Throwback Thursday: The Machine in the Room
Six genres, six decades, one theme: a piece of gear that could have stayed a gimmick, and instead became the reason each of these records is still remembered.
By Song Reviews · August 27, 2026
What Throwback Thursday Is
Every Thursday, Song Reviews looks backward: one short retrospective per major genre, deliberately jumping between decades instead of camping in one. These entries are not graded. The artists we cover on a Thursday are settled business, so the Review Score box carries the Song.Reviews mark and the words Greatest of All Time! rather than a number, on every Thursday entry, every week. The writing still has to earn its place — “this is great” is not a piece of criticism.
Today’s Run
Six genres, six pieces of gear, thirty-one years:
| Genre | Year | Record |
|---|---|---|
| Rock | 1967 | Nights in White Satin — The Moody Blues |
| Electronic | 1974 | Autobahn — Kraftwerk |
| Rock | 1976 | Show Me the Way — Peter Frampton |
| Jazz-Funk | 1983 | Rockit — Herbie Hancock |
| Hip-Hop | 1989 | Fight the Power — Public Enemy |
| Pop | 1998 | Believe — Cher |
What Connects Them
This run’s theme is narrower than usual, and it’s stated right in the title: every one of these six records is famous, at least in part, because of one specific piece of gear or technique — used in a way that hadn’t quite been done before, or wasn’t supposed to work at all.
- Somebody borrowed a body part as an instrument. Peter Frampton ran his guitar signal through a plastic tube into his own mouth, shaping the tone with his throat before a mic caught it and sent it back to the PA — a technique he picked up secondhand from Nashville pedal-steel sessions, not something built for arena rock.
- Somebody used a keyboard to fake a section of the band that wasn’t there. The Moody Blues’ Mike Pinder played a Mellotron loaded with tape loops of strings and choir, standing in for most of the orchestral sound on “Nights in White Satin” — the real London Festival Orchestra only shows up on the album’s connective passages.
- Somebody built the instrument because nothing else made the right sound. Kraftwerk’s homemade “Robovox” and self-triggered drum system on “Autobahn” exist because the band wanted a specific mechanical texture no commercial gear in 1974 was going to give them.
- Somebody put a street technique on national television. Herbie Hancock and Grand Mixer D.ST performed “Rockit” at the 1984 Grammys with a turntable as a lead instrument, introducing scratching to a broadcast audience that had mostly never seen it happen live.
- Somebody stacked ten samples where everyone else used one. The Bomb Squad’s production on “Fight the Power” layers unrecognizable fragments of a dozen or more records into a single passage, repeated as its own loop — orchestration built entirely out of other people’s records.
- Somebody broke a tool on purpose and lied about how. Cher’s producers pushed Auto-Tune’s retune speed to its most extreme setting on “Believe,” then told the press it was a vocoder so nobody could copy the trick before the truth got out.
None of these six records needed the gimmick to be a good song underneath it — the writing, the performance, the arrangement all still had to hold up. But take the specific piece of gear out of any of them, and you’re left with a decent record instead of the one that’s still being talked about fifty, forty, or twenty-eight years later. That’s the actual argument of this run: craft gets a song made. The machine in the room is often what gets it remembered.
Hero image: Cher performing on the Here We Go Again Tour, London, October 2019. Photo by Raph_PH, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.