Elias Leight surveys the spectrum of popular music touched by the drum machine:
Most people credit Sly Stone’s use of a Maestro Rhythm-King MRK-2 on the 1971 No. 1 “Family Affair” as one of the defining early moments for programmed percussion. During the ‘70s, the devices worked their way into hits—Blondie’s “Heart Of Glass,” Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love,” Roxy Music’s “Dance Away”—and carved space in both explicitly regenerative genres like new wave and commercial juggernauts like disco. In the ‘80s, Prince, Michael Jackson, and Madonna all used drum machines. Hip-hop developed into a national force behind acts like Run DMC, LL Cool J, and the Beastie Boys; they had the toughest beats around, put together with drum machines.
There are still corners of the world for the machines to colonize—they probably appear less in country music, for example, though J.J. Cale used them under his loping country grooves—but their unique propulsion is pervasive, and valuable. This is true regardless of how you evaluate music. If your metric is sonic innovation, drum machines have consistently pushed boundaries further: Kraftwerk playing every part of their songs on a machine; Lee “Scratch” Perry using the “Super Rhythmer” to help open reggae’s spaces; Prince working with Linn models, pumping record levels of sexuality and whiplash into funk and pop. (Questlove, drummer for the hip-hop band the Roots, suggested that “Prince is, bar none, the best drum programmer of all time.”) Grandmaster Flash, the Daft Punk influence Jean-Michel Jarre—these people worked with drum machines to create new worlds of music.
The Dish 