The 50 Greatest Vocoder Songs

Image via Complex Original

This has nothing to do with rankings, not to mention taste, but it's just best to just go ahead and get this out of the way. Snoop's voice is enhanced by Auto-Tune, which is often mistaken for a vocoder, though he, and the tube in his mouth in the video, are paying homage to Roger and the Talkbox. (Triple Word Score!) In the true spirit of speech recognition, getting it wrong, and signal distortion, there was an animated send-up called "Butternut Reduction."

"Hide and Seek" is the only vocoder song to appear on an episode of The OC (when Marissa shot Trey) and be sampled by Jason Derulo. "Where are we? What the hell is going on?"

On his 1982 album Trans, Young used the vocoder to empathize with his son's struggles with communication, a result of his cerebral palsy. Neil Young was then sued by Geffen for not sounding like Neil Young. Though the vocoder was never subpoenaed, Young's Sennheiser VSM-201 was never heard from again.

Seeing Mogwai live obliterated my hearing, making me easy prey for when the vocoder pranked my ears. Relatedly, vocoder frequency compression has played a role in the treatment of hearing pathologies; in a study conducted by the University of Miami, deaf mute children wore tactile vocoder belts to school in an attempt to "feel" the Miss Othmar faculty garble. Unfortunately, the study was invalidated because students only caught the sub-frequencies in the gut—they could only feel the bass.

Ozzy, maybe Geezer, seems to be wailing through bong bubbles here. Sometimes mistaken for a vocoder, it's a signal-processing trick called ring modulation, patented by the Daleks of Dr. Who, and later used by Can. “Planet Caravan” is so quiet—or stoned—you think the album’s over. Then Iron Man shows up with his Talkbox and stomps a mudhole in the village.

Sometimes, the vocoder was just happy to get away from the robots. It could be used for subtle shading or accent, as when Phil says, "Do you remember?" (Or when Jocelyn Brown says, "When the stuff hits the fan.") How could we possibly remember anyway? The vocoder didn't stand a chance against The Drum Fill or Miami Vice.

Here is a real rap song that uses a real, not sampled, vocoder—somewhat of a novelty in 1994. While we're at it, ATL's "Ballin'" is the summer jam you need to be listening to right now. Then follow it up with CMW's "Late Night Hype." Gyeeah.

Just a brief talkbox cameo towards the end, a kind of Rufusized croak and valid excuse to work the Jacksons in here, instead of, say, some nasty red alert-ass vocoder gravel from Cleveland. The vocoder would get more prominent MJ shine in the chorus of "PYT."

We also could've gone with "My Prerogative," or the Keith Sweat quiet storm classic "How Deep Is Your Love." Teddy Riley single-handedly kept the vocoder dream alive in the 1990s.

Dilla turns to Italian disco producer Giorgio Moroder, a man with a vocoder built into his name.

According to Holger, this 18-minute vocoder song about perfume is meant to be enjoyed while roller skating or flying, and was inspired by the space station of his childhood. Of course, he also said the vocoder was capable of destroying the atmosphere.

"I don't have a mind/It's all blown on you baby." This Devante Swing Talkbox ballad made it into the academic journals.

Daft Punk had the arena pyramid and French robots in motorcycle suits. "Robot Rock" owed its loop to Breakwater, a Philly funk outfit pictured on their album cover wearing parachute jumpers and quilted yellow moon boots, hanging out in a sauna. And they had a Steve Zissou seahorse on their logo. You decide.

The vocoder had a turbulent history with Japan. In 1945, it was used to encrypt tactical conversations concerning the deployment of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima. In 1980, Yellow Magic Orchestra (YMO) used it to cover the Archie Drell soul standard "Tighten Up." The Japanese-manufactured Roland SVC Vocoder was widely used by Bambaataa and the hip-hop old school and then ultimately the Beastie Boys, when they suited up for this Ultraman-inspired Kaiju Eiga wrestling match.

During the early '00s, it was brought to my attention that electro no longer had anything to do with hip-hop and had been adopted by something quite awful. (Though I deeply admire any song that calls itself "Space Invaders Are Smoking Grass.") Frankfurt-based producer Anthony Rother was a welcome retaliation, with this glabela-scrunching, pig-oink of a vocoder. Word is barn.

I used to run to this on the beach, but heatstroke, blindness, and the nagging ghost of my severe ACL rip always took over before the vocoder met me at 28:45. Thank you, James Murphy, for breaking this thing into sixths. Thank you, Dilaudid, for being there during knee recon post-op.

Italo-Disco in the early '80s went nuts for the vocoder. As with the "Voice of Q," it's best to stick to the instrumental side.

Beck tried to sabotage this one for me. But it's all about the arpeggiated bass and the Mantronix checkbook font. You should also check out "Listen to the Bass of Get Stupid Fresh, Part 2."

Allegedly the first man in Miami to have Space Invaders hooked up in his glove compartment, Pretty Tony Butler produced the Miami teen electro of Debbie Deb, Trinere, and Freestyle's "Don't Stop The Rock" (which introduced the word "freakathon" and was recently used to sell Cadbury chocolate.) "Jam The Box" returned Tony to his commander nerd self, inspired by the pirate radio frequencies that broadcast early Miami hip-hop. ("Jam the Box" also flirts with vocoder speech compression, but that's another story.) As the main producer at Music Specialist Studios in Little Haiti, Butler would spend hours breaking bottles out back—refining that tinkle separation.

Synth pioneer Bruce Haack appeared on Mister Roger's Neighborhood. Party machine Russell Simmons appeared at the Disco Fever zooted out of his mind. Haack had a wall of skulls. Simmons has a wall of platinum. Haack once wrote that he loved "lights and legends." Simmons once said, "We don't have to hire nobody to say nothin' and keep all the money." Haack released a song called "Mean Old Devil." Simmons released "The Def Jam." How did this happen?

Nice of Hyphy to break for an old-school L.A. classic, sampling Rich Cason's "Radioactivity Rapp." The vocoder is in good company here with Steve Urkel, Decepticons, Planet of the Apes, glasspack mufflers, and dog food snorting.

The Rockets were bald, silver, and for the most part, French, save for German vocoder commander Zeus B. Held. Be sure to check out the second half of "Future Woman" for pure Zeus Talkbox glory.

Rap was scarce on "Urban Contemporary Radio" formats, so you waited through hours of what the British might call "laser synth funk boogie bombs," like this one by the Brooklyn, Bronx, and Queens Band.

Finally, a rap song stuck a tube in its mouth and said "cut a rug" and quoted (and sampled) The System.

This was back in the day when you bought an album just to hear the song that's already all over the radio and somehow missed an utter freak jam called "Hips." Luckily for us, Dam-Funk has been keeping this sound alive—one of the few people out there still packing a vocoder and saying he's going 2 kill this motherfucker 4 U 2nite.

Recorded in Ft. Lauderdale by James "Maggotron" McCauley, the 12-inch of "Radio Mars" recently went for over $1,800 on eBay, which, for those doomed souls keeping score, was roughly $300 less than what Kraftwerk's original Musicoder went for in the virtual marketplace. "Radio Mars" is the most expensive vocoder record made by an ex-telephone operator who used to skate backwards to "Turning Japanese" at Superstar Rollerteque in Liberty City.

Lauderdale's M.C. A.D.E. once performed "Bass Mechanic" on Pele's ex-wife's TV show (before the kidnap attempt), and in a Brazilian futbol stadium (while wearing a trenchcoat). "How Much Can You Take" drowns the John Carpenter Halloween sample in its trunk. You can also detect A.D.E.'s swamp drawl in the word "oscillatin'", despite the vocoder's best efforts to band-pass filter his voice into robot anonymity.

The Original Human Beatbox's album was darker than God would have you think, between the anti-abortion song and an instrumental that used the Phantasm theme. (Big up, silver ball!) They led off with "Nuthin'," which borrowed its vocoder from an obscure—and now somewhat pricey—boogie track by Cosmic Touch.

On some Saturday-morning-pull-a-Vida-Blue-hologram-card-out-of-your-box-of-Frosted-Flakes-type shit. If this song was any happier we'd have to punch it in the face. That's Dayton's Shawn Sandridge you hear vocodering on Project Future's classic electro 12 "Ray-Gun-Omics."

One of the advantages of being a vocoder is one doesn't have to sound like a vocoder. Just an incoherent banshee singing in the shower.

Just think, without Kano, there'd be no "Whoomp There It Is" and sports arenas across the U.S. would be stuck with Gary Glitter. Also used in Gigolo Tony's "Hokie Pokie," based on a dance formerly known as the "Hokey Cokey."

It's all here. The dribbling cowbell sampled from Dynamix II and a vocoder clearing its throat at the beginning. Battlecat also remade "Radioactivity" for the Dogg Pound's "Cali Iz Active" and is fluent in Talkbox. You can hear Snoop over the original "Radioactivity" on a demo for "True To The Game."

A former speed skater from West Palm, Dave Noller from Dynamix once told me: "Don't kick your fans in the nuts." "Just Give The DJ..." came out on Trick Daddy's dad's label (Sun Town), as well as Bass Station (which was owned by notorious coke dealer Norberto Morales). I like the Visage "Pleasure Boys" riff. "Toilet bowl rock you to the ground" refers to a booty drop they used to do in Miami, also known, in some shameless circles, as the "Commodecoder." Wave those troubles down the drain.

The vocoder was pretty much a space helmet party until Laurie Anderson topped the British charts with this haunted duet with herself and an answering machine in an empty room, foreshadowing incoming planes. On the early, pre-war Bell Labs vocoders, the "frequency discriminator"(their words) had trouble recognizing women's voices. "O Superman's" syncopated holding pattern—a phone off the hook, crying for its receiver—was played on an Emulator keyboard, used to great effect on Freez's IOU and Martin Dupont's "Inside/Out"

Considerable "Joystick" debt here. Though the hiccup is often overused when describing things that aren't involuntary contractions of the diaphragm, one of the untreatably nastier cases of Talkbox hiccups takes place here. I like how this song takes a while to finish, or in the case of this edit, begin. Hold on fellas, we're not done with the lasers yet.

L.A. freaked so hard, they had to give it a new spelling. This could've been a thinly-veiled Jimmy Jam/Terry Lewis thing, after Prince fired them from The Time. "Street Freeks" included contributions by Rich Cason (R.I.P.), who once produced a rap version of Duran Duran's "Wild Boys" (yikes) for the Rapper's Rapp Disco Co.

Dilla samples Herbie Hancock, who used the Sennheiser vocoder to improve his voice, of all things, and clone himself into a chorus of Herbots. The Sennheiser VSM-201 vocoder was also used by DARPA, the Jet Propulsions Lab in Pasadena (Big up Jack Parsons), and a deleted alien abduction scene from Cheech & Chong's Next Movie.

We could've gone with "Blue Monday" ("I thought I heard your words") or "Bizarre Love Triangle." Appearing as an "instrumental" on New Order's 1983 album Power, Corruption & Lies, "Ecstasy" was a vocoder on a tone bender, caterwauling across the track. "I've lost my way."

Spyder D said he made this one for the "cats droppin' acid in Europe." Released on the Bismol pink label, West End, the "B Beat Classic" samples the 1973 Italian sex comedy Sessomatto (How Funny Can Sex Be?). After being up all night cutting and splicing the tape loop together (no digital sampling), Spyder said he went nuts on the vocoder (see: "Yeeeeeeaahhh"). He masked his voice to avoid getting sued by his other label, Tel-Star Cassettes, which threatened to run Spyder through a speech analyzer.

Whodini had more vocoder per album than any other artist. We used Whodini's tribute to the late Mr. Magic here, though one could easily go with "Freaks Come Out A Night," if only to watch Whodini lead everyone on a "Friends" singalong after getting off the tour bus at the Swatch Watch Fresh Festival and discovering they had a Jermaine Dupri stowaway.

If your name is Roger Troutman and you're going to make a comeback, it's best to do it while burning donuts in a dune buggy in the Mojave Desert, Mad Max-ing with Pac and Dre, and singing Ronnie Hudson's "West Coast Poplock" with an electric juice box straw in your mouth.

Egyptian Lover once told me that the vocoder was what the freaks liked to freak to. At the early Uncle Jamm's Army parties in L.A., they would toss vials of Good Fred's Hansome Dude Pomade Oil into the crowd while Egypt cut up Zapp records. So began the invention of the Jheri curl.

Michael Jonzun's vocoder jones can be traced back to some formative childhood moments: a UFO landing in a garbage dump in Central Florida, a one-armed man named Mr. Bags who used to terrorize him with an Electro-Larynx, and the time his band's van nearly flew off a cliff in Vermont while listening to "Space Oddity."

According to Bootsy Collins, they were so excited about "More Bounce" that he, Roger, and George Clinton spent most of the session airborne. I saw Zapp perform "Computer Love" twice—consecutively—at the Charlotte Coliseum, with RJ's Latest Arrival and Doug E. Fresh opening. Roger wore a suit made of Christmas lights. His brother Lester, the drummer, said the beginning of "Computer Love" was inspired by "Iron Man." I like the idea of Zapp practicing Talkbox versions of "Iron Man" in their garage in Hamilton, Ohio, while the deep freeze went on the fritz.

Apparently this episode of Sesame Street inspired Roger Troutman to sever the tube from the meat freezer in his parent's basement and devise a homemade Talkbox with his brothers so he could impersonate Chaka Kahn in the garage. Stevie also Talkboxed a Michael Jackson tribute last year.

A Pentecostal reverend in Arkansas feared this song might turn his youth group into a bunch of backsliding horndogs. When Midnight Star performed it at the Ohio State Fair, vocoderist Vincent Calloway said, "Freak-a-zoids, robots, please report to the dance floor." Kids said, sure, but tore down the fences getting there. Midnight Star—and their vocoder—were nearly arrested for inciting a spirited all-county insurrection.

One of the better German expressions used for vocoder intelligibility testing was "Aztekenexpresszuggsellschaft," which means "Aztec Indian train station." Or you could just be like Kraftwerk and go with "Trans Europe Express." A self-confessed "Collector of Artificial Voices," Kraftwerk's Florian Schneider also used Speak n Spell, DECTalk (used by Stephen Hawking), and the Votrax, a text-to-speech device developed by the Federal Screw Works of Troy, Mich.

If electricity constantly bragged about its indispensability, we'd be more inclined to shut it off. Recorded in 1936, this Bell Labs plug for the vocoder could've been a ConEd ploy. Kraftwerk would adopt it 40 years later, in German, for the "Voice of Energy." The voice of blackouts would be hip-hop in the summer of '77, when Bambaataa played "Trans Europe Express."

In Dick Fontaine's 1984 documentary Beat This!: A Hip Hop History, Afrika Bambaataa

appeared in the projection booth at the Museum of Natural History's

planetarium and made a special vocoder PSA. "I am the funk overlord. I

have come to take control of your mind." He then quoted George Orwell and the kids bugged.

I have a friend who used to do aerobics with her mother to this song.

According to Scorpio himself, it was inspired by a Rick James stomach

ache, a sexual encounter under a piano, and his "all-around freakiness."

I first heard it when my best friend suffered a near-fatal asthma attack

and barfed green on our front porch. You don't forget these things.