IT WAS the cold winter of 1901, the Tsar was still in power and you couldn’t buy a hip-hop import in the whole of St Petersburg. Scratch this Ivan: no roubles no rap. Then the futurists came along, welcoming the winds of change and the prospect of revolution. By 1912 the young artist Vladimir Mayakovsky and his friends had published their first manifesto A SLAP IN THE FACE OF PUBLIC TASTE. “Only we are the face of our time. The horn of time trumpets through us in the art of noise”.

 

They rubbished past art claiming there was more worth in Charlie Chaplin’s pants than in the entire works of Pushkin; more excitement in Bambaataa’s hip-pocket than in the entire work of The Beatles. Then came hip-hop. It was Mayakovsky who was the first mix-master. But somewhere along the line it all went wrong. Now Russians are reduced to poncing Elton John albums off visiting tourists and New York City stole the beat: more dimes and more rhymes. Mayakovsky committed suicide in 1930 and never quite got round to meeting Mantronix. But he sure did dig their stylee. 

“People In The Place To Be
This is Mantronix, with M.C. Tee
Devoted. Promoted. We’re the brothers you voted
Giving you a second taste so we’ll make it sugar-coated”
(Mantronix ‘Needle To The Groove, The Re-Mix’)

 

After months of underground attention, Mantronix, a two-boy team featuring the dynamic new producer Curtis Kahleel (aka Mantronik) and the rap-master MC Tee, have gone public. Their debut album sold to Virgin for an undisclosed sum and a single ‘Ladies’ already in the pop charts, Mantronix are future fresh. And every new day deserves a manifesto.

 

RAP MUSICIANS have always agreed that theft is inevitable. Those irresistible beat-breaks from Gwen McCrae’s ‘Funky Sensation’ and Freedom’s ‘Get Up And Dance’ have been robbed a million times, Chic’s ‘Good Times’ is always getting mugged and every good dancefloor loves a klepto. DJ Mantronik raids and reconstructs his own record collection, a discorama that stretches back to a childhood spent in Jamaica, early teenage years spent listening to local rock in Canada and several more recent years working in Downtown Records, Manhattan – “mostly black and Latin” – a shop that stocks the most up-to-date club music and “the best euro-pop and new wave records, ABC, New Order...

 

“When I arrived in New York from Canada I didn’t understand hip hop. I used to be into rock, especially groups like Kiss and April Wine from Montreal. I was completely sold on that kind of sound, my music was guitars and straight upfront rock. When I got down to New York I heard these guys rapping and scratch-mixing and thought this stuff is pure shit. But my cousin kept on at me, he had some turntables, I spent hours watching him scratch and just became completely intrigued.”

 

For those tribalists among us who blanche at the thought of owning records by pop music’s great unwashed – Aerosmith, AC/ DC, Mahogany Rush – the current state of art-rap has turned taste into self-terrorism. OK, I’ll talk. I once tapped my foot to Robin Trower, but when I bought ‘Mantronix: The Album’ I thought it was hot (as in a hot new import) not hot (as in this video’s hot, son, can you come to the station and help us with our enquiries). But the first law of rap creativity is theft and each fresh beat makes us an accessory to the crime. Do Mantronix care about dealing in stolen property?

 

“The best bits of ‘Ladies’ and ‘Hard Core Hip-Hop’ are borrowed from a British rock record that came out on Polydor Records, it’s by Peter Godwin, a dance rock record called ‘Emotional Disguise’. Some people take the beats and play whole sections of current funk records; we try to take the unusual sounds, things off the radio, noises from an NBC advert, some fusion beats, bits of horn sounds from jazz, snatches from Third World, Aerosmith. But we use them less than a bar at a time, emulate them, so there’s never a copyright problem ‘cos we won’t get caught.”

 

THE FUTURE is eccentric and rap is a black music re-alignment with humour. Mantronix try hard but could be funnier. Almost every hip-hop worth a mention has moved in the direction of self-mocking slander: taking the electro-piss. The eccentricity stretches from the cartoon beats that funk steals hungrily from ‘Inspector Gadget’ and ‘The Pink Panther Show’ to the more extended novelty raps like ‘The Show’ by Doug E. Fresh, Concept’s ‘Mr DJ’ and Whistle’s ‘(Nothin’ Serious) Just Buggin’, to Mantronix’s smiling look at breakdance style.

 

“I’ll make you take a quick freeze, walk in the breeze
Make you think your Bojangles as you walk on your knees
Put the needle to the groove”
(Mantronix ‘Needle To The Groove’)

 

If blonde pop and smashing hits can deal with picture-book romance, then eccentric rap is its permanent put-down. One looks neat, smells sweet and deodorises the real meaning of love and hate, the other looks tough, smells rough and rejects the sureness of deodorised style, for the aroma of underarm music.

 

“You’re dirty, out of place and you’re on the floor
Your sneakers have a scent I’ve never smelt before.
You’re dirty, a sleaze, and you need a bath,
Do me a favour; wash your ass."
(Captain Rock ‘You Stink’ (NIA))

 

At one end of the spectrum eccentric rap can be easily appropriated by the dead-heads of Radio One – (“Mr DJ won’t you play my favourite song”) – who have built a 20-grand career out of silliness and at the other end it can be turned into the dishonest toilet humour of The Beastie Boys. Not so far from the madding outrage, The Boys are trying to relive middle America’s memories of punk: wrecking hotels, farting at press receptions and shitting in the bath. With a killer track called ‘Hard Core Hip-Hop’ and a foot in the hard-rock history, are they part of the new-wave fusion?

 

“The Beastie Boys are a set of jokers. Over in the States they’re just crap, a joke. We know them well from hanging around the Danceteria at night, in fact one of them was going to rap our first single ‘Fresh Is The Word’. The real laugh is on CBS, they spent a fortune getting The Beastie Boys and no one buys their records.”

 

We laugh. We pause for breath. There is not a convenient bath to shit in.

 

IT WAS a cold October the year we stormed the Palace. Mayakovsky couldn’t make it but the rest of us showed up. Food was scarce in 1918 and you couldn’t buy a Trouble Funk 12” in the whole of Leningrad. No go-go and no goulash. How did we survive?

 

Futurism set out to make communication strange. It took familiar objects and showed them in new and unusual configurations, by mixing up unconnected images, Futurism set out to show things in a new way. Rap and scratch are urban mixes, taking future funk, industrial noise and all the best beats and turning them into another kind of harmony. Mantronix may well be one of the most commercial rap acts to date, their music almost fits comfortably into the mainstream flow of regular club music. It manages to stay strange but has a familiar eye on commercial patterns.

 

“Our first album used rock and the beats. Our next album is intended to use the big-band sound and the dance orchestra stuff that’s been lying around my mother’s record collection. We will be mixing Benny Goodman with fresh beats. We start work on that in about a month.”

 

 

SINCE ITS emergence in the late ’70s, born out of an uneasy alliance of street funk and European electronic pop, that bastard child electrofunk has been treated as a negative, faceless and inhuman abberation. Dismissed in the black music press as the end of civilisation as we know it, electro is everyone’s favourite swear-word, an impure and impertinent brat that claims soul is the music of the past and digital music in all its robotic logic is the music of a soul-less future. In some circles a paedophile could expect a better reception than a Mantronix record. But despite the critical cold shoulders, heavily synthesised music and electronic rap sells to Britain’s (and possibly America’s biggest) underground. For emergent young street musicians, a Lyricon synth is a bigger deal than lyrical pop and the Roland 909 is a bigger status symbol than the Stratocaster. If Russian futurism blew kisses at the kinetic age, worshipping the motion and ideology of the machine, then future funk has literally ravished the electronic era.

 

DJ Mantronik is confidently critical of those who refuse to face the future and likes to challenge the common consensus. “In some hands the turntable, the needle in the groove, is a much more sophisticated musical instrument than the guitar or the keyboards. And the emulator is much more exciting than any real musical instrument. In fact, Mantronix are moving away from scratch-mixing, except on stage, and getting into sampling, taking sounds from other places, maybe a strong horn blast, putting the sound through an emulator and getting new synthesised sounds.”

 

Is the name Mantronix –a collective name for the mixer Mantronik and the rapper MC Tee – a deliberate attempt to put forward an identity of faceless futurism?

 

I’d rather people called me Mantronik rather than Curtis because I don’t want to be confused with Kurtis Blow and we do prefer to let people think that the name is a mixture of the human and the electronic, which kinda reflects the sound of records like ‘Ladies’. But there was once this German guy called Boytronik whose record came on import into the shop I worked in. The record didn’t do anything so I thought I’d steal the name and change it to man. That’s a secret and we’d rather people didn’t know...” My lips are sealed, man.

 

MANTRONIX ARE the latest and to date the most successful acts to record on Sleeping Bag Records, one of New York’s most experimental independent labels. The company began in 1981 with the release of one of club music’s most sought after classics, a left-field jam session featuring Butch Ingram and Family working under the pseudonym Dinosaur L. The fifth take of the atmospheric session was simply named ‘Go Bang Number Five’ and it began to appear in specialist shops with a strange and endearing logo, a small red koala bear, the marsupial that put the bag in Sleeping.

 

The name was a deliberate and clumsy reaction against the slick side of New York’s metropolitan dance-music scene and first emerged as an unintentional joke. Will Sokolov, an original owner of the company camping down in bohemian disorganisation, said of James Brown, “he might have a brand new bag but all I’ve got is a worn out sleeping bag.” The initial impetus for the music was New York’s underground club scene based at The Loft and Larry Levan’s Paradise Garage, where the predominantly black, gay and bourgeois crowd danced to a mixture of The Clash, Patti Labelle, Hi-Energy and, of course, ‘Go-Bang’. Responding to the demand for the scene’s most popular record, Phreek’s ‘Weekend’, Sleeping Bag contacted the original singer Chris Wilshire and re-recorded the song under the name of Class Action.

 

In 1985 after a series of less inspired releases, partners Will Socolov and Ron Resnick discovered DJ Mantronik spinning and mixing in their favourite record shop. A debut single ‘Fresh Is The Word’ sold over 70,000 copies and the follow up, Tricky Tee’s ‘Johnny The Fox’, had Mantronik robbing the beats from one of his favourite rock records, Thin Lizzy’s ‘Johnny The Fox Meets Jimmy The Weed’.

 

On the back of these successes Sleeping Bag began work on ‘Mantronix: The Album’ but cleverly resisted making the all-or-nothing deal that delivered Def Jam into the corporate jaws of CBS.

 

“We began with Dinosaur L and we’ll stay with the koala, better alive as a small animal then just another dead dog.”

 

“I Would Do Anything Just To Get The Chance To Go Bang
I Wanna Go Bang”
(Dinosaur L ‘Go Bang Number Five’)

 

NOISE IS the key, musical terrorism tied like fireworks to your ear, pitched against the democratic consensus of a song, sing-along harmony. But Mantronix are proof that noise – dismembered music like ‘basslines’ – can be something other than terrorism, it can be popular. After all, hip-hop is the scourge of the avant-garde. If only Burroughs could cut it up as sharp as DJ Cheese? If only Lou Reed’s ‘Metal Machine Music’ could fill a dancefloor? If only the avant-garde had hits? If only noise could cross over like Mantronix.

 

It was 1931 when our first tractor arrived and it was the most exciting noise we’d heard since Grandmaster Flash played at Tretyakov Hall. Mayakovsky had died the year before, so he missed us dancing to L.L. Cool J. down on the collective farm. That was the day we really discovered futurist music: noise and strawberries make the best deaf jam. Chill out comrade.

 

 

© Stuart Cosgrove

Originally published in the NME, Mar 15 1986

 

 

 

 

Download Wild Style

The Wild Style soundtrack was produced by Blondie’s Chris Stein and Fab Five Freddy, features all the early old school players, and has been sampled by everyone from De La Soul to Nas. The version in our shop is the superfly 25th anniversary version, with a gang of unreleased tracks and loads of beats and breaks. If you have an ounce of hip hop in your bones you should own this album. LISTEN/BUY>

 

 

 

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