Customer Reviews

Duck Rock

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This album anticipates the multi-cultural "world music" movement by almost ten years. (Check that date, 1982.) At the very least it was one of a handful of early attempts to exploit that movement, pre-dating Paul Simon's "Graceland" by a good five or six years. (Talking Heads did it too, incorporating African rhythms into their new wave music in the late 70s and early 80s. Then later David Byrne went full tilt multi-culti, with his Brazillian music compilations of the early 90s.)

If you're too young to know who Malcom McClaren is/was -- he's the guy who assembled/managed/invented the Sex Pistols in 1976. He also managed Adam & The Ants in their early days, as well as Bow Wow Wow. Both of those acts were built around the "Burundi Beat" and vaguely Appache tribal rhythms. "Duck Rock" was the first time McClaren put out an album of his own, but he's not really a singer or a songwriter or a musician, or even a record producer. He's an "idea man" and an exploiter of other people's creativity.

His idea here was to mix early East coast hip hop, radio DJ banter, and scratching with African zulu, Brazillian and Carribean music, with layers of Eurocentric strings, lush beds of nu-wave synthesizer and... Appalachian square dance music! The effect is at turns gorgeous, hilarious, ponderous, weird, wonderful, infectious, etc., etc.

Some other reviews here crow about Eminem sampling the song "Buffalo Gals" -- but hundreds of rappers and hip hoppers have sampled "Duck Rock" over the years. (Neena Cherry's "Buffalo Stance"?)

"Duck Rock" is a unique melange of an album - and a first of its kind in many ways. It really is the Sergeant Pepper of hip hop... in my opinion. Others would elaborate and do it better, but "Duck Rock" came first. It's seminal - and judging by the scant number of reviews here, it's been all but forgotten. Pitchfork.com didn't even include it in their Top 100 Albums of The 80s. In my estimation, "Duck Rock" belongs in the top 5, easily, in terms of influential albums of the 80s.

McClaren's subsequent albums weren't as interesting or relevant.

Produced by sampling maverick Trevor Horn (Yes, Buggles, Art Of Noise, ABC, Propaganda, Seal) who deserves as much of the credit as McClaren for this brilliant album. Maybe more. All of his best ideas (Art Of Noise most notably) were arrived at in the process of making the ground-breaking "Duck Rock".

I remember this album form when it hit stores in 1982. I bought it for the outrageous cover and was amazed when I got home at the techniques malcom McClaren and The Worlds Famous Supreme Team were incorporating in their radio shows. This is a classic that every hip-hop head should have in their collection. If you appreciate the art of scratchin' this is a must own. The re-released product with appearances by Rakim and KRS One and Soulson revives this classic and gives it a new life and identity, but the original holds its own.

Duck Rock is an very intersting album. Malcolm was on a trip to New York. On his trip he heard an interesting sound. The music of break dancing and double dutch. Being a business man and a "haberdasher", he knew that this music was going to become the next hottest fad. So he got together with music producer Trevor Horn (of the Buggles) and worked on an album that'll mirror the music of hip-hop with traditional african music. This album was a labor of love for Malcolm. He put his heart and soul into this disc. It also caused a lot of grief because he "borrowed" heavily from traditonal South African music.

Recording the disc was an event in it's self. Bringing a cast
of characters into the studio (a whole cast of african singers and musicans, N.Y.C. hip-hop d.j.s', an elderly southern violin player to name a few). The album was a huge sucess
but it cost the studio plenty. To re-coup the losses they released a few discs that featured re-mixes and out takes from the production (Swamp Thing and Do You like Scratching). Buffalo Gals was a smash hit and hugley inspirational amongst many young hip-hop music performers in the United States and the U.K. Fifteen years later these artists paid tribute to McLaren by doing their own re-mixes and versions of Buffalo Gals and other songs from this disc. Malcolm would later re-visit the world of hip-hop ten years later. This time merging the music with Shakespere and Salsa beats.

Highly recommended.

Notorious as the mastermind behind the Sex Pistols, McLaren surprised everyone with an album (originally released in 1983) that blended African high-life rhythms, early East Coast hip-hop, latin beats, moody synthesizers (courtesy of Thomas "she blinded me with science" Dolby and Anne "art of noise" Dudley) and Tennessee-hilltopper fiddles (!) into a heady gumbo that may qualify as the first post-punk World Music album. Gleefully schizophrenic, this record is pure genius, pure fun, and a testament to McLaren's sense of style. A must-have in any collection, and a killer car-stereo selection.

Upfront this album is really nothing more than Mr Maclaren going out and wholesale stealing (lifting, borrowing) world music before there was ever a bin in the store called world music.

But (!) he mixes it with the emerging NYC hip-hop scene with the help of Trevor Horn, Anne Dudley and JJ (future Art of Noise team- you can hear the roots of the noise on this record. In fact the initial AON sessions were done at night during these recording sessions).

Double Dutch (not the famous Double Dutch Bus song by Frankie Smith) is the stand out track here, predating Paul Simon's South African work by almost a decade. Coupling it with the NYC street double dutch teams was pure genius.

Merengue is nothing more than a third rate Dominican Merengue pattern.

Buffalo Gals is the other stand out track here, deserved of its place in music history. From our standpoint here, 20 year on, this sounds dated and even slightly un PC. But at the time this was the first time that most people outside of NYC had heard hip-hop or early DJs. Call it what you will but this record broke a lot of new ground and parts of it still sound fresh today.

While certainly not Malcolm McLaren's best album this was well before its time - incorporating African tribal music in songs like Soweto before people like Paul Simon 'discovered' it. Also thrown into the mix are other eclectic things like the white hip hop Buffalo Gals (this 1990 hit recently being reinvented by Eminem as "two trailer park girls..."

Definitely worth a listen, but if you're new to Malcolm McLaren - I'd suggest you check out Fans or Waltz Darling first as they have stood the test of time better.

One of the reviews listed here calls this a [similar style] of Eminem (specifically, the song "Buffalo Gals"). This is pure baloney. If there's any ripping off going on here, it's the other way around.

Duck Rock was first released in 1983 - Eminem was 9 years old.

This is an astonishing album. Listen to it from start to finish, and it'll leave you exhausted and in awe. It belongs in every modern music fan's library.

This is a very important record, for a number of reasons. It introduced the world to hip-hop. It did 'world music' before it even had a name. It beat Paul Simon to 'discovering' South African music by years... Keith Haring did the cover art. I bought it when it came out for 'Buffalo Girls' after seeing Malcolm Mclaren talking about 'scratching' on the Tube (CH4 TV series in the UK). It's still one of my favorite albums of all time. Most of the credit should go to Trevor Horn - Mclaren ran out of ideas and Horn saved this. It has to be one of the most influential albums of it's time.

Something (not sure what, maybe channel-surfing past MTV) recently inspired me to get out this CD and give it another spin, and I was, once again, totally captivated by Mr. Mclaren's and Mr. Horn's visionary masterpiece. The enthusiasm, energy, vibrancy, and respect for world music cultures radiate from the speakers of my home system like a sunny tropical breeze. It's pretty much impossible for this disc not to brighten your day; maybe the fact that it's -10 degrees F. here today has something to do with it!

There's not much I could add to this review that wasn't already mentioned in Shawn Wolfe's excellent essay on this webpage, except that I was disappointed that Island didn't reprint the fold-out liner notes from the original vinyl release, explaining the origins of the recorded material, as well as the complete lyrical content. I had bought this record in 1984 after hearing "Double Dutch" and "Buffalo Gals", and was not only entranced with the music on the entire disc, but thoroughly enlightened by the concept of combining so many diverse elements into such a captivating whole, few of which I would have been able to discern on my own without the help of the record's packaging. I'm just a mid-western farm kid; they didn't play this type of stuff on AM radio where I grew up in the 60's and early 70's.

So this record not only entertains, but educates. The fact that Island Records still has this CD in print should speak volumes about its worth, to this day. True, Mr. Mclaren did take samples of music from a variety of cultures and make them his own, but given the history of popular music it should hardly be a surprise that any one would want to do that. Perhaps there are web pages somewhere out in cyber-space that will help those who don't have access to this record's original liner notes to fill in the blanks. Definitely worth a search.

So for content, it gets five stars; for CD packaging, 3 stars. Total score, 4 stars. Go buy it anyway, along with your favorite tropical libation, and let it take you away. To Mr. Mclaren, Mr. Horn, and all your collaborators, a most profound Thank You!

This is a really excellent album. I see a lot of people here are commenting on the cultural collisions and overall significance of this album; those are valid things to comment on, but I hope no one reads them and thinks this album is in any way stuffy. Much as I enjoy the cross-cultural collisions in something like Eno & Byrne's "My Life in the Bush of Ghosts", I find *this* album to be far more fun.
It's a lot less po-faced (and feels a lot less like homework) than similar world-music/pop-music fusions from the likes of Peter Gabriel or Paul Simon. It just focuses on what's fun and appealing about different sources of music, and what sounds good when the different elements mixed. I just think that makes the album as successful as any of the more-serious minded albums trying the same thing. Why does Malcolm do a monologue about jump rope competitions over African chants? It really doesn't matter when the effect is so pleasing, and so natural sounding. Sometimes really successful art comes from the most bizarre places, and that's what happens here. Credit producer Trevor Horn with pulling this thing off, but the idea is clearly Malcolm McLaren's. He just passed away this week, which is a shame - the music scene, and Western culture in general, could use more people with the intelligence and skill to create an album as off-the-wall, intelligent, and entertaining as this.