Freeze Force – Boogie Down (Bronx)

One of my childhood favorites, right here. Cooler than the water in a swimming pool! I recently ed this from iTunes and compared it to the record, and iTunes is definitely a remastered version. Much more crispy and the bass is a lot more deep.

If I had to choose just one record out of my 7000+ collection to play out... this one is it! It stands for everything I lived for in the 80s... and still makes me go crazy. This is timeless hypnotic electro. Play it as loud as you can and move everybody's ass!

An absolute Hip Hop anthem. Still the first time I heard it on the radio dropped in on top of Jam On It with Rockit taking it out. As much as both of those were huge hits, Boogie Down Bronx dwarfed them.

This song highlights the real beauty in original hip-hop. I grew up in a housing project in North Memphis, Tennessee and could immediately relate to the real Boogie-Down through this song. Classic real hip-hop....the world is still searching for something this authentic! They will be studying the Golden era of the 1980s Hip-Hop for years to come. I will never forget hearing this song bounce of the walls in the projects and having to listen to the radio for another 2-hours to hear it again until I could catch it soon enough to tape it. CLASSIC!

Excerpts from my Man Parrish interview for Electronic Standards:

"Boogie Down Bronx started as a fun and crazy dance track. I did it in my bedroom studio at home back in 1983. I used the Roland 808 Drum Machine and the Roland 727 Percussion Machine for percussion. The Prophet 5, Pro One and Casio CZ1 for synths. I also used the Emulator One as my Sampler. At the time, it was the only affordable sampler, other than the $10,000 Fairlight. The Emulator was a few thousand dollars and only sampled 2 seconds maximum!

I probably had my early 512k Mac Plus (that's 512 kilobytes maximum memory) with Opcode's early software sequencer running (very unstable and not tight musically). But none of these keyboards were MIDI, this is at the very start of MIDI, and not many synths had MIDI built in. So, I used the software to Sync the bass and the drums using a Roland Midi To Voltage Converter Box, that would translate the midi on the computer, to control voltages that the synths would understand. What ever didn't have Voltage Control, like the sampler, I laid down by hand. How did I ever do this and not loose my mind? Lol!

Everything was recorded to my Tascam 8 Track 1/2 in tape recorder, and mixed with my Tascam 8 Track Mixer and a Spring Reverb. Spring Reverbs were a box with a coiled spring inside. It would send sound down the spring and on the other side, it had a pick up (like a guitar) that captured the reverb sound. It had no settings. It was input and output levels only. You couldn't control the size of the reverb, it was basically one setting. Also when recording to 8-track tape, you didn't have many tracks available, so you had to be creative with your music and your arrangements.

There was a kid in my neighborhood call John Carter. He used to sit on the front steps of my house, and rap to me every time I came home. He wanted to be on a record. At that time I wasn't doing anything with rap on it. I would enjoy what he did, and thank him, but I basically had no tracks for RAP at that time.

We finished boogie down Bronx and on a whim, decided to use John Carter to RAP on it. We let him hear the track, and told him he had two hours to write something for it, and we would see how it would turn out. He basically did that track in one take after writing it in two hours. Totally amazing!

We mixed it to two track half-inch tape, pressed up some vinyl, and the rest is history…

Basically, most of the records I did back in those days were done on eight track half inch tape. The advantage was that you had to use your tracks wisely, so there wasn't a lot of room for filler. You had to think on your feet, and get your song done in as few steps as possible.

The outcome was that you wrote some very basic and interesting songs, so people didn't have to fight through huge productions to listen to, and understand what you were doing. Basic songs I believe are universal. Make something simple and basic and you've got your point across. People can easily understand it, and that's what a good hit record is all about...!"

Absolute all time old school classic!!!!!!

Does,nt this sound like Neucleus "jam on it"

HIP HOP DON'T STOP BE BOP is CLASSIC!
I never imagined they could do ANOTHER SUCCESS AS GOOD AS THE FIRST!

For me, this is the best early electro hip-hop track.

Almost as good is the dub version - it loses Jonski's rhymes, but allows Man Parrish extra room to let his imagination run riot.

Heavy vocoder / Casio tracks with a hard NY street attitude and killer hooks? Just pick this up, it's all you need. Murderous.