While most of the obituaries for Malcolm McLaren will rightfully center on his time as manager of The Sex Pistols, this was just the first of his successes in revolutionary pop music. Upon its release in 1983, Duck Rock‘s distillation of Soweto, South Bronx and proto-electronica sounded like nothing on earth and everything on it at the same time. Nowadays it sounds almost ridiculously dated. The primitive turntablism sounds like something your 4-year old could do when you hand him your iPhone to distract him for a while. The raps are impossibly old skool, practically “moon” and “june” rhyming. Even the selection of African sources seems downright quaint as the recent crate-digging revolution led by Soundway and others continues to dig up impossibly modern-sounding treasures from the 70s.
To truly appreciate how insanely alien Duck Rock felt at the time, you need to place your ears in its historical context.
The idea of creating cut-up music and rhythms from records and charismatically, charmingly rhyme-chanting over them was still very new. Rap and hip-hop were still barely more than rumors to most of the country. Even as a teenager in relatively open & urban Berkeley, the hip-hop hits that bled out into our mainstream were more like novelty acts. Grandmaster Flash was on auto-repeat in the school cafeteria, while Tom Tom Club and Blondie had fluke hits that played on hip-hop styles without actually committing to them. But that was about it. The great Def Jam/Run-DMC/Beastie Boys explosion of 1984 was still yet to come.
I would never go so far as to say Malcolm McLaren discovered African music, but for the 80s generation Duck Rock represented its introduction into their consciousness. South Africa and apartheid were only just entering mainstream conversation in America. None of the great boycotts had started. Nelson Mandela was still in jail – and wasn’t he some kind of terrorist or something? All we knew about him we learned about from The Special AKA. Stevie Ray Vaughn and friends had not yet declaimed “I ain’t gonna play Sun City!” Most critically to the success of Duck Rock, African music simply hadn’t made it over yet. After the political convulsions of the late 1970s, Africa’s music industry was essentially gone. Graceland wasn’t even a gleam in Paul Simon’s eye. The Indestructible Beat Of Soweto was not on anyone’s radar, except perhaps Robert Christgau’s.
Finally, Duck Rock believe it or not is a critical early entry into the creation of the synth-y pop sound that dominated pop in the 80s and is a focus of today’s 80s revivalism. Producer Trevor Horn was fresh off the successes of a couple of the best sounding and most influential post-punk synth-pop productions, ABC’s The Lexicon Of Love and Into Battle With The Art Of Noise, and yet to move on to the monolithic and silly manifesto-ism of Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s Welcome To The Pleasuredome. It’s difficult to give the sense now of how new and modern Horn’s production style felt in the early 80s, especially coming out of a long period starting with punk where amateurism was so key to the aesthetic. Crucially, the Horn style sounded great on Walkman headphones in the early days of personal stereos when little else did. And whether on purpose or not, Duck Rock brought together several burgeoning genres – African, electronica, sampling and hip-hop – that sounded great on cheap portable headphones, even better when moving in virtual isolation through an urban environment – still a novelty in those days.
I think it also bears noting that there was – and should be – considerable controversy over the provenance of the songs. Connecting the dots between township jive and US inner city radio seemed pretty clever at the time and still gives a nice message that we’re all connected, baby. But there’s also real reason to be uncomfortable with that message, especially in light of the songwriting credits that give all the rights to “Horn/McLaren.” One listen and you’ll see strong reason to doubt that they really had much to do with songwriting. While it’s true in the early days of sampling that credits were a bit less… stringent, the co-opting of others’ artistry – in particular from distressed urban areas around the world – reeks of the worst of cultural imperialism. This is another crucial way that Duck Rock is a product of its time even as it stretched out ears into the future.
(Come to think of it, Malcolm had done something similar with another music project six years earlier.)
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Tags: 80s music, african music, hip-hop, malcolm mclaren, post-punk