the three minutes the narrative between the two the melody is so strong the sounds are so interesting yeah and the rhythms that that that are used across both of them, both in the scratching, as we were talking about, in the beats. And now in this melody, all of it sustains your interest, you're obsessed the whole time. And there's so many different parts of the song. It's really, it may be one song, but it's like so many different elements. So many hooks, so many motifs. And yet, it's pretty minimal when it's very sparse. So Herbie has a solo on this song. Can we hear that? Isolate it?

That's right. At the very end, we have kind of a coda. So the whole thing has been sort of building up to like him letting loose. It's been robotic, robotic, robotic. And then finally at the end, we hear really Herbie Hancock what he's known for. He's got the mod wheel, the pitch wheel. He's doing all the bending of the notes, and it sounds like this. Yeah. I'm so glad we had a jazz fusion artist on this song because that part makes a big difference. You know, this is the part where the humans beat the robots in the end.

Yeah, we win. The robots are funky. Yeah. They're not some crazy algorithm getting us to kill one another. These are cute-ass robots. But how, by the way, how daft punk get lucky was that solo, right? The rhythmic. I mean, that's the other part.

When you hear that, you hear every idea that the robots being daft punk, Chromeo, all that stuff that we, you know, think is so, you know, popy down. It kind of stems from this song, doesn't it? Yeah. It kind of goes back to this. Vocoters and drum machines and even the solo being funky and melodic is all stuff we hear a lot later, a lot of times in bands like what you're naming. Yeah.

You know, there's still a human behind. all that stuff. Human after all. Human after all. I want to talk about the final piece, which is Herbie's vocals. It occurs to me that there are vocals on this, but I'm not sure that I know, other than the words Rocket, I know any

words, any actual words. And I literally stayed away from like, you know, genius and other places that list the lyrics. What can you tell us about the vocals on this song? Well, they're pretty minimal. But there are some vocals, and they are all going through the vocoder. So this is a Senheiser vocoder.

Lyrically, the content is extraordinarily minimal. And as Bynhorn tells the story, because Planet Rock was the big hit and maybe on all of their minds because of the drum machines and electro sounds that they were using. The idea was, let's take some of the words from that song. For example, Don't Stop, Planet Rock Don't Stop. And Rocket, which are both featured in Planet Rock. And here's Herbie saying, don't stop. on the vocoder. Don't stop it.

That's one of very few things you hear. And if you can believe it, the title of the song, Rocket, we only hear once in the whole song. Wait, one time? Yeah,

here it is. I feel like it happens more than once. I know, it's just the once, and here it is. Rocket. It's so brief, too. Rocket.

That only happens one time in the song. There's more little sounds like this. He's just saying, nonsense. He's just kind of saying, scatting, really, nonsense. That was a real fun. sample waiting to happen. Can you play that more?

Shaka to cook. Oh, you're clapping on the one in three, my friend. Don't do that. Uh-uh. No, but I'm saying, like, if you flip it as its own sample, you can put it anywhere you want. Okay, then I'll give it to you. Then I'll give it to you. Yeah.

Now, I was trying to make it a new song. That's your one? One, two, three. I know that's not the one. No, I'm giving it to you. Yeah, but if you put the, if you put his clap, then it's different. Okay. So sick, though.

How it interplays with the drums there is so cool. Absolutely. To be clear, I was trying to flip it into a new song. I heard that, yeah. I think what you did was an improvement. I can't have people out there think I'm clapping on one and three. That's cool. Is that it?

Because I feel like there's some other sounds on it. Yeah, there's all kinds of weird sounds dispersed. Here's another one you might remember. That's Bynhorn just saying da-dao and slow down. The 80s were weird, man. That's a weird sounded. Well, this song was infectious from the very beginning. I love the story of Bill Aswell playing rocking in public for the first time.

Apparently, he had some time to kill on his way to the airport and played a reference tape mix at a speaker store, which is the thing. Kids used to go to these places. Astro. To buy speakers. Yeah, you'd buy speakers. When he played a bunch of kids from the neighborhood gathered around asking What was that song?

I'll tell you what that song was. It was a Grammy Award winning hit in the making. His performance of the Grammys that year is really like an introduction of hip-hop as art To a global older audience. Let's watch a clip of that. I love that they brought so many elements. From the video.

They've got these also like pre-jabberwocky guys Who are like in these like robot face masks if you want to call it that? Like it's almost like a dancing mannequin. And it really tied up at a ribbon. Look at the instrument he's playing on stage. He's finally got his key tar. He doesn't have to wear an actual keyboard around his neck anymore.

What I have personally is it's still, the word uncanny keeps popping in my head. It was the video is uncanny. The uncanniness of the robots and the machine motions that they're making. But even watching this now, I know those are real people with masks on emulating the video, but I'm still a little bit like, is that a robot or not? It's still not 100% clear.

Of course it's really people. At this point, it's obvious with the break dancing. But earlier when they introduced them, I'm like, wait, how are they doing that? How are they doing that? You don't know. This is actually the beginning of Boston Dynamic, the guys who make the robot dogs. That are going to kill us all. They started with breakdancing.

It was really benign. This will be our last episode, guys. But this was really just the first time that you had the, because the Grammy's audience was not the MTV audience. And for some of them, this was the first time that they had break dancing and scratching and all these B-Boy elements on a stage for them to see. So cool. With Herbie Hancock, who by that point was respected in those circles.

Luxury, now that we've heard the song and we've seen the video, knowing how much Bill Laswell contributed, I'm curious how these splits break down. Well, it's an even split between Laswell, Bynhorn, and Herbie Hancock. All three of them, split it all the way down the middle. That's awesome. Well, down the middle, 33, 33, 33. It's the...

Even, Stephen. It's the... It's the even Stephen that I always wonder who gets that extra penny. I know that extra penny. That's been tied up in court for 45 years, actually, the extra penny. No, I love it too because that seems fair. That seems like the song wouldn't have come together had it not been for the three of them adding their talents in different ways.

And I actually want to call attention to because a friend of mine just sent me a chapter of his forthcoming book about Nashville songwriting. Nashville rules as a baseline is that everybody in the room is equal. And I love that. I think that's really fair. Can I say I do feel bad? that Grand Mixer DXT does not get in on the publishing because I think without the scratching,

this song is not the legendary song. I think so too. Rhythm is left out of the equation with copyright, wrongly so. But I will say, you know, we love Herbie, and I've been waiting so long to do a Herbie episode. And I think Rocket was a perfect place to get in. Herbie's still around. So if Herbie ever wants to come on the show,

we'd love to talk to you about your catalog. Please come on the show, Herbie. So, Diallo, what do you think the legacy of Rocket by Herbie Hancock is? there are a lot of things you can say about this song. You know, it was a groundbreaking music video that so much has been said about Thriller, you know, breaking down doors over there. But like, Les is said about Rocket, I think this is absolutely, you know, it deserves to be, it's number two to Thriller's number one in terms of like opening those doors.

But I also just got to call out the scratching again. Like there's been so many hip-hop songs and songs in various genres. But Scratching rarely does it take such a center stage the way that it does. here. I completely agree with you. I know every note of the scratching as much as I know every note of the bass line or the melody line. They are all components of what makes this song hooky and memorable. And I think memorable is the key phrase because, you know, people often think of scratching is just a spice, but it's one of the four avenues of B-boyism and rarely does it get to take the stage. But when it does, it can transform a song. I'm thinking about going back to

Cali by L.L. Cool J. I'm thinking about Paul Revere by the Bisi Boys. I'm also thinking about Peter Piper by Run DMC. I just love it anytime. And we won't even get into a conversation about we've been talking primarily about people scratching on instruments. But when you scratch on a word, like, fresh, you know, or I-I-I-I-I is a good thing to scratch on.

Like, that's a whole other conversation. But, you know, give scratching its due, it definitely took music to a different place. These are new sound sources. And remember in 1981, like we take for granted that we got synths, we got spliced, we got all kinds of ways to get sounds. Prior to this, you had to have an instrument. You had to know how to play the instrument.

All of this stuff suddenly overnight becomes transformed by your ability to take a tiny little piece of another recording. And it's a sound that you completely transform in its reuse. I mean, the other thing to the legacy of the song is the elevation of hip-hop and turntableness and scratching as an art form. contextually because Herbie Hancock co-signs essentially on hip-hop to the Grammy audience with his legacy.

What an elevation that is, and deservedly so. And people might have wondered why I threw when Marcellus's name at the very time of this episode. But there were people at the time saying like, that's not jazz. Herbie sold out. That's not jazz. And I think the jazz, as much as I love bebop and hardbop and I love the music of Robert Glasper.

I feel like in some ways, Herbie is more like Robert Glasper in the sense that like he draws in these elements from other genres, and it prevents jazz from becoming sort of like this, you know, strictly for the museum's dead art form. Right. You know, like, no, like bring in more influence. Jazz didn't end in the 60s.

Jazz continued to evolve. Absolutely. So no disrespect to Winton, but I'm team Herbie Cancun. Me too. Okay, luxury. It's time for one more song. This is the segment where we share a deep cut or a hidden gym with you, the one song nation, and with each other.

Luxury, my man. You go first. Well, I mean, I couldn't resist with this song because this is mayor. Jaysi Mehuba by Bopi Lahiri. I'm glad you said it. I mean, we got to ask the question, who came first? Oh, definitely, Herbie Hancock. Not even close.

Hindi music, Hollywood movies have always have a long legacy of like taking something popular in the West and they're not going to hear it. Let's just redo it. I think that's actually an 808 too, which is fun because it kind of gives you an alternative universe where they used an 808 instead of a DMX and only had a two-track recorder or something. But I love how lo-fi it is And I love how like kind of, you know, recreated sounded.

Imperfect. That's awesome. What about you, D'all? What's your one more song? I think because we were talking about Herbie, I've been thinking about things with vocoders and various vocal enhancements. So for me, I'm going with one of my favorite southern rap songs of the late 90s. This is eight ball and MJG, top of the world.

I think eight ball and MJG are just criminally underrated in the history of southern hip-hop. I like anything with a vocoder or a top of, Talk box. And by the way, I couldn't actually tell which that was. It's right in that zone where it could kind of go either way. But it's always cool. We should do a segment call. It's always cool. Talk box, Vocoder, Autotid.

And then, you know, we should give out cash prices. As always, if you have an idea for one more song, you can find us on Instagram and TikTok. You can find me on Instagram at Diallo, D-A-L-L-O. And on TikTok at Diallo-R-R-L-R-Y. And you can find me on Instagram at L-U-X-X-U-X-Y and on TikTok at Lexury-X. And you can follow our podcast on Instagram and TikTok at one song. podcast for exclusive content.

You can also watch full episodes of One Song on YouTube and Spotify. Just search One Song Podcast. We'd love it if you like and subscribe. Also be sure to check out the One Song Spotify playlist for all the songs we discuss in our episodes. And you can find that link in the episode description. And if you made this far, you're officially a part of the One Song Nation. Show us some love. Give us five stars, leave a review, and send this episode to a fellow music nerd.

It really helps keep the show going. Luxury help me in this thing. I'm producer, DJ, songwriter, and musicologist. Luxury. And I'm actor, writer-director, and sometimes DJ, dik-k-kid, diallarittle. And this is one song. We will see you next time.

This episode is produced by Melissa Duanyas. Our video editor is Casey Simonson. Our associate producer is Jeremy Bimbo, mixing by Michael Hardman, and engineering by Eric Hicks, production supervision by Razak Boykin, additional production support from Z. Taylor. This show is executive produced by Kevin Hart,

Mike Stein, Brian Smiley, Eric Eddings, Eric Wiles, and Leslie Gwam.