In 1995 during a trip to Glasgow, Scotland, I found this amazing compilation of essays about music, done in a year to year, era to era fashion called The Faber Book Of Pop.

Consisting of writing, mostly non-fiction with a little fiction thrown in, it wholly encompasses music criticism and writing in a way I’d never quite experienced before. Traveling in time from the year 1942 with it’s opening essay by Malcolm X, who writes about black dance halls during the war and the freedom of movement he saw there, to1994’s essay by Andrew O’Hagan about the amount of ecstasy taken at raves in the U.K. and how it happened to be killing British teens.

At 862 pages it is quite the tombe. Though most essays in the book range in the area from 2 to 6 pages, so you can pick through it at your leisure. When I get interested in an old band from the ‘70’s or ‘80’s, one of the first things I do is look them up in the index and see where and how they were mentioned in this book.

This week I’d like to introduce you to The Faber Book Of Pop with edited selections chosen from this amazing resource, and some samples so you can get the vibe of music writing through the last few decades.

Today I’m starting with an essay from the section of the book about the Early 80’s called Baroque Proportions. It’s an essay about Afrika Bambaataa and his 1982 cult hit Planet Rock written by David Toop in 1984 from the early Hip Hop magazine Rap Attack.

Sharing the twilight zone of 42nd Street movie houses, drug dealers and seedy subterranean record stores are the video arcades. Video games have had a big influence on latter day hip hop – the arcades are bleeping, pulsing, 24-hour refuges for the obsessive vidkids with nowhere else to go. Since the Japanese exploitation of American Nolan Bushnell’s original games, a major part of the populated world has been saturated with Space Invaders, Gorgars, Missile Commands, Dragon’s Lairs and Ms Pacmans. Along with their addictive properties, their imagery and their insatiable appetite for coins goes an e-z-learn induction into the world of computer technology.

Toop goes on to describe the beginning of the love early hip hoppers had for early electronic music as coming from the “notorious Death Mix” made by Bambaataa which used a song by Yellow Magic Orchestra called Firecracker. This inevitably lead to the discovery by many early hip hoppers of the German group, Kraftwerk.

Below is Bambaataa’s recollection of Kraftwerk’s influence as quoted in the article:

”I don’t think they even knew how big they were among the black masses back in ’77 when they came out with “Trans-Europe Express”. When that came out I thought that was one of the best and weirdest records I ever heard in my life. I said, ‘scuse the expression, this is some weird shit! Everybody just went crazy off of that. I guess they found out when they came over and did a performance at the Ritz how big they was. They had four encores and people would not let them leave. That’s an amazing group to see – just to see what computers and all that can do. They took like calculators and added something to it – people pressing it and start playing it like music. It was funky. I started looking at telephones – the push button type – they really mastered those industrial type of machines.”

Toop concurs:

Kraftwerk were the most unlikely group to create such and effect among young blacks. Four be-suited showroom dummies who barely moved a muscle when they played, they were nonetheless the first group using pure electronics to achieve anything like the rhythmic sophistication of quality black dance music. They were fascinating to kids who had grown up with the incursion of microchip technology into everyday life. The George Clinton funk empire and its theatre of excesses had taken sex, sci-fi and comic-book abandonment about as far as it could go on stage; four Aryan robots pressing buttons was a joke at the other extreme.

He ends the essay with his thoughts about Planet Rock and it’s impact on further dance music and Hip Hop.

”Planet Rock” was so strange on first hearing that it was hard to believe anybody would buy it. Not only one of the massive hits of 1982, it also shifted dance music into another gear.

From the opening moments of Bambaataa shouting, “Party people, party people – can y’all get funky?” “Planet Rock” is as addictive and as hypnotic as a two-screen miniature Donkey Kong.

Here’s the original video for Planet Rock.

As per usual audio samples of the songs that both inspired and were sampled by Afrika Bambaataa can be found at my blog, T.M.L., here.