Rockit

Herbie Hancock had already spent nearly two decades reinventing himself — sideman in Miles Davis’s second great quintet, solo jazz composer, funk bandleader — before “Rockit” turned him, unexpectedly, into a bridge between hip-hop and the mainstream. The 1983 single, from the album Future Shock, is built around a turntable credited to Grand Mixer D.ST (also billed as Grandmixer DXT), and its most consequential moment didn’t happen in a studio at all.

At the broadcast of the 26th Annual Grammy Awards, on February 28, 1984, Hancock performed “Rockit” live with D.ST scratching on turntables while robotic mannequins danced alongside them. For a large share of the television audience, this was the first time record-scratching had ever been presented as a musical technique rather than a DJ-culture curiosity happening somewhere they weren’t watching. Turntablism had existed on New York streets and in clubs for years by then; a nationally broadcast awards show performance is a different kind of introduction, reaching people who had never once considered a record player an instrument.

The song backed that moment up commercially: it won the Grammy for Best R&B Instrumental Performance, swept five MTV Video Music Awards for its stop-motion video, and charted at No. 1 on the Hot Dance Club Play chart. None of that changes the fact that its most important four minutes happened live, on a stage most of the audience had tuned into for something else entirely.

Greatest of All Time. A jazz musician’s turntable performance that made an entire technique visible to people who’d never seen it before.

Hero image: Herbie Hancock at the Library of Congress Gershwin Prize ceremony for Joni Mitchell, February 28, 2023, by Shawn Miller/Library of Congress, public domain.