Rakim's Contribution to Cyberfunk

How a pioneer both ended and perpetuated the cyberfunk tradition on one album...

Welcome to ddrake.substack.com, a substack written by former music journalist/current industry A&R David Drake. This substack is one dimension of an art project I’ve been working on, one which manifests primarily as a series of DJ mixes courtesy Industrial Streaming Information Logistics (isil.club) exploring a sound I’ve labelled cyberfunk. In contrast with the predominant strains of retro dance culture—particularly disco and techno, which I find boring—cyberfunk has largely been marginalized as “dated” since at least the early 1990s. This substack is an effort to explore the real histories of a fictive genre, and have some fun. Listen to one such cyberfunk mix here.

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James Brown had a huge ‘comeback’ in the mid-1980s, winning a Grammy in 1987 with “Living In America,” a pop anthem which has a relationship to, even verges on, cyberfunk, in ways we’ll explore in future posts. Yet it was Eric B and Rakim’s “I Know You got Soul,” released the same year, which showed how fully enmeshed in the vanguard of creative culture Brown still was. It was driven by a sample of the 1971 Brown-produced Bobby Byrd record of the same name. Brown records were a major part of the DJ setlist DNA of hip-hop from the beginning. But Rakim’s record (and these days it’s pretty widely understood that these were Rakim’s production chops at work) was a radical formal shift. James Brown loops soon flooded hip-hop (“Tell the truth, James Brown was old/Til Eric and Rakim came out with ‘I Got Soul’”—Stetsasonic¹) and the revolution launched by Larry Smith’s drum machine symphonies five years earlier came to a close. This is what we’d consider the beginning of the end of the “cyberfunk era,” when the aesthetic overlap of hip-hop, industrial/ebm, and drum machine pop (among others) splintered permanently.

Yet the same album also featured a cyberfunk classic. Go figure!

It wasn’t until 2001 that I had access to an always-on internet connection fast enough to download music. I revisited songs I’d taped off the radio when I was ten—“C.R.E.A.M.” still had a magical emotional pull. Pharcyde, Gang Starr, Da Brat, Warren G—it’s hard to communicate how quickly music became a part of the permanent past until the dawn of Napster, if it wasn’t a part of pervasive formats like Classic Rock Radio. At least, if you weren’t able to afford it, a caveat that kept people from taking risks on music outside of the familiar.

I was also able, for the first time, to explore the music that I’d heard so much about, but had no access to—hip-hop’s past, the foundational records that led to my reality. Hearing Whodini’s “Freaks Come Out at Night” was not at all what I’d expected early rap to sound like and I quickly filed it away as a curio—an enjoyable one, conecptually, but one which made little sense to me in the era of Dr. Dre’s dominance. I’d also heard Nas (one of my favorite rappers at the time) was heir to Rakim, an instant endorsement. Rakim’s style is easy to understand for listeners who kept up with rap for the next 20 years, not just because it was ‘influential’ but because it mapped out new ways of rapping, a creative baton picked up by successive generations.

Because of its utility and inspiring idiosyncrasy, because of the pervasiveness of its impact as style, I suspect people today underestimate how sui generis Rakim must have seemed at the time. This verbal wildstyle this wasn’t the normal way rap music sounded. Yet it was so successful that it became a set of legible laws of Good Rapping retroactively, to the extent that critics would eventually critique it for being primarily or predominantly about “skills.” (“Don’t Sweat the Technique” was a Rakim title seemingly no one has paid attention to.) This technical fixation ignores how artistically, subjectively interesting, how left-field what Rakim was doing really was. He would share this quality with his inspiration John Coltrane, who admittedly enjoy a bit of a technical showboating, as on the athletic chord structures of “Giant Steps.” But Coltrane’s style was also not empty technique; his style had a striving quality, a sense of improvisational, searching experimentalism to its core. (Coltrane and Rakim alike are often reduced to tics and cliches by countless imitators.)

Once you stop reading Rakim’s creative approach as a one-dimensional representation of “skill,” it becomes easier to consider what he actually did creatively. From a rapping point of view, I think one thing the “skills-first” school ignores is how many of his very quotable lyrics (self-consciously quotable—“take a phrase that’s rarely heard”) were formally driven by their phrasing—that is to say, use of space, pauses, punctuation, unpredictable rhythmic shifts. He wasn’t filling each line with syllables packed in like sardines. And this sense of musicality extended to his production—an aspect whose impact has been underestimated.

The most Cyberfunk of all Rakim songs is “Move the Crowd.” When I was 18, in 2001, and heard “Move the Crowd” for the first time, it was easily my least-favorite production on the entire project—the keyboard bass, the synthesized horns, the piercing snare that rigidly frames the song. It sounded inorganic, stiff, amateur. I slotted it away as a “product of its time”—which Rakim’s rapping, of course, was self-evidently ahead of. I wasn’t wrong but I was only right in the conditional, temporal sense. What was my least favorite beat on the project has, over time, become my favorite. Much like Larry Smith’s production for “The Freaks Come Out at Night,” however ‘dated’ a song felt to me 20 years ago, the fresher it feels now.

I’m sure “Move the Crowd” did not sound quite so dated in 1987 on the album’s release as it would years later. What made it feel that way by 2001 was the paths other artists picked up on in the interim. At the time, though, “Move the Crowd” was a modest success as a single, peaking at No. 3 on the Hot Dance/Music Club Play chart. The differentiating factor was that rather than being sampled, “Move the Crowd” was replayed.

In Brian Coleman’s Check the Technique: Liner Notes for Hip-Hop Junkies, Rakim discusses making the song:

My brother Steve did the music for that track. My oldest brother, Ronnie, played piano and Steve played sax and some piano. If I wasn’t sampling something, like on there, we would play it on keyboards, and Steve was my keyboard player. That beat I think was Chick Corea “Return to Forever” and the horns were James Brown. We put it all together. My family’s musical background at the crib was crazy. My mom played jazz all day and my pops played smooth shit. My mom sang in Brooklyn sometimes, opera and jazz. She was definitely a big influence on me.

Here we have all the evidence that whether sampled or replayed, Rakim was working with the same essential building blocks from the past, and not really discriminating between the two techniques. Soon after, the textures of 1980s production—say, the “cheap” synth preset of the slap bass on “Move the Crowd”—would be victims of a great anti-tech aesthetic reaction. The 1990s became a return to the organic and the human, the rise of jam bands, The Roots, Dave Matthews, grunge and its authenticity-oriented rock stars, and sampling as an authentic craft linking history to the present. Often sample-based hip-hop producers are celebrated for the off-kilter way they utilize records (perhaps in contrast with Dr. Dre’s commercial precision)—J Dilla’s swung rhythms, RZA’s choice to chop his loops in unexpected places, the way a filtered bassline never seems to quite get rid of all the other frequencies, reducing them to a kind of fuzzy smog.

The authorial weight given to these examples of unconventional sample-driven producers is seldom extended to those using newer production technology. The “stiff” feeling of “Move the Crowd” coded to me in the early 00s as an inability to master technology, a fumblingly amateur effort to approximate the rhythmic pocket of a James Brown loop. And maybe that’s what it was—but nonetheless, the pocket of “Move the Crowd” sounds, today, incredibly fresh to me, a style that, ironically, feels more human, more “imperfect,” in its rigidity than any “lo-fi” chillout dilla music to study to, no matter how intentionally, wonkily rhythmic those records may be. The post-Dilla industrial complex may as well be AI, a market so saturated with sameness. Intent is unknowable, and any signifier of authenticity or humanity can become its opposite—as with what sounds cool, the resonance of a particular production technique is contingent and contextual.

Throughout the years, some artists have (intentionally or not) revived the malfunctioning-robot mechanics of mid'-80s drum machine hip-hop, to some degree of success—Swizz Beats’ early motion with the KORG could easily be seen as the true inheritance of drum machine-era hip-hop, particularly in the way its un-quantized rhythmic effect gives the beats a sense of scale and density, like sound echoing between tenement buildings. Mannie Fresh’s use of colder timbres on tracks like “Ha” were less rhythmically askew, but texturally modern. (Kanye’s soul-sampling style might be seen as an echoed reaction to the success of these producers in the late 1990s, much as the dominance of ‘90s samples were a reaction to ‘80s drum machines the first time around.) The Clipse’s “Grinding,” often considered one of the genre’s greatest beats, was really just a tribute to the era—I suspect inspired by World Famous Supreme Team’s incredible “City Life.” And as much as RZA’s reputation was burnished by his off-kilter sampling style, when he shifted to keyboards on Wu Tang Forever and especially Bobby Digital projects, his production’s unconventional rhythmic approach went from being perceived as an auteur’s signature to an inability to produce “correctly.”

1. I’ll admit I wonder how much of the Stetsasonic line—a defense of sampling, which was under attack—was specifically singled out because of how self-evidently “Prestigious” James Brown was in the wake of the Grammy wins and “comeback.” Important to read in that context.