That is, Northern hip-hop stopped learning from Soul Sonic Force et al.

But it’s easy to see why “freestyle” became the umbrella term: “Miami Sound” leaves out New York, whereas “Latin Hip-Hop” not only leaves out all the non-Latinos like Tony Butler and Debbie Deb and half of Sequal and two-thirds of Exposé not to mention all the Italian Americans etc. in the audience, it also overassociates the music with hip-hop, from which Latinos in ’80s New York are feeling more and more estranged (at least according to John Storm Roberts in the second edition of The Latin Tinge they are, though he doesn’t connect this to freestyle; in fact – irritatingly – he doesn’t seem to know of the existence of freestyle).

Which leads to a final point: I get the impression that in the ’80s “electro” was much more a British term than an American – Bambaataa called Soul Sonic Force “electrofunk,” but the term “electro” didn’t have an overall use here. (Again, I could be all wrong about that.) So calling the stuff “electro” now feels wrong, not because the term is retrospective, but because it covers over musical and social tensions: Even though Bambaataa was a prime figure in ’70s New York hip-hop, ’80s New York hip-hop had little use for what he was doing. It was the clubsters and the freestylers who learned from Soul Sonic Force but, after the first wave of electrofunk, not Northern hip-hop. Of course, Miami was a different story, with Miami bass’s embrace of the big boom.

And though I consider Shannon’s “Give Me Tonight” and “Let The Music Play” to be MAJOR as dance tracks, I think of them as peripheral to the story of freestyle, ’cause again they don’t sound all that freestyle. I think of them as basic electrofied New York club music of the time, similar to “Everybody” and “One More Shot.” But here I may well be wrong; I was still in NY until the mid ’80s, but the clubs I went to were TR3 and A7. So this music existed for me mostly on 12 inch or on the radio, and a lot of it I didn’t catch up with until several years later anyway. But my guess now is that “Let The Music Play” and “Give Me Tonight” are considered freestyle classics not just because they made it onto the Tommy Boy freestyle compilations in the ’90s but because in the ’80s the freestyle audience was taking those songs to heart (though I’m also assuming that those songs were also taken to heart by clubgoers who didn’t go near the freestyle clubs and didn’t know Nayobe from Debbie Deb).

What Newcleus and Shannon and the freestylers have in common is that they all listened hard to Soul Sonic Force’s “Planet Rock” and “Looking For The Perfect Beat.” But then, so did a whole slew of people from New Order to 2 Live Crew.

In response to AndyPandy, I think that – whether you were right or not – you’d have been on reasonable ground if you’d said “I think it stretches the term freestyle too far to apply it to either Newcleus or to Shannon, much less to both, and it confuses history to do so.” But that’s not what you said, and you seemed angrily dogmatic about the history and the terminology without knowing them too well. And in general I agree four-square with Steve’s and Elsa’s and wichitalineman’s responses (well, I have a few quibbles, which I might or might not get around to posting).

BTW, their electronic appropriation of Motown seemed very, well, Brit at the time.

BTw BTW, they reunited for the BET Awards last weekend to sing J5 songs and, wow, they were effing awful.

Completely different to ‘Candy Girl’ which really did aim not so much for the lowest comon dominator as for basically a primary school audience (as opposed to the usual mythical 12-16 year old female pop audience…the album even had sort of embarrassing nursey rhyme type things on it according to a horrified 0 star review of it I remember reading at the time- ie 12 or 13 year old boys rather creepily singing stuff more suited to 4 or 5 year olds).

Very little Jackson 5 and even less electro about it…

Yes, in the same way that the heads into Progressive House used to laugh at shite like Shut Up & Dance. The whole Electro genre was dismissed as kids’ music by the Invicta-listening crowd, at least that was the case in white sock Croydon.

Same thing again with House. A friend of mine once asked “can you imagine listening to Washing Machine in 20 years? Can you imagine sitting there with your girlfriend and saying ‘this is our song’?”

Re Freestyle, nobody used the term Doo Wop til the early 70s, or Freakbeat til the mid 80s. And then there’s Acid Folk, Free Soul… What we now know as Garage Punk was called Punk Rock in the 60s (even this may not have been entirely contemporary), and the likes of Greg Shaw felt the Sex Pistols had somewhat hijacked the term. He then coined Garage as a replacement genre name around ’77.

To describe “Let the Music Play” in wiki articles etc as “freestyle” is akin to a group of for example Tokyo youths discovering the Sex Pistols in about 1979 making their own name up for punk and then in the noughties everytime “Pretty Vacant” is mentioned this Japanese name being used as the genre to describe the track…

PS and completely unrelated to the above points wasn’t this track (Maurice Starr notwithstanding)looked on at the time as completely irredeemably shite that only kids of about 10 or 11 bought. Sort of a couple of steps up from Little Jimmy Osmond.

Really surprised at the lack of love, this is such a pop standard!

Actually I believe the early freestyle records were indeed made big by the Hispanic culture. It happened at such NYC clubs as the Funhouse, Roseland, the Inferno, the Devil’s Nest, and Heartthrob. The DJ’s pushing electro/freestyle in these places were Hispanic – “Jellybean” Benitez & “Little Louie” Vega among them. Many of the producers were Hispanic, such as Exposé’s Lewis Martinee, The Latin Rascals, Micky Garcia & Elvin Molina, and Ish Ledesma . Countless numbers of the performers were Hispanic as well – Lisa Lisa, Nayobe, Judy Torres, TKA, Sa-Fire, and on & on. The Cover Girls, Exposé, and Sweet Sensation (US version) all had at least one Hispanic member.

Incidentally, The Cover Girls’ producer was called Andy Panda.

Suddenly at some time in the 90s people started retrospectively calling certain types of tracks ‘freestyle’.

Which I could (just about)understand if the tracks had emerged or were made big by the Hispanic culture but they were generally produced by blacks or whites and were made hits by the same people so I’ve always thought it a bit of an imposition that suddenly electro/hiphop/dance (what ever you want to call them) are retrospectively called ‘freestyle’..

Key tracks which sampled or interpolated the hook: D4L’s terrific “Laffy Taffy” and Trina’s “Kandi” off her Diamond Princess album, which is not on Youtube OR Dailymotion OR Imeem OR Spotify. Internet FAIL. Anyway, it’s great; takes the original and makes it sweeter, pinker, girlier, but Trina will obv never quite leave that undertow of nastiness out. Features a terrific verse from a child by the name of Lil’ Brianna: “10 years old, the baby diva / The kids at school call me Baby Trina”, “I got more flavors than Starburst / I keep my penny candy in my Prada purse / If I act too sassy, pardon me y’all / I be playing with Barbie dolls in Carnegie Hall”.