Jam on Revenge

When Newcleus made “Computer Age (Push the Button),” they couldn’t have known just how potent it would sound today. The lead singer, communicating through a vocoder, is fed up with the power of consumer tech: “Everyone must have a machine/They say it’s gonna make life easier but I can’t stand it!” The pounding instrumental feels like the flashiest ’70s synth-pop given a dystopian makeover, and the break arrives in a vortex of alarms, effects, and warning sirens. Like all science fiction, the song uses the adrenaline rush of an advanced future to fuel a critique of an uncertain present—in Newcleus’ case, that of New York City in the early ’80s, when cheap access to drum machines was reinventing the texture and structure of popular music. A new reissue of Jam on Revenge captures a classic of this transitional moment and proves how much the era’s blueprints have left to teach us.

While it’s full of sharp songwriting, the album is best known for the 1984 single “Jam on It,” a hip-hop anthem that reached No. 56 on the Billboard Hot 100 and epitomizes the eccentric worldbuilding made possible by the widespread adoption of new Roland equipment. It lands somewhere between foreboding, inspiring, and hilarious, with rhymes about the extraterrestrial members of the Brooklyn group fighting off Superman in a crew battle, wowing the crowd with their DJ skills, and saving New York from destruction. Every inch of the song’s dynamic range is weaponized to immersive effect; kids at roller rinks could conjure the action for themselves as soon as they heard those tense 808 cowbells and the rubber-band bounce of the bassline. 1984 was a crucial year for hip hop’s relationship with wider pop culture. Stan Lathan’s film Beat Street offered new audiences a personalized look at the breakdance, DJing and graffiti cultures thriving in the Bronx, and its diegetic soundtrack featured electro staples like Arthur Baker’s “Breaker’s Revenge.” The same year, Newcleus would share a bill with Run-D.M.C., Whodini, and the Fat Boys as part of the inaugural Fresh Fest, hip-hop’s first national stadium tour.

The group that became Newcleus arrived at Jam on Revenge after a roundabout journey through the Brooklyn scene. The rotating Jam-On Productions collective began DJing and rhyming over funk and disco records at Brooklyn parties in 1977. After stints in rock and reggae bands, the core of the group’s lineup took shape as a family affair: Ben Cenac (Cozmo D) and his future wife Yvette (Lady E), alongside Ben’s cousin Monique (Nique D) and her future husband Bob Crafton (Chilly B). Cozmo and Chilly were the main producers and songwriters, and all members contributed vocals. The group’s first recordings had an ecclesiastical bent and were shopped around under the name Positive Messengers; even the earliest demos have a screenwriter’s focus, showing an innate knack for drawing drama and hooks out of the new gear Cozmo was collecting from his local Electro Harmonix store.

The song that found Newcleus a foothold in the industry and christened their new sci-fi identity began as a parody. “In Brooklyn, a lot of the rhymes [on records] were all this sing-songy routine shit. We thought they were corny,” Cozmo told Red Bull Music Academy. Preferring the more “battle-tested” rapping they knew from parties, Cozmo created a surreal “anti-rap” novelty record, “Jam on Revenge,” with intergalactic electro production and chipmunk “wikki-wikki” chants that taunted another Brooklyn DJ who had derided them for not knowing how to scratch. They stitched it at the end of a demo to fill space as an afterthought, but it had been a laugh-out-loud hit at parties and eventually became their first single after catching the ear of producer Joe Webb. A musical culture so omnivorous and competitive could discover hits in the unlikeliest places.

Plenty of Newcleus’ trademarks on Jam on Revenge—the irreverent chipmunk voices, the theatrical sci-fi concepts—owe an obvious debt to George Clinton and Parliament-Funkadelic. Like P-Funk, Newcleus had a keen sense for how innovations in instrumentation and arrangement compelled fresh, evocative songwriting. Listen to “Automan,” where our cyborg protagonist laments that he was never meant to love (“I don’t even have a heartbeat…listen!”) and, right on cue, oscillating synths demonstrate the awesome sounds that pulse in his empty chest. The instrumental “Destination Earth (1999)” moves with a low-swung syncopation in its drums and bassline that gets dragged along by the heavy, sequenced line like it’s caught in a tractor beam. Many songs pepper their mixes with electric guitar and bass; on tour, Newcleus performed entirely with live instruments. All members were self-taught musicians.

As was common for artists bringing new Black music from block parties to the charts, Newcleus struggled to maintain creative control as industry actors reckoned with their work. The mixing on Jam on Revenge, which stands out for a calibrated ’80s pop sensibility, was handled by WBLS disco DJ Jonathan Fearing, who made unsupervised structural changes to the final songs and forbade Newcleus’ members from entering the mixing room as he worked. Fearing, who passed away in 1985, “knew nothing about the streets; he knew what worked in clubs,” said Cozmo. (Fearing’s familiar re-works of the songs stick around on this reissue, and the Comic Sans liner notes credit “a jonathan fearing mix” in conspicuous quotation marks.) Newcleus never received royalties from the album’s original release on Sunnyview Records, which was co-owned by Morris Levy, the infamous record magnate charged with racketeering in 1986.

Despite some incredible songs on later albums, Newcleus’ commercial fortunes declined throughout the ’80s as hip-hop rapidly evolved. Ben Cenac found a second career making house music with the lovely Dream 2 Science project, featuring his wife Yvette on lead vocals. Cenac continues to run Jam-On Productions and maintains a trove of rare Newcleus recordings on their website; Chilly B, his longtime production partner, passed away in 2010 after a stroke. “Disco Kryptonite,” a loose “Jam on It” remix that’s new to this reissue, sticks out for atypical sound selection (whistles, hand drums) that’s less faithful to electro. It doesn’t feel superfluous, though, because it calls back to the old-school disco records that made the first Newcleus parties possible almost 50 years ago, closing the loop on their explorations. This album transports us to a vital time before the exhaustively-documented and sampled music known as ‘electro’ was codified as such.

More than mere proof-of-concept, Jam on Revenge shows how much of popular music’s power comes from artists’ efforts to negotiate between a personal vision and the larger forces—in scenes, in boardrooms, in the morass of daily life—that prod and pull at them. “I’m Not a Robot”, adapted from an early Positive Messengers demo, features a recognizable story in the tradition of ground-level R&B, about a man in the city struggling with addiction. “What he’s searching for is how to be free/What he finds is that he’s lost hold of reality,” sings Cozmo. The powers that be “think they’ve got our lives pre-programmed,” and they make it seem impossible to assert yourself. But he does it anyway: “They can’t stop me from living!” The message is clear: Even the most alienating circumstances leave room for the spark of creative potential. Just find the right buttons to push.