The Greatest Cyberfunk Producer in History
How one creative mind unintentionally created this genre as he launched another
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.
I know millennials who will call the 1990s the “golden age of hip-hop,” but as I’d always understood it, that period began in 1983 with the release of Run-DMC’s “It’s Like That”/”Sucka M.C.s (Krush-Groove 1).” The b-side of that 12” finally conveyed (and although I’m speaking via second-hand experience here, I think it feels intuitively true on listening) hip-hop’s real-life energy in a way previous disco-oriented singles failed. The early Run-DMC songs captured the power of hip-hop as party- and DJ-driven phenomenon. Transmuting the energy of its origins onto wax in a way that feels uncompromising and real has been a core function of the genre’s commercial MO ever since.
This also launched Larry Smith as hip-hop’s first super-producer. It wasn’t until 1987-1988, as James Brown loops and technology shifted in the direction of sampling, that Larry lost dominance. Alongside contemporaries Pumpkin and Davy DMX, and successors Mantronix, Ced Gee, and Marley Marl, Smith defined the sound of what has become widely respected but deeply ignored by what’s become the dominant audience of hip-hop consumers: the post-disco, pre-sampling, drum-machine driven era of hip-hop. This sound in turn affected everything, pop, rock, and R&B, the crest of a wave built on rising trends across genre as new technologies punched through older traditions. The backlash to this era shapes today’s reality.
The role Smith played has, for extremely casual fans of history, been transmuted into a general “Rick Rubin Aesthetic.” This is in part because of Raising Hell, the third and biggest Run-DMC album and first without any Larry Smith beats, and first to cross over to what we’ll clumsily call “middle America”; because Rubin and Russell Simmons were savvy self promoters (Smith and Simmons also fell out around this time). Maybe it’s also because of Jay-Z’s “99 Problems” video. And it had to do with the nature of their respective skill sets. Rick Rubin was a music executive, and Larry Smith was an artist and musician. Although to what degree their paths were chosen for them by the social structures of their time is certainly a conversation. The idea to have Run-DMC try rock music was Smith’s; the idea to own that idea and bring in Aerosmith was Rubin’s. The latter was an effective business decision. I would contend that creatively, “Rock Box” was the greater accomplishment, but I was two years old at the time, and have zero stakes or investment in the era’s social realities—just a playlist preference.
And Rick Rubin’s resume is very impressive—signing and A&Ring LL Cool J, the Beastie Boys, Slick Rick, and working with the Red Hot Chili Peppers on the album that would launch them to superstardom. On the other hand, listening to the actual beats, and it becomes apparent that Larry Smith was, as musicians go, running laps with his hands tied around his peers.
Histories of this era rarely feel as if they make these kinds of distinctions, and seldom seem to capture the actual creative texture of the time, preferring to cover bronzed touchpoints which I would contend has kept later generations from even attempting to understand 1980s hip-hop. It’s been set on a shelf, reviewed to appear knowledgeable, to “know what you’re talking about,” to pay a sort of mystical deference, but seldom to enjoy or appreciate for what it does well, unless your family members have a particularly urgent attachment to this time and place, mainly New York. (My parents were boomers, and do not; the people I knew growing up who would be generationally attuned were more invested in George Clinton than new school rap, or came on board slightly later, in the late ‘80s.) But if you can dig past this calcified framework, Larry Smith’s production stands apart as some of the best, most powerful music the genre produced.
Of course hip-hop artists themselves always understood this work’s self-evident appeal, even as more formal histories failed to make it legible. There are reasons so many beats in the ‘90s and ‘00s feature traces of Larry Smith. I don’t want to go into them, though, because that’s exactly the logic I think undermines what’s special about the originals, when exploring ‘80s music—that it’s justified by what it led to. When really, Nas’ “If I Ruled the World” is, I’m sorry, nowhere near as good as “Friends” by Whodini. B.G. and Prodigy’s Y.B.E. is fucking sick because it uses “One Love,” which at the time, to me, lent it this otherworldly futuristic ambiance that “One Love” retains today, this grandeur that cuts through any track. A substantial portion of ‘90s rap looked back on the time of the genre’s early years, and their use of the sonic resonances of a less-codified era retained a sensuous mystique—you really had to be there to appreciate its sophisticated stitching of present to past, and if you weren’t, the mystery was cool: the “knowing posture that implied connection, invisible lines up to hidden levels of influence.”1 What happened before I was cognizant? What did I miss?
I’ve read stories of how flipping his beats required few updates, because the songs were so well mixed in the first place. Goes without saying: Larry beats sound clean as fuck. (As much as I love Ced Gee and Scott LaRock’s work on Criminal Minded the mix on those beats doesn’t have the same punch as Smith’s for Whodini.) It cuts through even moreso now, post-loudness wars, through the trash-compacted SoundCloud 128kbps YouTube-rip mush of today, a digital crunch that makes everything overly smooth and kind of flattened. Gen Z tracks afraid to make eye contact, moving at a different frequency as if embodying avoidance.
But it was more than just good engineering. It’s easy to imagine Larry Smith in a hard hat with a rolled-up blueprint under his arm, like a construction foreman. Each beat sounds like it was made with precision-engineered steel girders, each pure gesture erected with intent. Larry Smith’s beats really feel like architecture. They take up space, each beam soldered into place, functional in a way that supports the deliberate shape of the whole.
I suspect a lot of folks would tell you that Larry was good because he was a Real Musician. I’m sure people have said that over the years, when, in the late ‘80s, sampling became hip-hop’s lingua franca and then especially with g-funk, where Dr. Dre was elegantly laying out one-track-jacks—a few years ago we had a real musician making beats! This was also probably a very popular argument in response to punk, wherein the ability to articulate a creative Gesture was democratized forever. Larry Smith had the chops of having been in bands, the chops of being a real studio head, but fuck all that—Larry Smith intuited that rap was a canvas for real art when many Real Musicians resisted it. He was a real fan, spending each night at the clubs, a regular at The Fever, taping hundreds of DJ sets out of a real love for the sound.2
And on top of being at the creative vanguard at a time it meant something, he was able to manifest it by writing hit fucking records, as well as records that should have been hits. Lots of real dues-paid musicians out there can’t put a fifth of a hit together. Hits aren’t things “real musicians” force through sheer disciplined practice, they’re a finesse which require a particular sensibility, like trying to throw the end of a thread through the eye of the needle. A sensitivity to the melodic grammar of the audience. In one phase, rap producers banked off the audience’s universal familiarity with television themes. But Larry Smith was one of the rare auteurs whose gift for the technical aspects of recording, of coaching artists to be their best, of musicianship, of an embedded cultural connection with the creative vanguard of hip-hop clubs, was matched or exceeded by his interest in the DNA of pop—the melodic webbing which allows songs to take up psychic space, to persuade those disconnected from its social or cultural roots on a global scale.
Smith and Whodini famously recorded Escape in six weeks, and follow-up Back In Black took nine months. The two albums are great evidence of how more time doesn’t mean more great art, that the art of popular music is unevenly distributed across the temporal landscape—both have about as many classic songs as each other; maybe a slight edge to Escape, the one recorded in a hurry. The story goes that the legendary “Five Minutes of Funk” was cut the first night they worked together! But Back in Black is Larry Smith’s greatest accomplishment as a full-length album, even if in singles it lags behind Escape. “One Love” is its most totemic hit, but on Back in Black its the unheralded sonic landscapes of album tracks like “Last Night (I Had a Long Talk With Myself)” which I find myself revisiting these days—at 2:47, you hear the unique sensibility of a creative genius given a real budget and the latest technology to experiment. (I’ll explore more about this record in a future post). His instinct for “One Love”-style records which cut through, is rare, even moreso when you’re trying out new blueprints every time. Yet from the perspective of a Larry Smith pundit you’d be forgiven for thinking Back In Black was the best Larry Smith full-length ever made.
Larry Smith beats are one-of-one. They defined their era but sound like nothing else; Rick Rubin’s beats on LL’s Radio are emblematic of his time but sound a lot like each other. They are generic, in a way that serves the material—I don’t even mean to belittle Rick Rubin here, LL Cool J makes those records their own and it’s not like Rick didn’t have his moments. (“I Can Give You More” has a jaunty humor to it, to be fair.) But Smith’s erecting artistic monuments, irreplaceable structures. This is what he really accomplished—to create archetypes, to perfect them, to make sure they sounded so clean they could cut through 40 years later. These songs were carved into stone and cast shadows.
He was a real artist—not interested in creating stable forms to be reiterated over and over, but creating a distance between each discrete piece. Despite his reputation as a craftsman, and he was that, his technical skills were in service of a greater artistic constellation. The distance between each song is vast, each a blueprint for a lost future. Look at “Starski Live at the Disco Fever,” and you hear a simple, stark drum track with an instantly identifiable pattern, as idiosyncratic as a fingerprint; rappers into the ‘90s would make little subliminal signals to records like these (I love Cru’s tribute to the Tunnel using the same drums).
The musicians and producers in his position—and there were many, I’m sure—who scoffed at rap and stuck to R&B likely were intimidated by the challenge, in some way; how do you make this stripped down music, which many refused even to call music, musical? Larry Smith figured it out immediately. He was also involved in producing for R&B acts at the same time. (Perhaps the best is Con Funk Shun’s “Electric Lady,” though I might reconsider that take any minute.) But in recognizing the drum-forward aesthetic of hip-hop was a radical new sound, he shifted the sound of pop music writ-large. In the mid-’80s, everyone in every genre needed their drums to do what Larry’s drums did. In fairness, it was a direction all of popular music was headed. There’s an argument to be made if it wasn’t Larry, someone else would have done it. But there’s a more compelling case no one would have been able to embody the spirit of the transition as completely, because no one managed to work at such a high level at intersecting cultural, creative, logistical, social, and musical communities. Few were positioned, and we’ll talk about them in future posts; but only one one grabbed the ring: Larry Smith.
Larry Smith passed away in 2014. Read Dave Tompkins’ eulogy for Smith here, if you get a moment. I also like Robbie Ettelson’s post here. Ebony did a series of interviews about this “unsung legend” here. I can never read enough about Larry Smith, so anything you’d like to share, feel free in the comments.
Just a little William Gibson….
“My favorite DJs from the early 1980s were DJ Hollywood, Junebug, Starski and Starchild from the Bronx. Starski was a great R & B mix DJ. Davy D can drop needles better than anyone. Flash had speed. I have over 1,000 cassettes of club recordings going back to 1979. I recorded a lot of Kurtis Blow shows, too.” https://medium.com/@briancoleman/larry-smith-q-a-january-2006-229fd9bd8e91