More Bounce for Your Ounce - The Legacy of Roger Troutman

Originally Appears in Issue 7 of One More Robot

Dean Van Nguyen examines Roger Troutman’s often overlooked influence on 30 years of pop music.

Turn on any mainstream pop radio station and listen for a couple of hours. Chances are that a good percentage of the songs you’ll hear bear the handprint of Roger Troutman. If the name seems only vaguely familiar, you probably recognise it from being attached to 2Pac and Dre’s 1995 hip-hop masterpiece ‘California Love’. But even with that, I’d wager there’s a good chunk of ’Pac fans out there who are unaware of the full extent of Troutman’s influence on that song, or that it borrows a large amount from the output of him and his band Zapp, who cut a huge body of funk music the previous decade.

Zapp formed in 1978, with four Troutman brothers providing the nucleus and Roger being the one outstanding talent. Dedicating themselves to creating dance floor-friendly funk grooves, they were soon noticed by the genre’s overlords in the Parliament-Funkadelic collective who gave their career the breakthrough boost it needed. George Clinton and Bootsy Collins helped Zapp pen a record deal and they immediately began carving out one of the most singular careers funk has ever seen.

Their first hit ‘More Bounce to the Ounce’ set a template for Zapp’s biggest records. Their sound was loaded with bumping grooves, almighty baselines and, uniquely, Roger’s vocals, which utilised a keyboard synthesizer that created robotic-sounding vocals through the simultaneous use of a piano-like interface and a breath tube. Throughout the eighties, Troutman fluttered between releasing records with Zapp and as a solo artist, but there was a consistency to his sound regardless of what moniker appeared on the album, with the talkbox, as it was known, almost always present.

I’m quite partial to his solo hit from 1981, ‘So Ruff So Tuff’. At under five minutes, it’s relatively short for a Troutman track (his version of ‘I Heard it Through the Grapevine’ swells to over 10 minutes), but the muddy, funky jam proved to be a microcosm for his entire sound. Even the title ‘So Ruff So Tuff’ reflects Troutman’s brand of funk. The beat is grubby. The baseline is so fat it stretches the track to its absolute limits, almost overwhelming everything else it comes into contact with. The guitar lines are greasy and the almighty handclaps are smacked so punishingly hard it almost seems unhealthy. Zapp would sometimes wear hardhats on stage as if their music was so bumpin’ the ceiling above them would crumble. The world ‘funk’ originally meant a strong smell or stench, and Zapp’s arrangements were indeed dirty, particularly when stacked against the relatively smooth production guys like Rick James were putting out at the time.

With their beats providing unlimited bounce-ability, West Coast rappers saw Zapp’s music as something they could put a rhyme too. Kick-starting the soundtrack to John Singleton’s 1991 film Boyz n the Hood, Ice Cube’s ‘How to Survive in South Central’ lifted a huge amount of ‘So Ruff So Tuff’. The song pastes other samples, sound effects and spoken world interludes on top, giving it a kind of manic quality. But Troutman’s immovable beat remains consistent, and Cube’s verses are lively, as if the rapper had to raise his energy levels just to keep up.

Troutman’s influence on the emerging West Coast gangsta rap scene in the early nineties was huge. A generation of rappers, then reaching adulthood, had grown up on his beats. “Roger’s music is a part of the backbone of hip-hop,” said Ice-T in a statement to accompany a 2002 tribute record to Troutman. The influential hip-hop artist put out ‘Cop Killer’ in 1992, a controversial track that gauged the rising anger in rap music at the time. West Coast gangster rap was hard and violent; in the grooves of the Zapp sound its artists found something they felt could score their angry lyrics and raucous rapping style. Compton’s Most Wanted sampled the group’s 1982 hit ‘Dance Floor’ on their 1992 track ‘Hit The Floor’. Ice Cube went back to the well of  ‘So Ruff So Tuff’ on ‘My Summer Vacation’ the very same year. But even away from the direct sampling, Californian hip-hop was gravitating towards Zapp. Beats were becoming slower, with lush, multi-layered synthesizers, slow hypnotic grooves and colossal bass lines. G-funk is what they’d call it.

Ice Cube: Regularly sampled Troutman’s compositions.

While there is some dispute over who invented the G-funk sound, Dre was certainly its most potent force. Away from the steady paycheques he was receiving via sampling, Troutman’s career had actually wound down by the time the good doctor came knocking in 1995, with each of his records selling less than the previous. But by bringing him and his voice box in for ‘California Love’, Dre was acknowledging him as one of the forefathers of his increasingly popular sound.

‘California Love’ is actually a bit of a Frankenstein job, incorporating elements from all over the map. The music is essentially a remake of Ultramagnetic MC’s single ‘Funky’, which itself sampled the piano section from rock’n’roller Joe Cocker’s ‘Woman to Woman’. The hook was pinched from Ronnie Hudson and the Street People’s ‘West Coast Poplock’, a track that leans heavily on Zapp, integrating in lyrics from ‘More Bounce to the Ounce’ and ‘So Ruff, So Tuff’. The “shake it, shake it, baby” line that Troutman chants was lifted from ‘Dance Floor’, and on the ‘California Love’ remix he’s given space at the end to croon even more of his most famous lyrics a cappella.

’Pac had already sampled Zapp several times, notably taking the hook from ‘Computer Love’ for one of his softer tracks, ‘Temptations’. ‘Computer Love’ is a towering achievement. With its hypnotic slides and creeping bassline, Troutman built a three-dimensional digital world. Serenading a love interest on his computer screen some two decades before web cameras, social networking and Internet dating made it common practice for pop singers, Troutman tapped into the increasing wonder of what computers in the household could make possible. While musically it does owe a debt to the ballads Prince was cutting at the time, ‘Computer Love’ would be in the very top echelon of the Purple One’s output had it been one of his.

In his considerably large back catalogue, ‘Computer Love’ is perhaps the easiest track to draw a direct line from Troutman to Auto-Tuning crooners of contemporary R&B. The similarities in sound are obvious to the untrained ear, even though the technology has morphed slightly. Auto-Tune was developed to artificially correct pitch and disguise singers who struggled to sing in key. Rappers like Lil Wayne and Kanye West have used it for this purpose, but for the most part it has been utilised by guys who can actually sing, but choose to filter their voice through a machine for stylistic purposes, much like Troutman did.

T-Pain: Heavily influenced by Troutman, but not considered his successor.

The equipment may be different, and many musicians over the years have used computerised methods to change their voices, but Troutman’s influences over the new generation of Auto-Tune artists is easy to spot. So much so, in fact, that if you look up almost any Roger Troutman or Zapp video on YouTube, you’ll see a flood of comments deriding the Auto-Tune process and, in particular, T-Pain, who himself has acknowledged Troutman as a major influence. A blog post that appeared on his webpage in 2009, titled ‘5 Reasons to Love Roger Troutman’, begins with, “T-Pain has always shown love to the original voice-modulating pimp, Roger Troutman.”

But T-Pain is not the heir apparent to Troutman – that’s unanimous among Troutman fans. Rappers Buckshot and KRS-One released ‘Robot’ in 2009, criticising the large number of artists turning to Auto-Tune. A line in the song goes: “The best to do it was Roger Troutman/Nah, Shorty, T-Pain didn’t come out then.” Backlash like this was inevitable considering how prominent the method became. As well as Kanye and Wayne, others to embrace the method have included Madonna, R. Kelly and Snoop Dogg, whose single ‘Sexual Eruption’ directly acknowledges Troutman both in its sound and its retro video.

Troutman’s influence on these pop vocalists is not just limited to manipulating their voices digitally, but how they use the machinery also. On the remix to R. Kelly’s ‘I’m A Flirt’, perhaps T-Pain’s finest moment, his seemingly impromptu, off-the-cuff delivery is reminiscent of Zapp’s vocal lines, which were often free from the constraints of a consistent melody, while remaining tuneful.

Troutman himself wouldn’t live to see all this influence. In 1999 he was shot and killed by his brother and manager, Larry, who took his own life shortly after. Roger was 47. To this day the incidents remain a mystery to their family. But Troutman’s legacy continues to grow year after year. Having provided a well of great music that has inspired 30 years of hits, there are no signs yet of it running dry.