Jam On It

This hip-hop classic is all about fun, with Newcleus busting family-friendly rhymes over a highly danceable beat. The title - often heard as "jamoney" - comes from the name of their DJ crew, Jam On Productions. Based in Brooklyn, they had been doing park jams, block parties and battles with other crews since 1977. Unlike many crews from the Bronx, they played a lot of disco and funk. "You had to play the stuff the girls wanted to hear because the girls wanted to dance and the guys wanted to dance with the girls," group leader Cozmo D (Ben Cenac) said in a Songfacts interview. "Whereas in the Bronx, it was more of the B-Boy thing, which was almost exclusively a male thing, and they would compete with each other."

Many hip-hop records from this time relied on samples or interpolations, but this one was completely original. It started out as a song called "Jam On Revenge," which had the same musical elements but no rapping. That song Newcleus released in 1983, and when their record label asked them to do something with a rap, they reworked it into "Jam On It." For the lyrics, Cozmo D, who wrote the song, dug into his notebook for rhymes he would recite to the crowds when he was DJing for the group. He also wrote the rap for Chilly B (Bob Crafton), his musical partner who became the other main vocalist.

Cozmo D put the track together using Roland TR-808 drum machine for the drums, and three different synthesizers for the other elements: a Sequential Circuits Pro One for the bassline, a Roland TB-303 for the arpeggiates, and a Roland RS-09 for the chords. He started with the bassline, then added the sequence, chords, string line and bells.