Planet Rock producer Arthur Baker hits the decks in Hong Kong
The electro, house and hip hop pioneer and superstar mentor is coming to town so don’t miss the chance to catch him in action
Few people can claim to have had such a profound influence on the direction of modern music as Arthur Baker. A 1980s pioneer of electro music, producer, songwriter, remixer and DJ, Baker has been critical to the development of the two most influential musical genres of the past few decades, hip hop and house, and has stayed at the leading edge of production, remixing and genre cross-pollination for decades.
A user of sampling before there were machines to do it for you and a remixer before remixes were a thing, using analogue means up to and including hiring musicians to duplicate sounds, he is possibly best known for 1982’s Planet Rock by Afrika Bambaataa & the Soulsonic Force.
A dazzlingly innovative sound collage, it set the melody to Kraftwerk’s Trans Europe Express to a breakbeat generated by the famously otherworldly sounding Roland TR-808 drum machine – a machine about which Baker has been working on a documentary film, to be released shortly, featuring contributions from Pharrell Williams, Richie Hawtin, Hank Shocklee and Felix Da Housecat.
Planet Rock pretty much created electro, invented sampling and paved the way for hip hop to go electronic, revolutionising the genre in the same way that Italian producer Giorgio Moroder had done with disco a few years earlier. Baker says he knew at the time that he was onto something special.
“I definitely said while we were making it to my wife at the time, that we’d made musical history and it was either going to be huge smash or nothing at all. The rappers hated it – they thought after that they’d never get to make another record.”
“I play the music Tracey likes,” he says (mostly Motown, punk and disco). “It’s a very retro set. It’s like playing a really cool wedding. But while I was there I wanted to do at least one club gig; the art crowd are not very underground.”