The “Rockit” rhizome

I have come to believe that Herbie Hancock’s “Rockit” is the most interesting musical recording of all time. It touches every form of twentieth century American music, from blues to jazz to rock to techno, and it’s one of the founding documents of global hip-hop. Not bad for a last-ditch effort to keep Herbie’s label from dropping him!

Here’s the album version:

Herbie’s performance of “Rockit” at the 1984 Grammys had a colossal impact. Few people watching the broadcast had ever heard (or heard of) turntable scratching. Breakdancing was probably new to most viewers as well. If you watch Scratch, one interviewee after another cites this broadcast as their inspiration for getting into turntablism. Even twenty-five years later, the whole thing remains fresh.

It’s also enlightening to watch another live version from a year later. This time, rather than recreating the studio recording, the band takes it as a jumping-off point, starting with an abstract and ambient introduction that includes Grand Mixer DST scratching through dub echo:

Between the clothes and the gear, this performance epitomizes the 1980s. The multiple keytars are especially evocative of the era. Keytars are easy to make fun of, but Herbie embraced the instrument for a good reason: it enables him to be up on his feet dancing while he plays. Look at his face! Doesn’t he look happy? That joyful ease translates loud and clear in his playing. The idea of a dancing keyboard player is a stark contrast to the classical piano tradition. I think all the ridicule of the keytar represents anxiety about Africanizing the most Eurological instrument.

As remarkable as live performances of “Rockit” are, it’s the original studio version that holds the most significance. This track is a node in an immense musical rhizome. Its roots and tendrils stretch deep into musical history; it connects horizontally to everything else happening in the 1980s; and its branches extend far into the future. Before I dig into the track, I’m going to take you on a short metaphysical side journey to understand what a rhizome is and why it matters.

In botany, a rhizome is an underground network of roots joining multiple plants together. Ordinary grass is a good example. A lawn is really one big organism, rather than a collection of individual plants. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari use the rhizome as a metaphor for a method of organizing knowledge. Think of a network, a web of nodes connected to other nodes. This metaphysical rhizome has no center, no periphery, and no overarching organizational scheme. There are just nodes, some of which connect to many other nodes, and some of which connect to fewer nodes.

The opposite of a rhizome is a tree-shaped hierarchy, in which nodes are only connected to the nodes directly above and below them. In a tree, information only flows from the top of the tree downward, unlike the chaotic wanderings of the rhizome. For example, the military is a tree, but a friend network is a rhizome. A computer’s file system is a tree, but your brain is a rhizome. A database is a tree, but Wikipedia is a rhizome.

You usually see Western music history and musicology presented in tree format. But where in a tree-shaped folder system could you possibly file “Rockit”? Is it techno, hip-hop, jazz, funk, rock, all of the above, none of the above? Is it coming at the end of jazz or the beginning of electronic dance music? Books about jazz almost never mention “Rockit.” Even when jazz historians write about Herbie specifically, they focus on his 1960s recordings, and they treat “Rockit” as an embarrassing afterthought, if they mention it at all. If I had to pick a single genre to fit “Rockit” into, it would be hip-hop, but it’s an outlier there too–rap songs don’t usually have vocoded scat singing or long instrumental solos.

Every truly innovative piece of music is going to defy categorization by definition, and Herbie’s tune is no exception. However difficult it may be to label, “Rockit” has had deeper and more lasting cultural significance than anything else created by a jazz musician in the 1980s, and it may end up being Herbie’s most lasting contribution to the world. If a tree-shaped folder system can’t find space for it, then that’s a failure of the tree. In a rhizome, on the other hand, “Rockit” makes perfect sense: it’s a node connecting to many other seemingly disparate nodes. Rhizomes give a neat definition of a song’s significance: the more nodes it connects to, the more significant it is. By that definition, “Rockit” is one of the most significant pieces of music of my lifetime.

You can read the story of “Rockit” in the third chapter of Mark Katz’s excellent book Groove Music. I’ll summarize here. First, let’s meet Herbie, seen here singing through his beloved vocoder.

Herbie was a classical piano prodigy who dropped out of conservatory to play jazz. He went on to write a bunch of bedrock jazz standards, and his intellectually abstract post-bop sound would come to be a defining pillar of the art form. If Herbie had quit music in 1965, his place in jazz history would be secure. But he was too creatively restless to keep playing that way; instead, he followed his mentor Miles Davis into funk. Herbie spent the 1970s playing Afrofuturist grooves on synthesizers, horrifying jazz critics, and selling mountains of records. The cover of his classic album Thrust gives you an accurate picture of his place in the culture during this time.

By the beginning of the 1980s, Herbie’s star was on the wane. He loved dance music and was eager to get on board with disco, and his music increasingly featured vocoded singing over four-on-the-floor beats. While Herbie’s disco records sound as fresh as a daisy today, they didn’t connect with audiences at the time. They were too pop for jazz listeners, but were too artsy and abstract for the club. In 1982, after a string of money-losing albums, Columbia Records decided to give Herbie one last chance before dropping him. As a kind of Hail Mary pass, Herbie agreed to work with a group of young hipsters who were part of the New York No Wave scene: bassist Bill Laswell, synth player Michael Einhorn, and engineer Martin Bisi.

Laswell, Einhorn and Bisi’s idea was to have Herbie play on top of electro-funk tracks informed by hip-hop, which was just starting to be a presence in white downtown clubs. “Rockit” started as a beat programmed on an Oberheim DMX. Laswell added a bassline interpolated from a vocal part in “Upper Egypt and Lower Egypt” by Pharoah Sanders. Then they brought in Grand Mixer DXT to overdub some record scratching. One of the records he scratched was a rap single that Laswell had produced called “Change The Beat.”

The part of the record that DXT scratched comes at the very end. There’s a short beep, and then you hear Laswell’s manager Roger Trilling goofing around with the vocoder. Though a white noise carrier wave, Trilling imitates a nerdy older label executive saying “Ahhh, this stuff is really fresh.” Most of DXT’s scratching on “Rockit” is on the word “fresh.” DJ gear wasn’t very sophisticated at the time, and DXT couldn’t move the crossfader fast enough to cut in the entire word. That’s probably for the best. The abstraction of the swishing white noise is more futuristic and mysterious than a recognizable word would have been.

After DXT did his scratches, Laswell, Beinhorn and Bisi had percussionist Daniel Ponce overdub three tracks of Batá drums. Then they decided to layer in a sampled snare drum to beef up the sound a little. They had planned to use a snare from the intro to “We’re Gonna Groove” by Led Zeppelin, but they ended up using a fragment of guitar from the song instead. Since dedicated samplers were expensive at the time, they recorded and looped the sample using a digital delay unit. When I asked about the provenance of the guitar stab on Twitter, Bisi himself responded with a video explaining how they did it.

I did a vid describing what the guitar stab loop sounded like -it was very short. I doubt it was from end of song. we didnt need it isolated like that.. I was just randomly hittin hold trying to get anything cool. You can hear stab is actually 2 stabs-that was length of the loop pic.twitter.com/H2wraSKLXq

— Martin Bisi (@MartinBisi) April 15, 2019

Herbie only became involved in the creation of “Rockit” a few weeks after all this production took place. Laswell and Beinhorn brought the tape of the backing track to his house, and the three of them spent a few minutes scat-singing until they came up with a melody. Herbie recorded it on three layers of synths, and also recorded a short solo at the end. He wanted to add vocoded scat singing too, so Laswell and Beinhorn suggested some lyrics from “Planet Rock” by Afrika Bambaataa and the Soulsonic Force. The resulting track combines the icy timbres and rigid rhythms of electronica, the improvisational spirit of jazz, the melodic style of the blues, and the still-radical idea of scratching an existing record as an instrument. This is, to put it mildly, an unusual recipe for a pop hit. But it was a smash, the biggest hit of Herbie’s career.

As befits its DJ-centric origins, “Rockit” has been remixed and sampled many times, including two mixes by Grand Mixer DXT himself. But “Rockit” isn’t just a sample collage; it’s an actual tune, written (partially) by a jazz musician. Jazz scholars have devoted most of their energy to transcribing Herbie’s 60s and 70s music, and no one is transcribing his 80s music. However, when you do a Google search for “Herbie Hancock Rockit transcription”, you do get this transcription of the scratch part:

It makes sense that analyses of “Rockit” are so rare. Very little of interest in the track can be captured by Western notation. Still, it does have some notes in it, and they’re interesting. Herbie’s melody uses a variant on the A minor blues scale: A, B, C, D, D-sharp, E, and G. His solo is mostly in A blues too, enhanced with his usual wild chromaticism. Jazz critics dismiss synthesizers as impersonal and cold, but Herbie’s touch on a synth is sometimes even more personal and distinctive than his touch on the piano. He sounds especially soulful when he’s playing a synth with a pitch bend control, because then he can explore all the notes between the piano keys. Listen to the first note in the solo on the studio version of “Rockit,” that long guitaristic bend. It comes straight out of the blues, and you can’t do anything like it on a piano.

I made a DJ mix of all the songs sampled by “Rockit,” and some remixes and samples of it. Enjoy:

Here’s a diagram of all the tracks that appear in my mix, click to enlarge:

Update: I was asked how I created the mix. I used Ableton Live’s Arrange view. I did some tempo automation toward the end but otherwise it’s just straight ahead audio editing.

I would love to have enough DJ chops to be able to perform mixes like this live using Serato, but that is far in the future.