[.ca] Duck Rock

We're on a world tour with Mr. Malcolm Mclaren...:
"We're on a world tour with Mr. Malcolm McLaren/we go each and every place including Spain"... so raps the Supreme Team on "World Famous." When I first heard these words at a house party at the University of South Carolina in 1983, I could only say WHOA! Then at the same party, the DJ played "Buffalo Gals" (also from this Album/CD), the kids went WILD and I dropped my jaws in disbelief! I HAD to run to the nearby record store. This was in fact one of tmy intros to African music, but it's very good as an example of excellent hip hop shortly before Run DMC saved the genre from dying out. This Album also helped in that first-aid effort. Still fun to listen to after all these years.

THE SGT. PEPPER'S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND OF HIP-HOP:
This album anticipates the multi-cultural "world music" movement by almost ten years. (Check that date, 1982.) At the very least it was one of a handful of early attempts to exploit that movement, pre-dating Paul Simon's "Graceland" by a good five or six years. (Talking Heads did it too, incorporating African rhythms into their new wave music in the late 70s and early 80s. Then later David Byrne went full tilt multi-culti, with his Brazillian music compilations of the early 90s.) If you're too young to know who Malcom McClaren is/was -- he's the guy who assembled/managed/invented the Sex Pistols in 1976. He also managed Adam & The Ants in their early days, as well as Bow Wow Wow. Both of those acts were built around the "Burundi Beat" and vaguely Appache tribal rhythms. "Duck Rock" was the first time McClaren put out an album of his own, but he's not really a singer or a songwriter or a musician, or even a record producer. He's an "idea man" and an exploiter of other people's creativity. His clever concept was to mix early East coast hip hop, radio DJ banter, and scratching with African zulu, Brazillian and Carribean music, with layers of Eurocentric strings, lush beds of nu-wave synthesizer and... Appalachian square dance music! The effect is at turns gorgeous, hilarious, ponderous, weird, wonderful, infectious, etc., etc. Some other reviews here crow about Eminem sampling the song "Buffalo Gals" -- but hundreds of rappers and hip hoppers have sampled "Duck Rock" over the years. (Neena Cherry's "Buffalo Stance"?) "Duck Rock" is a unique melange of an album - and a first of its kind in many ways. It really is the Sargeant Pepper of hip hop... in my opinion. Others would elaborate and do it better, but "Duck Rock" came first. It's seminal - and judging by the scant number of reviews here, it's been all but forgotten. (Pitchfork.com didn't even include it in their Top 100 Albums of The 80s?!?!?!!!!) In my estimation, "Duck Rock" belongs in the top 5, easily, in terms of influential albums of the 80s. McClaren's subsequent albums weren't as interesting or relevant. And yes, Trevor Horn (Yes, Buggles, Art Of Noise, ABC, Propaganda, Seal) deserves as much of the credit as McClaren for this brilliant album. Maybe more. All of his best ideas (Art Of Noise most notably) were arrived at in the process of making the ground-breaking "Duck Rock".

Clever cultural imperialism.:
Upfront this album is really nothing more than Mr Maclaren going out and wholesale stealing (lifting, borrowing) world music before there was ever a bin in the store called world music. But (!) he mixes it with the emerging NYC hip-hop scene with the help of Trevor Horn, Anne Dudley and JJ (future Art of Noise team- you can hear the roots of the noise on this record. In fact the initial AON sessions were done at night during these recording sessions). Double Dutch (not the famous Double Dutch Bus song by Frankie Smith) is the stand out track here, predating Paul Simon's South African work by almost a decade. Coupling it with the NYC street double dutch teams was pure genius. Merengue is nothing more than a third rate Dominican Merengue pattern. Buffalo Gals is the other stand out track here, deserved of its place in music history. From our standpoint here, 20 year on, this sounds dated and even slightly un PC. But at the time this was the first time that most people outside of NYC had heard hip-hop or early DJs. Call it what you will but this record broke a lot of new ground and parts of it still sound fresh today.

Brilliant, but...:
Something (not sure what, maybe channel-surfing past MTV) recently inspired me to get out this CD and give it another spin, and I was, once again, totally captivated by Mr. Mclaren's and Mr. Horn's visionary masterpiece. The enthusiasm, energy, vibrancy, and respect for world music cultures radiate from the speakers of my home system like a sunny tropical breeze. It's pretty much impossible for this disc not to brighten your day; maybe the fact that it's -10 degrees F. here today has something to do with it! There's not much I could add to this review that wasn't already mentioned in Shawn Wolfe's excellent essay on this webpage, except that I was disappointed that Island didn't reprint the fold-out liner notes from the original vinyl release, explaining the origins of the recorded material, as well as the complete lyrical content. I had bought this record in 1984 after hearing "Double Dutch" and "Buffalo Gals", and was not only entranced with the music on the entire disc, but thoroughly enlightened by the concept of combining so many diverse elements into such a captivating whole, few of which I would have been able to discern on my own without the help of the record's packaging. I'm just a mid-western farm kid; they didn't play this type of stuff on AM radio where I grew up in the 60's and early 70's. So this record not only entertains, but educates. The fact that Island Records still has this CD in print should speak volumes about its worth, to this day. True, Mr. Mclaren did take samples of music from a variety of cultures and make them his own, but given the history of popular music it should hardly be a surprise that any one would want to do that. Perhaps there are web pages somewhere out in cyber-space that will help those who don't have access to this record's original liner notes to fill in the blanks. Definitely worth a search. So for content, it gets five stars; for CD packaging, 3 stars. Total score, 4 stars. Go buy it anyway, along with your favorite tropical libation, and let it take you away. To Mr. Mclaren, Mr. Horn, and all your collaborators, a most profound Thank You!

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