Mass Production is an American funk/ disco

musical group Musical is the adjective of music. Musical may also refer to: * Musical theatre, a performance art that combines songs, spoken dialogue, acting and dance * Musical film and television, a genre of film and television that incorporates into the na ...

, best known for their 1979

hit Hit means to strike someone or something. Hit or HIT may also refer to: Arts, entertainment and media Fictional entities * Hit, a fictional character from '' Dragon Ball Super'' * Homicide International Trust, or HIT, a fictional organization ...

, "Firecracker." Based in Norfolk, Virginia, the ten-piece group had a series of minor R&B hits in the late 1970s and early 1980s. "Firecracker" is commonly misattributed to the similarly named (and sonically/stylistically similar) band

Brass Construction Brass Construction was an American funk group formed in Brooklyn, New York, United States, in 1968. They were originally known as Dynamic Soul, and went on to record a string of hit singles and albums through to 1985. Career Signed in 1975 by S ...

History

The band consisted of Kevin "D'No" Douglas ( bass and

vocals Singing is the act of creating musical sounds with the voice. A person who sings is called a singer, artist or vocalist (in jazz and/or popular music). Singers perform music (arias, recitatives, songs, etc.) that can be sung with or withou ...

), James "Otiste" Drumgole (

trumpet The trumpet is a brass instrument commonly used in classical and jazz ensembles. The trumpet group ranges from the piccolo trumpet—with the highest register in the brass family—to the bass trumpet, pitched one octave below the standard ...

, flugelhorn, clarinet, flute, piccolo and vocals), Agnes "Tiny" Kelly ( lead vocals,

vocoder A vocoder (, a portmanteau of ''voice'' and ''encoder'') is a category of speech coding that analyzes and synthesizes the human voice signal for audio data compression, multiplexing, voice encryption or voice transformation. The vocoder was ...

; later replaced by Dee (DeeDee) Henderson), George Jefferson (

trombone The trombone (german: Posaune, Italian, French: ''trombone'') is a musical instrument in the brass family. As with all brass instruments, sound is produced when the player's vibrating lips cause the air column inside the instrument to vibrate ...

), Larry Marshall (lead vocals, triangle,

percussion A percussion instrument is a musical instrument that is sounded by being struck or scraped by a beater including attached or enclosed beaters or rattles struck, scraped or rubbed by hand or struck against another similar instrument. Ex ...

and

xylophone The xylophone (; ) is a musical instrument in the percussion family that consists of wooden bars struck by mallets. Like the glockenspiel (which uses metal bars), the xylophone essentially consists of a set of tuned wooden keys arranged in ...

), Gregory “Sagittarius” McCoy

saxophone The saxophone (often referred to colloquially as the sax) is a type of Single-reed instrument, single-reed woodwind instrument with a conical body, usually made of brass. As with all single-reed instruments, sound is produced when a reed (mouthpi ...

tuba The tuba (; ) is the lowest-pitched musical instrument in the brass family. As with all brass instruments, the sound is produced by lip vibrationa buzzinto a mouthpiece. It first appeared in the mid-19th century, making it one of the ne ...

, bassoon and

kazoo The kazoo is an American musical instrument that adds a "buzzing" timbral quality to a player's voice when the player vocalizes into it. It is a type of '' mirliton'' (which itself is a membranophone), one of a class of instruments which modifie ...

, Emmanuel Redding

kettle drums Timpani (; ) or kettledrums (also informally called timps) are musical instruments in the percussion family. A type of drum categorised as a hemispherical drum, they consist of a membrane called a head stretched over a large bowl traditiona ...

and miramba, Ricardo Williams (lead vocals, drums,

, Tyrone Williams ( keyboards), Rodney Phelps (

lead guitar Lead guitar (also known as solo guitar) is a musical part for a guitar in which the guitarist plays melody lines, instrumental fill passages, guitar solos, and occasionally, some riffs and chords within a song structure. The lead is the featu ...

, keyboards) and LeCoy Bryant ( rhythm guitar, vocals). Phelps left the band prior to the recording of their 1980 ''Massterpiece'' album, leaving Bryant to handle all guitar duties. Phelps was later replaced by Dan Harris (

). Harris toured with the group as a freelance guitarist for a couple of years, then left the band to work as a recording session musician. The band would soon expand back to ten, with Samuel Williams joining on drums in the early 1980s, allowing Ricardo Williams to concentrate more on vocals. In addition to "Firecracker," which hit number four on the R&B chart in the late summer of 1979, other hits by the band include "Cosmic Lust", "Groove Me", “Doing Lines” and "Shante." The group stayed together for several more years, scoring a string of small hits, before deciding to disband in 1983. At that time, the group’s popularity was such that they were the only people who knew they had disbanded. Mass Production has recently reunited with the mostly original lineup, is in the process of recording new material, and has been playing live shows since 2017. "Firecracker" was

sampled Sample or samples may refer to: Base meaning * Sample (statistics), a subset of a population – complete data set * Sample (signal), a digital discrete sample of a continuous analog signal * Sample (material), a specimen or small quantity of so ...

2 Live Crew 2 Live Crew is an American hip hop group from Miami, Florida, which had its greatest commercial success from the late 1980s to the early 1990s. The group's most well-known line up was composed of Luke Campbell, Fresh Kid Ice, Mr. Mixx, and ...

for their 1989 hit single " Me So Horny", from their

album An album is a collection of audio recordings issued on compact disc (CD), vinyl, audio tape, or another medium such as digital distribution. Albums of recorded sound were developed in the early 20th century as individual 78 rpm records co ...

'' As Nasty As They Wanna Be''.

Discography

Studio albums

*''Welcome to Our World'' (1976) *''Believe'' (1977) *''Three Miles High'' (1978) *''In the Purest Form'' (1979) *''Massterpiece'' (1980) *''Turn Up the Music'' (1981) *''In a City Groove'' (1982) *83'' (1983)

Compilation album

*''Firecrackers: The Best of Mass Production'' (1996)Mass Production discography
Discogs.com, Accessed 1-10-2010

References

External links