Rockit

Herbie Hancock is a renown jazz musician who joined Miles Davis' band in 1963. Davis taught Hancock the importance of experimentation, and about how you can achieve excellent results by letting the people working with you experiment as well. And while jazz purists wanted no part of this electro classic, it created a fresh new sound thanks to the production of Bill Laswell and the turntable work of GrandMixer D.ST, who each got the green light from Hancock to do their thing. Laswell is a bass player who produced the track. Known for creating "collision music," he brought elements of electro, fusion jazz and hip-hop to "Rockit." GrandMixer D.ST, later known as DXT, was a disciple of Kool Herc and one of the first popular DJs on the New York hip-hop scene.

Bill Laswell explained how this song came together to The Quietus: "I got a call from a guy who knew Herbie who told me he wanted to put together some tracks. I went to New York, saw Bambaataa and people DJing at the Roxy and I don't even think he was really paying attention but after that night out I said 'I'll come to LA in a couple of weeks and I'll bring a couple of rhythm tracks.' So we just recorded very quickly in a basement in Brooklyn. We didn't really know what it was. We took it and Herbie played over it for an hour or two and then it took like another hour to mix. The whole thing didn't take very long. We didn't really know what we'd done. We stopped at a store that sold a lot of speakers on the way to the airport because we wanted to kill some time. The guy went to put on a rock record and we said 'No we don't listen to that kind of stuff.' We had a cassette of the rough mix we'd finished so we said 'Play this instead.' We played it and afterwards we turned round and there was just about 50 kids looking at the speakers, saying 'What the f--k was that?!' [laughs] I think there was Grandmaster Caz from the Cold Crush Brothers and D.ST and we all just looked at each other and everyone was 'Oh s--t! I think we might have something.'"

This was the first hit song to feature scratching, and for anyone not familiar with hip-hop, it was the first time they heard the sounds of a record being manipulated on a turntable to the beat. The technique was pioneered by the DJs Grand Master Flash and Grand Wizard Theodore, who performed throughout New York. Flash explained: "Scratching is just cueing the record. A deejay has to back-cue the record, but he only hears that sound himself. We felt, Why just let us hear it? Let's pull the fader halfway up while the other record's still playing and make this scratching noise, back and forth, to the beat."