The Melodic Sensibility of CYBERFUNK; An Investigation From Troye Sivan to Wally Badarou's Path of Fleeting '80s Effervescence
A wistful reflection for the beginning of 2024
CYBERFUNK is a metagenre pastiche conceived to capture the lost or diminished aesthetic vocabulary of the mid-1980s. The best way to understand the laws and byways of CYBERFUNK is to order Time to Make the World End, Vol III, a CD-only mix which explores the network of mainly obscure gestures which make up the sound. You can read more about it here, read a Q&A with ISIL CEO on the DJ Mix’s origins here, or explore ten cyberfunk hits you already know here.
But why read about it when you can experience it firsthand? Order the mix at ISIL.CLUB. Orders ship any day now; US only, for now. CD only, forever!
Troye Sivan’s 2023 discursive smash “Rush” is a fun slice of galloping pop with a striking video which also offers a portal to the past—more evidence that the past didn’t go anywhere. The most memorable aspect of the song is its multi-voiced titular chant (“I feel the rush, addicted to your touch,”) but the real meat of it, what makes it ‘take up space’ creatively, is a specific melodic line immediately after, which operates as a kind of centerpiece around which the whole thing rotates: “So good when we slow gravity so good/ Breathe 1, 2, 3, take all of me, so good.”
This melodic turn gave me an instant sense of Proust-style time travel thanks to its similarity to UK band Level 42’s 1981 hit “Starchild,” specifically the lead verse melody:
“When I was an infant in my mother’s arms / I would watch the starlight in her face.”
I wouldn’t say “Starchild” is per-se CYBERFUNK because of its close association with Tommy Boy’s iconic The Perfect Beats series (it appeared on Vol. 1). The Perfect Beats was a four-volume set which captured a bunch of popular underground dance music from the early 1980s. It was hugely significant for me, never mind a wide swath of other creatives and DJs and musicians, after its release in 1998. Because of this, much of what defines CYBERFUNK is its distance from this universe, ie, what was left out. That said, Level 42 are something of an outlier on here, in part because of lead singer Mark King’s earnest vocal stylings. (My favorite Perfect Beat records, the ones that had the biggest impact on me personally, tended to be the diva-esque Freestyle of Tina B’s “Honey to a Bee” or, especially, Seidah Garrett’s “Do You Want It Right Now”—all of which are amazing, none of which are CYBERFUNK.)
More than its vocals, though, Level 42 reflected a particular melodic and harmonic sensibility which when explored more deeply, leads us to some important philosophical inquiries about this project and its extended artistic universe.
True CYBERFUNK aficianados recognize that much of the genre’s allure is in its future-primitive drum machine gestalt. The closer it sounds to the tactile scrape of stone on concrete, the clatter of bone on tin cans, the roar of the rust belt, the closer it comes to the pummeling heartbeat of the genre’s spiritual center. These beats take up space, are not subtle, and channel the unpredictable, improvisational flavor of the untrained artisan to carve out novel territory. In Industrial Accident, the 2019 Wax Trax documentary, KMFDM’s En Esch is quoted describing the German philosophy of “genius amateurs” as a driving creative force in Industrial [to footage of Einstürzende Neubauten being totally nuts if I remember correctly].
One should avoid overly romanticizing this aspect of the sound; many of the genre’s most important artists were musicians of a refined artistic metier, from Duke Bootee to Paul Barker. This post celebrates one such auteur. Back to Level 42: “Starchild” was written by Mark King, Phil Gould, and the legendary, under-heralded CYBERFUNK superstar Willy Badarou.
My CYBERFUNK elevator pitch to friends is along the lines of, “I’ve been listening to ‘80s drum machine music.” Yet this is only halfway-accurate. Lots of ‘80s drum machine music doesn’t qualify. But perhaps more importantly, the subgenre relies on a distinct melodic sensibility. Badarou had an especially outsized impact on this sound—not that all his work is CYBERFUNK per se, but a sensational slice of it, particularly (though not exclusively) his solo work from the mid-1980s.
Wally Badarou is a French keyboardist, session musician, stage actor, and producer—a jack of all trades and master of several. Though never officially a member of Level 42—he never toured with the band—he was considered their honorary “fifth member,” contributing synthesizer and compositional work throughout the group’s run. Prior to hooking up with Level 42, Badarou went clubbing in France in the late 1970s, gigging with local musicians and recording several disco records of some interest. (I’m partial to 1980’s “He Was a Rasta in London Town,” though I wouldn’t describe it as essential Badarou.) His big breakout was on M’s 1979 hit “Pop Muzik,” considered one of the first New Wave smashes. Another significant moment was his synthesizer work on the Gibson Brothers’ “Cuba,” released a year prior to “Pop Muzik.” The song was written by one Daniel Vangarde, an important French composer who may be better recognized by his given named Daniel Bangalter—father of Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter. The Gibson Brothers’ work was distributed by Island, and so Bangalter knew Island founder Chris Blackwell (Bob Marley, U2, Steve Winwood, etc).
Blackwell was putting together a band at his new studio in Nassau, the Bahamas. The Compass Point All-Stars, as they would be known, were attempting to reverse the fortunes of Grace Jones, whose first three disco albums had not made the creative, commercial, or cultural impact her talent deserved. Blackwell knew she had much more to offer. With Sly and Robbie on drums and bass, Mikey Chung on guitar, Uziah "Sticky" Thompson on percussion, Barry Reynolds on guitar, Tyrone Downie of the Wailers, and engineer Alex Sadkin, Blackwell was looking for a keyboardist to accentuate their sound. Daniel Bangalter recommended Wally Badarou, and the Compass Point All-Stars were born—with Badarou’s sound an essential component.
The most well-known Badarou collaborations—the stuff you know, or may not know that you know, come from this era of Badarou’s career, the twelve years following his initial sessions for Grace Jones: his keyboards and synthesizers artfully dot the works of Jones, Tom Tom Club, Gwen Guthrie, Robert Palmer, Herbie Hancock, Manu Dibango, Foreigner, Talking Heads, Black Uhuru, Fela Kuti, and Mick Jagger, among others. This stuff is seldom CYBERFUNK, well within a legacy of prestigious early ‘80s classics that I doubt I need to mention includes some of the best music ever made. If you’re not familliar with the Compass Point catalog, the compilation Funky Nassau is a good starting point. (It’s also been heavily documented elsewhere, including by Blackwell himself, whose 2022 autobiography The Islander: My Life in Music and Beyond is worth hearing in audiobook form—Bill Nighy reads it, who is the ideal person to read your autobiography.)
I’ll just highlight quickly one non-CYBERFUNK contribution I would pay particular attention to from this era. Gregory Isaac’s Night Nurse is a certified classic album for which Badarou played a substantial role in cultivating the sound with his keyboard work. In an interview with Red Bull, Badarou also gets at where listeners can best locate his gifts as an auteur:
“The album was not even planned to me, I just landed there and found out I was wanted on board, “Here’s the Prophet 5.” [An analogue synthesizer Badarou used frequently, also used by Herbie Hancock and Weather Report. Prophet became Badarou’s nickname.] I was jetlagged, I was tired. Again, most of the great events of my life happened when I wanted to go home. It was a one night thing for me. All those 15 tracks maybe, done in one night! They had been cutting down the tracks for three or four days before. It was real fast, real sparse, fantastic singing, lots of space, beautiful. Still today, I play it as if I wasn’t part of it. I’m really proud of that album.
…Again, this is such an explicit example because what I did on that one was very simple as well. I only did that stab, badap-bap. Which is part of the rhythm, which is almost part of the melody. I was not told to do that. This is why I still believe that I am a melody man, because what I had in mind was a melody and I brought it to the song to finish or complete the idea already behind the melody. Sometimes it’s there and you don’t even notice.”
His melodies were simple, in the sense that he was deliberate and uncomplicated. He talks in some detail in the above Red Bull interview about his process of developing melodies. I think the amount of time and cultivation of their creation points to how clearly melody is the centerpiece of his art:
The way I write is very, very specific. I would proceed almost like Josef Zawinul, which is that I would sit on the acoustic piano and develop ideas on the acoustic piano, record them, and forget about them for years. Then, in the back of my mind without even knowing, ideas will flow out of those ideas to complete them, to make them richer, to develop them. I’m very grateful that you’re asking this question. I believe the composition has a lot to do with just that sparkling little idea at first that was magic even before you knew it. It’s a very simple, little tiny, little melody, chord change, sound, rhythm. It could last five seconds or half an hour, depending on how great you felt about when you did it. I know my weaknesses. I know that, just let it go, I will probably kill the thing without even knowing what was the real value. That’s why I never rush any of my production. That’s why it’s taking so long actually. I just leave this thing, age like good wine. You’re French, right? Yes. I like that. I leave it to rest like a good wine, and if three years later it still talks to me like it did when I did it, wow, I know I have something.
Some Level 42 works fit the vibe nicely. The “Power Mix” of their record “The Chant Has Begun” was a centerpiece of the recent Time To Make the World End, Vol. 2 (Thanks to writer/critic/attorney at law Tim Finney for introducing me to this particular cut). I especially love the bass breakdown around 3:37, but the overarching message of the song, its belief in the power of change, and its energetic earnestness give it a core “pop Cyberfunk” energy—that most nebulous of categories where genre, texture, and ideology meet the populist tools of melody.
Wally Badarou began working with Level 42 after meeting the group’s drummer Phil Gould at the session for M’s “Pop Muzik.” He and the band connected over a love of jazz fusion—”Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, Billy Cobham, John McLaughlin.” Interestingly, I recently saw a Chick Corea list of “CHEAP BUT GOOD ADVICE FOR PLAYING MUSIC IN A GROUP” which might as well describe exactly the sensitivity I get to space, time, and “deliberate” melody from Badarou. “Deliberate” is a word that comes up over and over:
At any rate, Level 42 could be described as a jazz fusion band going pop, in large part thanks to the clear vocals of singer Mark King. I like listening to the extended mix of “Weave Your Spell,” which gets at the interesting blend of pop and jazz fusion that makes the band “work”—a song where the jazz fusion elements connect as well as the more traditional songcraft. Like the piano solo at 2:00, or the bass at 3:50, or the overall instrumental interplay right after the leads into the drum solo breakdown. I wouldn’t say what’s so interesting here is melody as much as an approach to texture, at times, which hints at the disruptive aspects CYBERFUNK would prioritize down the line. (One can imagine dance edits of these songs ramping up the textural novelty.)
Badarou’s contributions to the group were substantial, no more so than on “Sun Goes Down (Livin’ It Up),” the group’s biggest UK hit to that point, until the release of “Something About You” two years later. Topline vocal melody aside, the record was a mainly-Wally composition—he wrote both guitar and keyboard parts that make the song what it is and brought the demo to the band when they were looking for a hit to wrap up the project.
There’s a current-day movement of reaction to “Pop” as such that I think underestimates how pop tools are a part of the greatest musicians’ toolkits. Regardless of where you stand on that conversation, I think the way Badarou articulates pop’s relationship to great melodic cultivation is interesting:
A lot of people have been criticizing Level 42 for leaving the jazz fusion thing and going towards more commercial stuff. I would reply that, for us musicians, if you can devise a great melody, don’t be afraid to do so. No matter how hard you are going to be criticized for trying to seek commercial success. This is stupid. Just go for what you think is great. And having a great melody never hurts anybody. We managed to write and co-write hits together. Till today I am proud of it and that makes my living.
The idea of great melodies as being some kind of commercial compromise also strikes me as kind of stupid, so take that grain of salt as you continue to read this substack! However I think this also gets at the gist of what makes certain forms of ‘80s pop CYBERFUNK—jazz fusion, and a focus on disruptive textures, united by great melodies which translate these outre sounds to audiences that might not otherwise find them intriguing in and of themselves. (Miles Davis, who we will cover in future posts, has had a similarly major impact on the melodic sensibility of CYBERFUNK and drew in aspects of jazz fusion and novel textural choices of his own. He also covered, like, “Human Nature” and “Time After Time.”)
Interestingly, in his Red Bull interview on the subject of “Pop,” Badarou draws attention to how noteworthy it is that an artist like himself, known for melody, was so drawn to James Brown—and he suggests that Brown himself is unrecognized for his own melodic gifts.
BADAROU: I know it sounds a bit strange for somebody that loves James Brown, but I can tell that James Brown is a melody man before being a rhythm, a groove maker.
BENJI B (interviewer): How can you tell that?
BADAROU: Well, listen back to what he did in the ’50s, ’60s, and you’ll find out that he was an incredible melody singer to start with.
BENJI B: In melody versus groove, melody wins for you?
BADAROU: Yes. That’s a very hard issue to me, even today. I believe that the value of a melody is difficult to appreciate. It is more than just putting notes together. It is actually creating textures.
This points to why we’re even talking about Badarou in the first place, of course; the textures of the Prophet 5 keyboard and the Synclavier, Badarou’s weapons of choice, gave his emotionally sophisticated, melodically precise work the sui generis texture the times demanded, and the times eventually abandoned. Badarou’s solo work of the mid-1980s is a more significant contributor to the sonic universe of the subgenre than his work with Level 42, about whom I can be a bit picky. Solo Badarou records were instrumental records, and sound a bit similar to later Larry Heard releases—a tropical tilt, a bit of proto-video game music, the textures of early synthesizers like the Prophet 5, united by Badarou’s unique melodic sensibility, timbres, and textures,1 aimed at very deliberate, precise tone. Perhaps his most well-known instrumental single from this era is CYBERFUNK classic “Chief Inspector.”
Chief Inspector appeared on Badarou’s 1984 solo debut Echoes, an instrumental album about which I can’t say enough good things. Created in conjunction with engineer and percussionist Andy Lyden, It’s easy to listen to, feeling at times like a mid-80s film soundtrack or a mid-90s video game soundtrack, a sublimely moving journey into recognizing our potential for varied experiences. (“Endless Race” also appeared on Time to Make the World End Vol. II, alongside the aforementioned “The Chant Has Begun (Power Mix).”) The album’s single “Mambo” became Badarou’s highest-profile solo song to be sampled, its intriguing sound the basis for Massive Attack’s “Daydreaming.” The peppy “Hi-Life” most explicitly shows the evident influence of African music on Badarou’s work, although it also ended up having a circular kind of influence on African music, zouk music, and the music of the French Antilles simultaneously—at least, according to Badarou. There’s a heterogeneity to the sound of Echoes—what unites the music is his melodic sensibility and the technology of the time, that small range of tools Badarou used which give the album coherence. It’s his ability to navigate these subtly precise tonal states and moods which allows the project to feel so deeply wide-ranging.
Badarou himself has discussed his inspirations for Echoes:
Well I was listening to everything everybody was listening to at that time but, quite honestly, I never wanted Echoes to be inspired by any of the ongoing chart of the time. I really wanted it to be apart, driven by past memories rather. Echoes were musical tales, based of [sic] forceful moments in my childhood, my teen days, my life in Africa, in Europe, everywhere and everything I had been. Hence the apparent eclecticism throughout the album.
This, much like his creative philosophies of melody mentioned above, give us some context for appreciating this work, but doesn’t really explain it. I’d contend his mastery of each song’s facet-distinct tone, as an outgrowth of his artistic processes for cultivating particular melodies over time described above, is what makes his solo work so moving. And if tone is the “dialectic of objective and subjective feeling that our aesthetic encounters inevitably produce,” as Sianne Ngai once wrote, hearing this unidirectional information about the artist’s intent doesn’t really explain why his solo work feels so powerful to me.
So what in Badarou’s artistic sensitivity gives him access to such a wild range of novel, fully-realized moods that fit so readily into the CYBERFUNK slipstream, while simultaneously granting Badarou a unique, friendly iconoclasm that separates his work from so much other experimental work of the period, and since? To me the effectiveness of Badarou’s work is tied up in a character which threads through his entire catalog—a guileless, exploratory, observational quality, a sense, through melody and texture, of rendering curiosity—of existing within experience that isn’t quite pleasure or pain. It makes sense he associates these feelings with his youth—there is, perhaps, optimism, but more precisely, a sense of uncertainty, that anything can happen, and if it does, you’ll be there for it. Of a camera panning slowly across a film’s opening scene, or with the careful focus of a child investigating their surroundings, inch by inch, never quite revealing the full picture until the moment is ready to pass. We often remain fixated on the moment of discovery. Badarou is interested in the state the precedes it, dread or intrigue, occasionally punctuated, rewardingly, by moments of of wonder or awe. There’s a comfort that comes from it, for sure—but that nostalgia doesn’t strike me as nostalgic for older forms of art, but for older states of being—a feeling common in childhood which becomes more rare as we age—yet remains accessible. And to revisit that state isn’t fully nostalgic, either, because it focuses instead on the tactile, the very real present, the moment of uncovering.
This ties into CYBERFUNK through what I’d consider the Sesame Street theory—that the fall of Eden/loss of childhood innocence damned many of the 1980s most distinctive melodic tics to the juvenile, primitive, or childish past. Certainly true in hip-hop of the 1980s, on which the rise of 1990s gangster rap had a permanent impact. I think this particularly youthful affect gains power when synthesized with the technology of the time—which for years was maligned as lacking in soul or comfort, of being the cold mechanistic subversion of “real instruments.”2 The aggression and displacement of norms epitomized by industrial’s Burroughs-inspired resistance to control systems, of hip-hop’s underclass disruption, deepens the emotional colors of contrasting tones it bumps up against, historically and in CYBERFUNK—children’s programming, Al Jarreau, jazz fusion, “world music,” Bobby McFerrin. The PBS aesthetic was abandoned as quickly as the DMX drum machine.3 But these melodies now, lacking the associations of teachers and librarians and public television, have come to feel refreshing, unexpected, “lost.” Consider the video for “Hi-Life” from Echoes, which I think epitomizes the colorfully innocent playfulness of a lost 1980s spirit. (It should be mentioned that its melodic life almost certainly seems present in contemporary afropop—that my descriptions here are of intentionally-foregrounded subjectivities of American ears for whom these sounds may as well have vanished.)
The kind of philosophical wisdom of this youthful approach makes me think of how Blackwell describes the movie Countryman, which he produced and conscripted Badarou for the soundtrack—an explicit articulation, perhaps, of Badarou’s creative M.O. Or maybe not—I haven’t seen it. Great songs though!
Badarou’s 1989 album Words of a Mountain, likely his best, began to drift away from CYBERFUNK and towards classical music, towards the fullest realization of his melodic gifts. He used the synclavier throughout, which had a formidable sample library, but like many artists of the 1980s—like Larry Smith, or Keith LeBlanc—his ideas of music were less interested in curating samples as such. “When I could finally afford it, I directly went for a Synclavier, a multi-fold groundbreaking monster at the time. That system made me one of the first tapeless producers ever … Here I was with the best sampling machine in decades, and yet I always kept a very minimal sample library. What mattered to me was philosophy behind the architecture, the music it allowed me to create, yielding in my most favorite solo work, Words of a Mountain.”
Yet my favorite Badarou record is firmly in the CYBERFUNK camp. Another film Blackwell produced was 1985’s Kiss of the Spider Woman, based on the Manuel Puig novel. Again Badarou was responsible for the soundtrack. “Novela Das Nove” is a CYBERFUNK all-timer, emblematic of the deliberate, zen-like poise Badarou brought to rare tonal states. I recommend watching this footage of him performing it in sick Indiana Jones hat and jacket accompanied by backup dancers for the full impact.
I’ll leave the last words to Badarou.
If you look at my website you would see the first thing I put was a painter. I think I’m a painter. Actually, I thought I was but I didn’t dare say it up until Manu Dibango told me, “Wally, you’re a painter,” and I said, “Oh, yes. Thank you. That’s exactly what I want to be.” I’m a painter, but I think we’re very privileged in making music that we design to think that we want to paint and painters normally, actually, take their models from outside of their minds to actually paint something. Unless we’re talking about abstract painting. Even abstract painting derives more or less from the regular thing that you can’t actually see. I’m a painter. I’m a soul painter. I paint with music. I paint with notes. I paint with sounds. I paint with melodies. Melodies come first to me. I know it sounds a bit strange for somebody that loves James Brown, but I can tell that James Brown is a melody man before being a rhythm, a groove maker.
Texture is the gestalt of the interplay of instruments or elements in a song; timbre is the specific feel of each individual instrument, ie the way an Oboe sounds “Oboe-ish,” or the Prophet 5 sounds like Night Nurse.
The rise of Kanye West is, for example, a continuation of the multi-decade reaction to technology’s impact on music—particularly the audience’s fixation of the soul-sample template of College Dropout.