UTFO releases 'Roxanne, Roxanne' — triggering the Roxanne Wars
Brooklyn group UTFO releases 'Roxanne, Roxanne' as a B-side to 'Hangin' Out.' Within months, the track inspires more than 100 answer records — most notably 14-year-old Lolita Shanté Gooden's 'Roxanne's Revenge,' produced by Marley Marl. The cycle, known retrospectively as the 'Roxanne Wars,' is the first sustained call-and-response answer-record battle in commercial hip-hop history.
Why it matters
June 1984. A Brooklyn group called UTFO (Untouchable Force Organization) released a 12-inch with "Hangin' Out" on the A-side and a song called "Roxanne, Roxanne" on the B. The song is about three MCs taking turns hitting on a fictional girl named Roxanne who, the song goes, keeps shooting them down. Cute concept. Light record. Nobody expected what happened next. What happened next is the Roxanne Wars. Inside a year, more than a hundred answer records hit shelves, each one written from another character's perspective in the Roxanne universe. The most famous of them is "Roxanne's Revenge" by a fourteen-year-old Queensbridge MC named Lolita Shanté Gooden, produced by a then-young Marley Marl. Shanté's record was supposedly cut in one take and outsold the UTFO record. The whole cycle, the hundred-plus answer records, is the first time the call-and-response answer-record format runs as a sustained commercial event in hip-hop. You can draw a straight line from this to every diss-track exchange that has happened since.
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