AFRIKA BAMBAATAA, GARY NUMAN, & MC CHATTERBOX - “METAL”
Amidst the recent heightening of racial tensions all across the globe--fully warranted, mind you--all manner of artistic media are coming under increasingly close critical scrutiny. Also fully warranted. Now is an ideal time to discuss the relationship between Black creativity and electronic music as we think of it.
Perhaps no genre of music feels such a stern, politicized condemnation as rap. The perpetual conservative screed against the apparent degeneracy of contemporary arts and culture has its token targets, constantly recycled. For visual art, this is nearly always abstract and/or conceptual art. For music, it tends to nearly always be hip-hop and rap, the work of the urban Black. And even in the seemingly “apolitical” sphere, it is not uncommon to hear, “I listen to every kind of music...well, except rap!” And the only other genre that’s mentioned this way is country, which also seems to have a clear class-based stigma, does it not?
That aside, while I may not personally listen to very much rap for my own delectation, even someone like me would be remiss to discount the deep enmeshment between the sort of stuff I do like and the broader musical tradition of the Black community. It comes as a surprise to many that architects of early hip-hop culture of the 1980s were tremendously inspired by the works of some rather pasty European music artists. Afrika Bambaataa was especially interested in Gary Numan’s The Pleasure Principle, so there is some rich history behind their collaboration on this “cover” of a single from the album. The percussion from Kraftwerk’s “Numbers” is one of the most sampled sounds of all time--owing chiefly to artists working in the hip-hop tradition--and even the industrial sounds of Thomas Leer and Robert Rental held some sway over the burgeoning Detroit Techno scene.