Kurtis Mantronik: Bathtub Beats

Totally instrumental in the formation of the sounds we know now as hip-hop and trap, and then going on to become the go-to guy for remixes (Duran Duran, Shirley Bassey, *NSYNC and a whole host of other artists will attest to that), it’s safe to say that Kurtis Mantronik has left quite a mark on the world of music. Headliner catches up with the former leader, DJ, and keyboardist in the influential ‘80s hip-hop and electro-funk group Mantronix – responsible for productions that helped shape the rap / hip-hop formula, including King Of The Beats and Fresh Is The Word.

Mantronik is undoubtedly a worldly man, having been born in Jamaica, and settling in New York City after a brief spell in Canada. He lived in London for several years, but is speaking to Headliner today from his current home of South Africa, on a day that is “sunny but chilly.”

Mantronik explains the reason for changing continents: “I lived in London for about 11 years, and I met my wife,” he says. “She worked in London, and she's from South Africa. I think we just had enough of the cold weather and I had visited South Africa a few times over the years. And I thought it was a beautiful country. So we just decided one day to pack up and move here.”

Conversation turns to life in London, and the gradual change Mantronik witnessed while he was there:

“I got to the UK in 2001 or 2002,” he reminisces. “I saw a transition over the years; things really started to change. Liberty X had just remade Got To Have Your Love. I'm the writer on that, so the royalties were pouring in, plus I was also DJing all over the place. So I wasn't short of cash at the time. But then London started really becoming expensive.”

With Mantronik’s career being so fascinating, I can’t resist going from the start, and addressing the truth in the rumour that he began by making beats in his bathtub as a kid:

“Me and my mother lived in Manhattan,” he says. “It was on 73rd in Columbus. She had a small flat and it was only a one-bedroom — I was up all night and I wanted to make music. And I had very limited equipment, I think it was like a Doctor Beat drum machine or something like that. But I was fascinated by beat making. I wasn't able to plug my beatbox into my mother's stereo, so I had to use headphones.

“Remember the apartment is very small and only has half a bedroom; the headphones would make a sort of a clicky noise from the beats and that would disturb her. So that's how I ended up in the bathroom. So to get comfortable, I would just put a towel in the bathtub, bring my equipment and headphones and sit in there and start rocking beats. And then that wouldn't disturb her. I would do that for two or three hours until I was tired and then just go to my room and go to sleep.”

Mantronik soon found work as an in-store DJ in the city, where he would fatefully meet Haitian-born, Brooklyn-based emcee MC Tee, with whom he would form Mantronix. The duo started making rap music and were met with great resistance to their sound from record labels, unable to predict how unstoppably popular the sound would become.

Mantronik is careful to point out that “at this point, rap was in its infancy. Still very, very much underground. We had labels tell us they didn’t want to have anything to do with it. They said ‘it's garbage and rap is not happening’. We went in the studio anyway, and that was my first experience with an 808 drum machine. At the time, they were very expensive. And that was my first release with Fresh Is The Word.”

And the rest, as they say, is history, with the song quickly becoming a significant club hit.

Mantronix would release more songs to great success, not only in commercial terms, but also the fact that their influence can still be heard today — Mantronik helped popularise the ‘Amen Break’ sample heard ubiquitously across the genre, with King Of The Beats being one of the first songs to use it (and that song has since been sampled almost as many times as the Amen Break itself).