The 7 best Miami Bass tracks of all time
Miami Bass
Miami in the mid-eighties, where electro was rebuilt around one thing: the 808 kick, tuned low and long enough to move air in a car boot. Fast, filthy, and engineered for a sound system rather than a radio.
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2 Live Crew / Throw the D
The record that set the template and started the call-and-response tradition of answer records. Crude by design, and the 808 is mixed louder than the vocal on purpose.
MC A.D.E. / Bass Rock Express
Often named as the first Miami bass record proper. A train rhythm, a countdown, and low end that will damage an inadequate speaker.
Amos Larkins II / Planet Rock
Not the Bambaataa track — a Miami producer's own bass workout, and a good demonstration of how completely the city rewrote what it had inherited.
2 Hyped Brothers and a Dog / Doo Doo Brown
A rhythm that became a template, then a standard, then a genre in its own right once New Orleans got hold of it. One of bass music's most productive records.
69 Boyz / Tootsee Roll
The dance-craze end, and a top ten hit. Miami bass's habit of pairing an instruction with a beat is the direct ancestor of a great deal of later Southern rap.
95 South / Whoot, There It Is
Released weeks before Tag Team's near-identical Whoomp, and the resulting confusion sold both. The scene ran on answer records and always had.
Dynamix II / Scarface
The technical end of the city — vocoders, tight programming, and an obvious debt to Kraftwerk that most of the scene had by then abandoned.