3)
Really this should be a section for the "Todd Terry Riff", which for all I know is actually stolen from some Chicago guy I will never respect unless it's Larry Heard/Ron Hardy. Growing up in NYC I heard this all the time but never knew who was responsible for it, or where it came about. It was a sort of ambient sonic meme, not unlike the James Brown samples I described before, or various sound effect triggers. My brain is patterned by punctuation that I've recognized and memorized over the years in order to place them again and again when they re-manifest. Genuine licks or melodic 'hooks' are like sentences and are obviously iconic, the quotation from your favorite poem. Chuck D's voice is an exclamation point. When you see it done, enough times, you understand it's usage and its utility. Semiotics of sound.
What is that riff? Energy. You don't know what the source sound is besides some sort of synthesizer buzz, but that sound communicates the grid, the sensation of witnessing the plasma orb react to your own electricity that briefly makes you feel the power of immediacy. "It Me, I'm The One." It's not the sound that electricity crackling in the air makes, the sound of thunder. Those are the echoes of the mass burning of particles within the air. We had plenty of simulations of the sound of energy prior throughout our lives, trying to nail it and get it right. This isn't the only one even! But it nails it and gets it so right that even before you've heard it finish, your brain is picturing all these images of the Surge Movement that you can convey.
Todd is God, but in a way that's personal to me. Obviously so much of what was important of East Coast house and Techno would emerge out of him. Your Armands, your Frankies, your Beltrams, your Louie & Kennys, your Todds (yes the other Todd). He had a pedigree in freestyle, and he helped out in hip-hop. He made Everything But The Girl pop off in America making a suburban mom down-tempo classic that still goes off. He's still in 2020 on Instagram threatening to pull up and rob DJs for money for stealing from his songs despite being one of the most obvious copyist thieves in dance music. A pure robber baron of the American image, and a legend to boot.