Did Mantronix invent Acid ton a Hip Hop record? Talking about the The Album whose influence on dance music is probably bigger than you’d believe.
Before there was Electro, House or Techno, there was Hip Hop. People like Todd Terry, Robert Hood, Egyptian Lover and Jeff Mills all had their start in Hip Hop before moving into the prototypes of the aforementioned future club music genres. At its roots, Hip Hop was a distinctly black American sound and -culture incorporating breakdancing, graffiti, soundsystem culture with a soundtrack infusing elements of Soul, Funk, Disco, Jazz and poetry.
Starting in the mid seventies as a truly underground counterculture phenomenon, by the eighties it started embedding itself in popular youth culture with acts like, T and Scott La Rock, LL Cool J, Run DMC, Big Daddy Kane, Kurtis Blow, and the Beastie Boys breaking through into popular culture. At the height of this wave of popularity there was one group doing things a bit differently. They were called Mantronix. They started lighting up the dance floors of New York in 1985 with two singles and then an album. The album was called simply, The Album and what it established for later generations coming into electronic music, is truly unquantifiable today.
It’s influenced and been sampled by some significant producers in House, Techno and Electro and I would go as far as to say it might even have established the genre Acid without knowing it (more on that later). While most people in Hip Hop circles have relegated the group and the album to the “where are they now” pages of the genre’s history, Mantronix and The Album is still an important touchstone in the annals of contemporary club music for some of the world’s most in-demand DJs.
It all starts with Graham Curtis el Khaleel; a young Jamaican kid, relocated to “Toronto of all places” with a mother in search of “a better path in life” for her and her brood. It was in Canada he started listening to Rock with everything from Queen to Uriah Heep saturating the airwaves, with Curtis even seeking out the Kiss Army at some stage.
“But there was a little station that was picking up a transmission from, I think, New York,” he recalls in an interview with DJ History. “They were playing disco. I was like, ‘Oh, I like this also’.” Six months later he and his family moved to New York, and young Curtis set out to become the “Disco King,” but by the time he arrives most of the American city has moved onto the next thing. Suddenly, the weird looking kid from Canada wearing “tights and a leather jacket” really sticks out on the G-Train to Brooklyn. “I get to my cousin’s house and they’re playing this stuff, and I’m like, ‘What is this?’ It was rap.”
From that point rap music and Hip Hop is everything for Curtis. Immersed in the nucleus of the scene in New York, Hip Hop lured the nascent DJ away from Disco. It wasn’t long before he was taking his uncle’s sound system apart, and jacking the outlet from the nearest street lamp, he sought to emulate the cooler kids in the neighbourhood. “I had a puppy crush on a young girl when I was the corny, geeky kid on the corner,” Curtis divulged in an article on RBMA “The guys that she was into at the time were DJs: street DJs, plugging their turntables into a lamppost.”
Imitating his elders he “somehow made a crossfader, and… found a turntable,” but what set Curtis apart early on was to compensate for the lack of the second turntable was to connect a Roland 606 drum machine and a Roland 303 bassline composer on the other side of the crossfader. A turntable and a couple of grooveboxes; that’s the rudiments of any dance music setup. There was “(n)othing too complicated about it” he recalls in a Reverb interview and that basic setup laid the groundwork for his start as an artist and producer.
His mother however, was not all that impressed with her son’s newfound hobby. As his equipment multiplied over her dresser, she politely encouraged the young Curtis to “get a job!” He started working in a record store, where else? Downtown records, a legendary record store in DJ history, hired him to refill empty shelves, but it didn’t take long before he was the in-house selector for the record store’s easily impressionable clientele. “I wasn’t stacking records anymore,” he told DJ History. “I was now playing tracks that I thought would impress potential buyers, DJs that were coming in.”
He would spend his days in the record shop and nights at those legendary early Hip Hop haunts In New York. He namechecks “Danceteria and The Roxy” in his story on RBMA as “the places that have had the biggest influence on me and my music to this day. Being at The Roxy seeing all of these guys – Bambaataa, Afrika Islam, Grand Mixer DXT, Flash – every Friday night was raw.” On the dance floor he was rubbing shoulders with the likes of other latent stars like Vin Diesel (future Fast and Furious star), Russell Simmons (Future Def Jam owner) and Adam Yauch (future MCA and Beastie Boy).
It was around the same time that Curtis finished his first track, Fresh is the Word. It wasn’t called that yet however, because the future classic was in desperate need of some vocals. Some Hip Hop lure here: he even turned to the then unknown MCA for help. – “I wanted Adam to do the rap on ‘Fresh Is The Word’ and I remember Adam calling me a few times, but in the end he changed his mind for whatever reason.”There was somebody else waiting in the wings. Touré Embden (aka MC Tee) was a regular at Downtown records and Curtis had known he was good with words. The story in DJ history goes Curtis approached him with; “Listen, I’ve got a little beat here, but I don’t have a rapper. Would you mind writing some lyrics to this?” Touré replies “‘Well, I’m not really a rapper. I write poetry.” Curtis thought, “Okay, close enough.”
They called themselves Mantronix, with a cheeky nod to contemporary hitmakers Boytronics, with Kurtis dropping the “C” from his name and adopting an artistic moniker to reflect the sci-fi theme. “All of a sudden, I’ve turned from my God-given name of Graham Curtis into this robotic name, Kurtis Mantronik of Mantronix with M.C. Tee,” he jokes in RBMA.
Fresh is the Word was Mantronix’ first track and first release, but it would’ve been consigned to a drawer, gathering dust if it hadn’t been for Will Socolov from Sleep Bag records. Sleeping Bag records was part owned by disco futurist Arthur Russell and while Fresh is the Word didn’t speak to Russell or the other partners of the company, Socolov was convinced. He said; “Kurtis, they’re not going to understand this at all. But out of my own money, I’m going to pay for it and I’m going to convince them that this is going to work,” according to the DJ History interview.
When Fresh is the Word came on the radio some weeks later, even Kurtis’ mom got off his back about finding a job. It was very clearly a hit. A pounding kick drum, energetic claps and a minimalist accompaniment to MC Tee’s vocals introduce the band to the world. There’s little more than a Roland TR- 808 drum machine and vocals to the track, but the track had a cataclysmic energy, one that could fill an empty dance floor at the time without hesitation.
Fresh is the Word brought out the best of the machines, emphasising the “synthetic sounds” of his Roland grooveboxes (drum machines and synthesisers). While Kurtis had been aware of the machines in popular music, he’d always thought it had always been in “a very timid way. If you listen to Planet Rock, for example, it’s quite processed,” he explained in a 909 Originals interview. “So I really wanted to strip it back and use the sounds that were coming out of the machine.”
Hip Hop, for the most part and even at its origins, is about using breaks, largely sampled from the previous generation’s Soul, Funk, Jazz, Disco and Rock records. It was a cut and paste music genre made of recycled musical pieces, but Kurtis opted for a different approach. The samples were still there, but the focus was clearly on the artificial nature of the machines, especially the Roland X0X series. From the 606 to 909 drum machines, Mantronix reached bass territories that the acoustic kick drum from those sampled records couldn’t reach. It wasn’t unheard of at that time, but where other producers would use it as an accessory in the mix, Kurtis exploited the sonic possibilities of the machines in a style that put the kick drum front and centre; like it does in most popular music genres today.
He was willing to experiment more with these machines and in one particular experiment for the album, he might have incidentally invented Acid music. Bassline, the track that introduces The Album, uses a bass emulation synthesiser called the Roland 303 to create the bass parts for the track . Those squelching bleeps are instantly familiar. Although he found the machine difficult to programme, Kurtis saw the charm and the potential of the machine, using it as a kind of lead theme echoing throughout the track, something that would become a totem of Acid House happening down the line.
Was Bassline the prototype for Acid? It’s hard to say with so many producers and artists arriving at the same idea around the same time, but I’d argue it was probably the first time the 303 was used as such on a recording. Both Phuture and Sleazy D’s first acid tracks only came out the next year in 1986, and Ron Hardy’s Acid Tracks wasn’t released until 1987. Although Charanjit Singh‘s album had been around since1982, in the western canon at least it’s safe to assume Mantronix was the first.
“How did you discover the potential of the 303?” Bill Brewster asked Kurtis in DJ History. “That’s all I had available to me,” came his reply “and I didn’t know other people weren’t using it.” Like the rest of the LP, Bassline is a minimal, stark arrangement centred around a booming kick drum that seems to bounce through the track in slow-motion. It was a case of make due with what you got and Mantronix took that to its extreme. Even in the context of today’s Hip Hop, The Album’s bass sound is still earth-shattering.
“Those tracks that you hear on that album, it was just basically me just messing around.” Kurtis told Reverb while going into little depth. “I would come up with something and then I’d get MC Tee to come in, and a lot of it was done on 8-track.”
With the growing success of Fresh is the Word, the gigs started rolling in and it wouldn’t be long until those DJs and places Kurtis had idolised started calling. “Before you know it Roman Ricardo,” according to the RBMA piece. “The big DJ at the Roxy, said, ‘Kurtis, I want to book you for a show.’ I’m thinking, ‘The Roxy?’” And as “Fresh Is The Word is kicking off, it’s like making some noise and it’s actually doing quite well. The record company says, okay, then we need a follow-up single, which was Needle to the Groove.”
“Giving you a second taste,” raps MC Tee in the opening verse of Needle to the Groove, before Mantronix reinforces that stark sound that they cultivated already on the first single,. It established something new in the burgeoning firmament of the young Hip Hop genre. “I don’t want to say that it was ‘rap’ or ‘hip hop’ in its rawest form,” Kuris Told RBMA “but something was different: just a beat and a rap, with simplistic programming.” Everything was still “very new,” remembers Kurits in DJ History, “and there was nothing to compare it with” back in 1985. He was lucky however to have a label and especially a label head in the form of Will Socolov who would let Kurtis “do what I wanted to do.”
The album followed shortly after Needle to the Groove and at a time when everybody was still consuming music in a physical way, the record sold in the hundreds of thousands of copies and the singles were syndicated for national radio, while the dance floors were saturated with the sound of Mantronix.
“The interesting part about what I did was that I was able to understand hip hop in its early form, understand also club music, and separate the two,“ recalls Curtis in RBMA. While he might have meant that he was trying to find a purer form of Hip Hop, I would argue, it’s exactly the dance floor inclinations of these tracks, which has lived on in infamy amongst DJs from other club music genres.
Drifting closer to the club arena, Mantronix wasn’t just about the hits, but about the dance floor. Those bouncing 808s and the minimal sound was made for the dance floor. Even the softer track and one Mantronix doesn’t particularly like himself, Ladies, was all about that groove. The Album as a whole diverged little from that formula and it’s in that approach to the dance floor, why Mantronix’ music continues to live on in legend today.
Mantronix’ next LP, Music Madness was released a year later, and there he continued on the same path while cutting a more divergent corner towards the Pop music threshold on his side-projects, working with the likes of Hip Hop icon T La Rock, and future R&B star Joyce Sims.
Music Madness would be the last record for Sleeping Bag, as the monetary allure and so-called freedom of big time label Capitol records stole Mantronix away from the indie label. Sighting some kind of rift between the rest of the management at Sleeping Bag as well, the move to Capitol ended up being a double edged sword (and that’s not considering the tumultuous subsequent relations with Socolov). The expectations on Mantronix to deliver something that could break through beyond the dance floor was enforced. By the time we get to the 1989 track, Got to have Your Love, Mantronix edges into R&B and pop territory. A female vocal croons over lush strings, making strange bed-fellows with the stabbing metallic bassline; some distant residual piece from those earliest LPs.
After a few records for Capitol, including hits like King of Beats, Mantronix’ output started slowing down. He all but disappeared from music in the mid nineties, but unbeknownst to him, records like The Album were influencing new styles of dance music emerging in the UK, built from Kurtis’ break beats. Drum n Bass and Jungle were sampling Mantronix, and acts like Future Sound Of London were mentioning records like The Album as a serious influence. Even German pop-dance act, Snap sampled King of Beats for I got the Power, but as a group, Mantronix seemed to be the reserve of other musicians and producers as it slid into the classic shelves of record stores.
He ended up moving to the UK, remixing Future Sound of London and then moving on tothe likes of Victoria Beckham and Robbie Williams. It’s about as far removed as you can take it from The Album, but it would never take anything away from the significance of that first Mantronix record.
The album might never be inducted into any hall of fame, but there were a lot of firsts on that debut that would make Mantronix the prototype for many things in dance music and Hip Hop. The bouncing 808 kick drum and the way used the 303 on Bassline would have been there before genres like Electro and Acid were fully formed while the stark production would allude to a sensitivity for the club dance floor that hadn’t really existed before then. The Album is a classic today and while it might seem like an outlier record, Mantronix’ influence on club music remains strong.