Infinite lives of undead tunes

Ok, some laughed at the gorilla solemnly preparing to pound the hell out of a drum kit then doing so, but that was Phil Collins and the tune was the ’81 number 1 In the Air Tonight so the laughing was at a safe pisstake distance. This bald, conservative pop-musician is one 80s artist never likely to be fit for hipster exhuming (I still shudder at how popular he actually was in the poptimist decade).

But now Cadbury’s are at it again and I for one CAN’T TAKE THE DESECRATION OF AN ELECTRO TUNE I HOLD DEAR. This is subcultural theft! I can’t take the smug packaging, the product promoted being ‘choclit’ and the overall, ‘anything’s-up for-grabs’ air of shameless expropriation. “We’re ditching the ape, now we’ve got kids winking,” says the design agency. “That’s BRILLIANT,” says the client, obligingly. An eyebrow dance?, meesh. Stop being so fucking twee, I won't buy any more of your chocolate!



Anyway, the tune is Freestyle’s Don’t Stop the Rock and is treasured for me as I came to it via Electro 10, a time when my mates had largely left the music of breakdancing (our peak period was the time of all the Roxanne/UTFO vs Roxanne Shante bitin’ and burnin’ – with the thrill of tracking down uncensored versions). In my mind I thought this drft signalled the end of a few years’ fascination but Electro 10 came out in 1985 so we’re probably talking an intense period of a several months from late 1984 into ’85, childish fads coming and going fast as they do.

Don’t Stop the Rock as you may glean from this embed is a synth and strings-led tune (with added ringtones) where the robots lead us on to the dancefloor again, rocking a style that was gradually being displaced in the culture by the focus on sampled drum loops and rehumanised g-talk. Electro 10 is pretty useful itself – a nice blend of old-school raps over cheap drum machines and the robots/space-obsessed stuff. MC Craig G’s industrial-strength Transformer, Mantronix aka Tricky Tee’s Johnny the Fox and the aforementioned Shante imploring other MCs once more to Bite This over a Marley Marl production the highlights. 19th Fleet’s Star Raid is pretty naff but shows the enduring intergalactic obsession.

But so on it goes, Cadbury’s audio-visual violation of Don't Stop makes Agnostic’s eurotrance version merely bearable in comparison, while this coquettish rip of the Cadbury’s format is merely one example of the many DIY versions already out there.

With some versions of Cadbury’s viral already a million hits to the good, expect a hasty reissue (complete with shit packaging) to be number one soon. If it was acceptable in the 80s….