Miami
Eleven records, three of our rankings, thirty years. One drum machine tuned in a Florida car park, and what became of it in Rio and on the South Side of Chicago.
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MC A.D.E. / Bass Rock Express
The starting point, and the clearest statement of what the city actually changed. The kick is not a drum here, it is the arrangement — tuned low, held long, and mixed to be felt through a car door rather than heard through a speaker.
2 Live Crew / Throw the D
The template every record below is a variation on: an instruction, a call-and-response, and the 808 louder than the voice giving it. Luke Campbell put it out on his own label because no one else in the country was going to.
Amos Larkins II / Planet Rock
Not the Bambaataa record — a Miami producer's answer to it, and the single best demonstration of the criterion above. Everything received from New York has been thrown out except the drum machine, which has been retuned until it is the whole track.
Dynamix II / Scarface
The precise end of the city, and proof that the sound was a choice rather than a limitation. Vocoders and tight programming over the same low end, by people who could clearly have made a Kraftwerk record instead and did not want to.
2 Hyped Brothers and a Dog / Doo Doo Brown
A rhythm that stopped belonging to its makers almost immediately. New Orleans took it and built bounce out of it, which is the first time Miami's pattern left Miami and kept going under another name.
69 Boyz / Tootsee Roll
The pattern reaching the top ten, and doing it without changing. Every Southern rap record that pairs an instruction with an 808 is downstream of this habit, which is why the theme cannot stop at the city limits.
DJ Marlboro / Melô do Tabaco
Miami bass arriving in Rio on cassette, which is a fact this site already publishes as a lineage arrow. Marlboro looped somebody else's drum programming and a national music came out of it — the same 808, the same shouting, a different language.
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Cidinho e Doca / Rap da Felicidade
"I only want to be happy." Six years after Marlboro, over the most basic possible version of the imported beat, and it is the most quoted line in Brazilian funk. The pattern has stopped being borrowed and become local property.
MC João / Baile de Favela
São Paulo, a hundred million views, and the drum still tuned the way a Florida producer tuned it in 1985. Included as the far end of the line: thirty years on, the most popular music in Brazil is running on Miami's kick.
DJ Deeon / Freak Like Me
Chicago's ghetto house takes the same overlong, tuned kick rather than the house records made in its own city — the lineage note on our footwork ranking says exactly that. A drum pattern, a bassline, a chant, and nothing that costs money.