ABSTRACT
The drum machine or beat box started as a simple studio tool but became an integral part of hip-hop culture in the early 1980s. As Malcolm McLaren noted on the sleeve to his early hip-hop hit “Buffalo Gals,” all a kid needed to create this new style of music was a pair of decks to scratch records and a drum machine to pump out a beat. By the mid1980s musicians unions were up in arms at the thought of drum machines making traditional, “real” drummers redundant. But at the same time musicians such as Peter Gabriel proved instead that this technology could play its own part in music. His antiapartheid anthem “Biko” started with a stark, solitary drum machine and finished bolstered by “live” African percussion. The very sounds that certain drum machines produce have inspired whole cultures and genres of music. Acid house would have been nothing without the bass drum sound of a Roland TR-808 drum machine, as evidence by the success of experimental dance outfit 808 State, who named themselves after the device.
