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Afrika Bambaata

Kraftwerk, the showroom dummies who caused Bambaata to scratch his head and say, "'Scuse the expression, this is some weird shit". For "Planet Rock", Bam used the melody from "Trans Europe Express". Over the distinctive 808 beat, the effect was spectral. The idea of making music from pocket calculators appealed to kids accustomed to scratching vinyl. [...] -- David Toop for Wire magazine

Afrika Bambaata & The Jazzy Five's groundbreaking 'Jazzy Sensation' was released in March 1981 on Tommy Boy records. It was produced by Arthur Baker and Shep Pettibone

Urban spaceman Afrika Bambaataa and producer Arthur Baker, plus musician John Robie, were the trio behind a musical revolution called "Planet Rock", Bambaataa's 1982 single with Soul Sonic Force. Following the impact of "Planet Rock", UK groups made Electro-boogie pilgrimages to Baker's studio in Manhattan: Freeze's "IOU" rocketed jazz funk into the infosphere but more significantly, New Order's "Blue Monday" launched indie dancing and sold massively on 12". Also breaking and robot dancing, the acrobatic and simulated machine dances that drew many adolescents into the alien zone of black science fiction. Bleep music was one consequence of this. Hardly adequate to describe and encompass the protozoic chaos of New York Nu Groove, Detroit Techno, Chicago House, [...]. Next came techno. -- David Toop for Wire magazine

1978, New York City. Dead summer. The city was always public but an inescapable heat sends folks out of their apartments and amplifies the streets' activity. The buzz surrounding hip-hop has already escaped —via mixed tapes aired on boomboxes— to Manhattan's attention. But it is here in its birthplace, the South Bronx, where Afrika Bambaataa and his crew of diasporic black youth known as the Zulu Nation have gathered to celebrate the new sensation.

Bambaataa switches from Olatunji's drumming to the Monkees to James Brown in the course of a few songs, ending up on Kraftwerk's electronic epic "Trans-Europe Express". How exactly, did futurist music from Düsseldorf, Germany find its way alongside African drumming, American soul, and British rock into an open-air party held in the economically ravaged Bronx? Hip-hop's logic is complex, irreverent, all its own.

From its inception, hip-hop was plural, defined by an approach to sound and music-making rather than a single stylistic designation. Jazz, soul, funk, rock 'n roll, Nigerian drumming — everything was in the mix. Parties were a cross-cultural barrage of styles chosen and mixed by the disc jockey (DJ). Jamaican-born Bronx resident Kool Herc provided the innovations that elevated DJing to an art form

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