Feel the rhythm - new book pays homage to the drum machine
Jonathan Demme's 1984 Talking Heads movie Stop Making Sense features perhaps the most famous opening of any concert film.
by Joe Mansfield
Get On Down
Jack Hamilton
4 stars
Jonathan Demme's 1984 Talking Heads movie Stop Making Sense features perhaps the most famous opening of any concert film. David Byrne strides onstage in a grey suit and white canvas sneakers and lays a boombox at his feet. "Hi," he says. "I got a tape I want to play." He presses a button and a pulsing, slithering rhythm emerges. The crowd goes wild; Byrne strums the opening chords of Psycho Killer.
The boombox is a lie; it's not even near a microphone. The sound that fills the stage and screen is a Roland TR-808, plugged into a mixing board far from the camera's gaze, defined by invisibility. The 808 is the Steinway of drum machines, the most famous model of the most important instrument since the electric guitar. When rapper KRS-One introduced D-Nice as "the human TR-808" on Boogie Down Productions' South Bronx in 1986, it was the highest compliment he could bestow on a beat boxer.
"I know y'all wanted that 808," declared Big Boi on Outkast's The Way You Move in 2003; given that the song hit No1, Big Boi knew right. In 2008 Kanye West named an album after the machine, 808s and Heartbreak; Kanye being Kanye, heartbreak got the cover. Even Byrne wouldn't let it have its close-up.
The TR-808 and 74 other objects of its kind finally receive their due in Joe Mansfield's Beat Box: A Drum Machine Obsession. It's a cleverly designed, lavishly illustrated and endlessly fascinating coffee-table history of the drum machine.
Mansfield is a drum machine collector as well as a historian and music business veteran, best known to hip hop fans as the producer behind Ed O.G. and Da Bulldogs' 1991 classic I Got to Have It. Mansfield bought his first drum machine in 1985, at age 15 (a mint-condition 808, for US$250); he has since accumulated upwards of 150.
Like most books of its kind, Beat Box is a primarily visual experience. Mansfield provides specs for each machine and an occasional anecdote; Dave Tompkins - whose brilliant 2010 history of the vocoder, How to Wreck a Nice Beach, is probably the closest thematic relation to Mansfield's book - christens the volume with a terrific foreword. But the stars of Beat Box are the drum machines, lovingly photographed by Gary Land and laid out on the page in all their glorious, colourful, idiosyncratic detail. Flipping through Beat Box it becomes apparent that for much of the drum machine's history, the people building them had no clear idea what they were doing, even if those using them increasingly did.