GEN X REFLEX: ROCKIT
The Song That Sounded Like the Future and Never Stopped
There are certain sounds that bypass memory completely.
They don't knock on the door and wait for your brain to say, Oh yes, I remember this.
They just walk in.
A beat.
A strange electronic pulse.
And then...
Scratch. Scratch-scratch. Scratch.
Oh, I know exactly what this is.
“Rockit.”
That's a Gen X Reflex.
And the funny thing is, if you asked me what “Rockit” was about, I couldn't tell you.
Nobody could.
There really isn't anything to tell.
There are no great lyrics to unpack. No story hiding underneath the chorus. No teenage angst for Adult Angel to revisit forty years later and suddenly understand differently.
“Rockit” is essentially an instrumental.
It doesn't explain itself.
It doesn't need to.
The sound is the story.
And in 1983, that sound was everywhere.
THE SILVER ROBOT
I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, and Fisherman's Wharf was one of those places that belonged to everybody.
Tourists came there to experience San Francisco.
Image: San Francisco Fisherman's Wharf. Source: Wikipedia
Locals went there to play.
There were shops, food, crowds, performers, noise, weirdness and always something happening.
And somewhere in all of that, there always seemed to be a robot.
Not an actual robot.
A person painted silver, dressed like one.
And when “Rockit” hit?
Oh, baby.
That silver robot had a soundtrack.
I remember people performing to “Rockit” at Fisherman's Wharf. I remember school dance troupes performing to it. The sound and the movement became connected. Popping. Locking. Mechanical movements. Bodies moving in ways that somehow matched this strange music coming out of the speakers.
You heard “Rockit,” and apparently the appropriate response was:
GET THE SILVER PAINT.
Image: Street performer on Fisherman's Wharf. Source: SFGate.com
It made perfect sense at the time.
This was the early '80s. A lot happened before breakfast.
But something much larger was happening around that record.
Jazz was there.
Funk was there.
Electronic music was there.
Hip-hop was there.
Turntablism was there.
Dance culture was there.
And somehow, everybody seemed to be listening.
The rock kids knew it.
The R&B kids knew it.
The dance kids knew it.
The hip-hop kids knew it.
The people who already knew Herbie Hancock absolutely knew it.
And then there were kids like me who were about to discover exactly who had just walked into our generation.
Because Herbie Hancock wasn't some new artist who had stumbled onto a cool sound.
Good Lord.
Herbie Hancock was HERBIE HANCOCK.
BEFORE WE KNEW HIM
Herbert Jeffrey Hancock was born in Chicago in 1940.
Image: Herbie Hancock. Source: EverythingJazz.com
And apparently regular childhood was not on the schedule.
At eleven years old, he performed a Mozart piano concerto with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
Eleven.
At eleven I was busy being eleven.
Herbie Hancock was performing Mozart with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. And i was playing with Barbie Dolls.
He would study music and electrical engineering, an interesting combination when you consider where his musical curiosity eventually took him. He moved into jazz, worked with trumpeter Donald Byrd, and signed with Blue Note Records. His first album as a leader, Takin' Off, gave us “Watermelon Man.”
Then, in 1963, the telephone rang.
Okay, I don't know whether an actual telephone rang.
But Miles Davis called.
Image: Mikes Davis. Source: milesdavis.com
And not some musician named Miles.
Miles.
Davis.
Hancock joined what became one of the most celebrated groups in jazz history, playing alongside Wayne Shorter, Ron Carter and Tony Williams in Davis's Second Great Quintet. During those years, Hancock played on records including E.S.P., Nefertiti and Sorcerer, and later appeared on Davis's groundbreaking In a Silent Way.
Meanwhile, Hancock was creating his own music.
Empyrean Isles.
Maiden Voyage.
“Cantaloupe Island.”
“Dolphin Dance.”
He composed the score for Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up and moved into film and television scoring.
This man wasn't standing near music history.
He was helping make it.
And then, because apparently dominating one musical landscape wasn't interesting enough, Herbie Hancock kept moving.
THE MAN WOULD NOT STAY IN HIS BOX
This is the part Adult Angel finds fascinating.
We love putting music into boxes.
Jazz goes here.
Funk goes there.
Rock goes over there.
That's our parents' music.
This is our music.
That's old.
This is new.
Apparently Herbie Hancock looked at those boxes and thought:
That's adorable.
Because throughout his career, he kept moving between them.
Acoustic instruments.
Electric instruments.
Jazz.
Funk.
Film.
Technology.
Synthesizers.
New sounds.
New collaborators.
New ideas.
In 1973, a full decade before “Rockit,” Hancock released Head Hunters.
Image: Herbie Hancock album Head Hunters. Source: Spotify.
And this is important because Head Hunters tells us something about the man we're dealing with.
Hancock was already smashing jazz into funk, electronics and enormous grooves. “Chameleon” alone should be enough to make anybody sit down and reconsider whatever neat little category they were planning to put him in.
Head Hunters became the first jazz album to go platinum, according to Hancock's official biography. During the 1970s, he put eleven albums on the pop charts.
So let's correct something.
Herbie Hancock did not suddenly become adventurous in 1983.
We just happened to notice.
WHAT'S THAT?
By the early '80s, something new was happening.
Hip-hop culture was developing its own musical language. DJs were doing things with records that challenged the very definition of an instrument. Electronics were changing what musicians could create. Breakbeats, synthesizers, drum machines and scratching were opening completely different doors.
And this legendary jazz musician in his forties heard scratching and apparently didn't respond the way an established artist was supposed to respond.
He didn't say:
That's not music.
He didn't say:
That's not how we did it.
He didn't demand that young musicians learn to do things his way.
He got curious.
Hancock's own account of Future Shock describes how he became interested in scratching after hearing Malcolm McLaren's “Buffalo Gals.” Producer-musicians Bill Laswell and Michael Beinhorn were already exploring this new territory, and their collaboration with Hancock eventually brought in GrandMixer D.ST, along with musicians including Daniel Ponce, Pete Cosey, Sly Dunbar and Bernard Fowler.
And this is where I think the real Herbie Hancock story lives.
He respected what younger artists were creating enough to listen.
He didn't make himself younger.
He made himself current.
There's a difference.
He brought everything he already knew into the room and then left enough room for somebody else to bring something he didn't know.
That is how you get “Rockit.”
THE FOLDS OF TIME
Maybe that's why I hear the record differently now.
Young Angel heard something from the future.
Adult Angel hears everything that came before it, too.
The classical prodigy is in there.
The jazz musician is in there.
Blue Note is in there.
Miles Davis is in there.
The electric experiments are in there.
The funk of Head Hunters is in there.
Then Bill Laswell and Michael Beinhorn walk in.
GrandMixer D.ST brings the turntables.
Hip-hop enters.
Breakdancing enters.
Gen X enters.
Nothing has to leave.
That's the genius of it.
We experience music chronologically because that's how we experience life. One year follows another. One generation follows another. We call something old because something newer came after it.
But maybe a musician like Herbie Hancock doesn't hear music that way.
Maybe rhythm is information.
Harmony is information.
Jazz is information.
Funk is information.
A synthesizer is information.
A turntable is information.
A new generation is information.
And when you understand the language deeply enough, you can calculate with all of it.
The folds of time are just calculations to a prodigy.
And in 1983, Herbie Hancock solved the equation.
It sounded like “Rockit.”
WAIT. THE RECORD PLAYER DOES WHAT?
One of the most important ingredients in “Rockit” was the thing that made our ears perk up immediately:
the scratching.
GrandMixer D.ST treated the turntable as an instrument.
That may not sound revolutionary to someone who grew up after hip-hop became one of the dominant forces in popular culture.
It was revolutionary then.
“Rockit” became one of the first mainstream singles to prominently feature scratching, putting a technique developed within hip-hop culture in front of an enormous audience that had never heard anything like it.
And it wasn't hidden.
When Hancock took “Rockit” to the Grammy Awards in February 1984, D.ST was right there behind the turntables.
So were synthesizers.
Electronic drums.
Robotic figures.
Breakdancers.
And Herbie Hancock, forty-three years old, standing in the middle of the future with a clavitar strapped to him.
The performance brought this collision of musical cultures onto one of the biggest stages in American entertainment. “Rockit” won Hancock his first Grammy, for Best R&B Instrumental Performance.
Think about that.
This man had played with Miles Davis.
He had recorded Maiden Voyage.
He had made Head Hunters.
He had spent two decades helping reshape modern jazz.
And his first Grammy came from “Rockit.”
Not in a jazz category.
R&B instrumental.
Perfect.
Absolutely perfect.
Because apparently even the trophy couldn't figure out what box to put the man in.
EVERYBODY WAS DANCING
This is what I remember most.
Everybody knew it.
Everybody was moving to it.
There are moments in music when genres that normally have their own audiences suddenly overlap.
“Rockit” was one of those moments.
The video became a major MTV presence. Its bizarre mechanical world of mannequins, disembodied body parts and surreal movement looked as strange as the record sounded. It went on to win five awards at the inaugural MTV Video Music Awards in 1984.
And the music didn't stay inside the television.
That's important to me.
It got out.
It went into dance studios.
School performances.
Clubs.
Boom boxes.
Streets.
Fisherman's Wharf.
The record became movement.
And maybe that's why “Rockit” remains such a powerful Gen X Reflex for me.
There isn't a lyric that brings me back.
It's the sound.
Scratch-scratch.
And somewhere in my memory, that silver robot starts moving again.
THE GOAT STEPPED INTO THE ROOM
I still love music.
I still love hearing artists experiment. I love collaborations between generations. I love watching someone with decades behind them walk onto a stage with somebody just beginning.
We still see that.
Legacy artists collaborate on singles.
They appear on younger artists' records.
They reunite.
They tour.
Their old songs are sampled or rediscovered by another generation.
But I don't often experience something quite like what Herbie Hancock did with “Rockit.”
Because “Rockit” wasn't asking Gen X to celebrate Herbie Hancock's past.
It gave us our own Herbie Hancock.
That's different.
He didn't arrive as a legend accepting our applause for everything he'd already done.
He walked into the middle of what was happening right then and contributed something so essential to the moment that young people didn't have to know his résumé.
We knew his name because of our music.
Only later could some of us look backward and realize:
Wait.
He played with WHO?
He made WHAT?
He's been doing this for HOW LONG?
Oh.
We didn't discover Herbie Hancock.
We caught up with him.
PRESS PLAY
And here's the magnificent part.
We can test all of this.
Right now.
Put on “Rockit.”
That's it.
No history lesson first.
No warning that the production is “very '80s.”
No nostalgic apology.
No you really had to be there.
Just press play.
That beat hits.
The scratching starts.
And damn.
It's still fire.
That's remarkable.
There are records I love partly because of what they carry with them. They take me back to a room, a person, a concert, a school dance or some version of myself that no longer exists.
I don't mind when a record sounds like its time.
That's part of the joy.
But “Rockit” doesn't need our forgiveness.
The record can defend itself.
More than forty years later, this thing still moves.
Maybe that's the final trick the prodigy played on time.
Young Angel thought Herbie Hancock had stepped into our generation and brought us something from the future.
Adult Angel understands it differently.
Herbie Hancock didn't step into our time.
He folded time around himself.
And somewhere inside those folds, Miles Davis is playing. Funk is getting nasty. A synthesizer is humming. A DJ puts his hand on a record. A kid starts breakdancing. A silver robot comes alive at Fisherman's Wharf.
And Gen X starts moving.
We thought “Rockit” sounded like the future.
Turns out...
it just never stopped.
Sources & Further Listening
Herbie Hancock's official biography documents his childhood performance with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Blue Note career, years with Miles Davis, Head Hunters, and the creation and success of Future Shock.
Hancock's official Future Shock history and retrospective on the making of “Rockit” detail his collaboration with Bill Laswell, Michael Beinhorn and GrandMixer D.ST, the role of scratching and electronic technology, and the record's crossover impact.
The Recording Academy's Grammy records confirm Hancock's 1984 Best R&B Instrumental Performance win for “Rockit” and document his Grammy history.
Herbie Hancock official website Recording Academy: 26th Annual Grammy Awards
Thanks for taking this trip back with me.
What do you remember? Were you there too, or did this story bring back a memory of your own? I’d love to hear it. Share your stories in the comments, and if this made you smile, laugh, cringe, or turn up an old favorite song, share it with someone who remembers too.
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Until next time...
Keep the memories alive. Keep the stories coming. And whatever you do... turn it up.
— Dr. AY Heath (Angel)
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