Interlude. Why the 808 Is Still Everywhere

In a studio where people make trap or drill, a producer might say, “This needs a heavier eight-oh-eight here,” and nobody will start looking around the room for a drum machine. The eight-oh-eight long ago became the name of a sound: a low kick with a long humming tail that gets tuned to the notes of the song and used to play the bass line. Most people who say the word every day have never seen the machine itself, and they have no reason to.

This rarely happens to model numbers. The names that turn into common nouns belong to firms that sold millions of identical things, Xerox or Thermos, but here the word came from the factory code of a machine made in fewer than twelve thousand units. The road there ran through hits. Marvin Gaye’s “Sexual Healing” in 1982 became the first American hit with an 808. Four years later the Beastie Boys ran its beat backwards, in 1987 a Whitney Houston song was largely built on it, and in 2008 Kanye West used it on every track of an album he named after it. The 808 is said to be heard on more hits than any other drum machine, and journalists call it the Stratocaster of hip-hop, after Fender’s famous electric guitar. Hank Shocklee, producer of Public Enemy, put it more briefly: without this sound there is no hip-hop.