This one might take some explaining.
You see, Malcolm McLaren was a manager to a lot of punk and post-punk bands, like the Sex Pistols and Bow Wow Wow. It was the latter that brought him to New York City in the 1980s, where he went to an outdoor block party by Aftrika Bambaataa. There, he discovered hip hop and scratching.
So he, Trevor Horn, and Anne Dudley got together, wrote a song that replaced guitars with scratching, got a whole bunch of then-unknown DJs and MCs to perform on it, and made a hip hop classic.
How a punk manager made a hip hop record might be strange, but there's no doubting its influence. Eminem made reference to it in one of his biggest hits. Neneh Cherry based her biggest hit on this song. The song was, and is, beloved and revered.
In 1998, McLaren rereleased the song as part of a larger record that featured songs based on and interpolated from "Buffalo Gals". Our favorite reimagination of the song was by Rakim.
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