Crate Diplomat

My family moved to Nürnberg when I was a kid. Military family. You go where they send you.

I brought my records.

Planet Rock. Jonzun Crew. Newcleus. Hashim. Pack Jam. Space is the Place. That was my crate. That was my whole identity in a foreign country where I didn’t speak the language and didn’t know a soul.

Turns out that was enough.

Here is what I didn’t fully understand at the time. Planet Rock was built on Kraftwerk. Bambaataa took the melody from Trans-Europe Express and the beat structure from Numbers, then fused it back with the James Brown funk that had inspired Kraftwerk in the first place. Karl Bartos from Kraftwerk said it straight: they were fans of James Brown and soul music, and always tried to make an American rhythm feel with a European approach to harmony and melody. So Bambaataa wasn’t just borrowing from Germany. He was completing a loop. Black American funk crossed the Atlantic, came back as robot music from Dusseldorf, and then got reclaimed and taken back to the Bronx. I arrived in Germany carrying that whole exchange on a 12 inch, playing it for German kids who had no idea they were in the middle of that story. Neither did I.

Kraftwerk had already rewired the culture from the inside. These kids understood synthesizers and drum machines on a cellular level. They didn’t need convincing. What they hadn’t necessarily heard was Hip-Hop colliding with all of it the way it was happening back home. Being the American kid with those records gave me an angle. I didn’t plan that. I just packed what I loved.

I dug through record stores wherever I could find them. WOM, World of Music, was the big chain you’d see across Germany. Big, loud, serious about product. I also spent time in downtown Fürth, the city right next to Nürnberg. Smaller. More random. Better finds sometimes.

I missed the start of the semester when we arrived, so I ended up in band. That was the opening. Tenor saxophone. I didn’t choose it so much as fall into it, but once I had it in my hands something clicked. The saxophone and the break records were living in the same brain now. I didn’t know yet what that would eventually mean.

Then Rockit showed up.

Herbie Hancock. 1983. I was already in Germany when that record came out and the video hit MTV. Something about hearing it over there, surrounded by kids who already had the electronic music DNA in them, it wasn’t foreign to them at all. It was like a handshake between two worlds I was already standing in. Scratching, electronics, jazz running underneath all of it. I didn’t have words for what that record was doing. I just knew it mattered.

Eventually I got a Commodore 64. Bought on the German economy, so it was PAL format. I was running it on a Sony Trinitron that had a PAL/NTSC switch, a genuinely rare thing, probably came through the PX on base. Most people didn’t have that. Most people didn’t know they needed it.

A friend of mine had modified his C-64 with a custom ROM called Speed DOS, a hand-installed EPROM mod that made the whole machine run faster, load faster, feel different. We were already hacking before we knew the word for it.

Technology and music. A new country. A saxophone I didn’t ask for and a computer I barely understood.

It was all the same thing. I just couldn’t see the shape of it yet.

The geek shall inherit the earth.

bits.bytes.beats.