Malcolm McLaren - Buffalo Girls

McLaren got the idea for the song while in New York City looking for a support act for Bow Wow Wow when he went to an outdoor concert (known as a “Block Party“) by Afrika Bambaataa and Universal Zulu Nation. This is where he was exposed to Hip-Hop for the first time and discovered the scratching technique he would use on this song. Most of the scratching and the beat of the song was composed by Trevor Horn. In the liner notes for Duck Rock, McLaren wrote that this track was “recorded with the World’s Famous Supreme Team and Zulu singers backing them up with the words “she’s looking like a hobo.“ The performance by the Supreme Team may require some explaining but suffice to say they are DJs from New York City who have developed a technique using record players like instruments, replacing the power chord of the guitar by the needle of a gramophone, moving it manually backwards and forwards across the surface of a record. We call it scratching.“