Another case of my napping during the revolution, as “Rockit” and “Close (To The Edit)” changed the way people looked at music and I looked at the grass grow. “Metal Beat” appeared in the second salvo, part of a calculated attack that exploded the conventional conceptions of where music ended and studio editing/effects started, all one notion under the groove. (Ho-hum. It was never a revolution I had any skin in anyway.) The B side, “Karabali,” is more interesting, like Santana in Africa. Of course, we’ve gone through the grain-of-salt speech already, so you can file my forays into jazz as clueless in wonderland. To atone, let me turn you on to www.jazzshelf.org, where you’ll find real genuine insight into jazz music.
Original 7-inch single
A1. Metal Beat (Herbie Hancock/Bill Laswell) (3:08)
B1. Karabali (Herbie Hancock/Daniel Ponce) (5:17)
Original 12-inch single
A1. Metal Beat (Extended)
B1. Metal Beat (Edit)
The Players
Produced by Bill Laswell/Material and Herbie Hancock.
The Plastic
Released on 7-inch and 12-inch in 1984 in the US (Columbia, 38-04633/44-04637).
