Grandmaster Flash

Bio

The way to understand the difference between DJ Kool Herc and Grandmaster Flash, if you didn't grow up at the parties, is to understand the difference between an idea and a discipline. Kool Herc had the idea: play the break forever, by cutting between two copies of the same record. Joseph Saddler, who would become Flash, looked at what Herc was doing and asked: what if this were a discipline?

Flash was born in Barbados in 1958 and raised in the Bronx. He was an electronics kid, the kind who reads the manuals. He took apart his father's record collection (his father did not appreciate this). He treated DJing the way an instrumentalist treats an instrument: with study, with daily practice, with the goal of being able to do, with precision, the thing that needed doing. He developed Quick Mix Theory. He wrote it down. He taught it.

The kids he taught included Theodore Livingston, who would, by accident, invent the scratch a couple of years later. The Casanova Crew formed around Flash. Then the Furious Five formed around him: Cowboy, Melle Mel, Kid Creole, Mr. Ness, and Rahiem. Then a recording career formed around the Furious Five. Flash made the move from park-jam circuit to recorded music essentially earlier and more deliberately than anyone else.

"The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel," Sugar Hill, 1981: this is the first recording where the DJ is the main act. He is not laying a beat for an MC. He is performing the turntables. He cuts and scratches through Queen's "Another One Bites the Dust," Blondie's "Rapture," Chic's "Good Times," Sugarhill Gang's "8th Wonder," and his own crew's "Birthday Party." It is seven minutes long. Every important hip-hop DJ of the next twenty years heard this on a tape and tried to do what they were hearing.

The other thing Flash did is "The Message," 1982. The credit on the label is to Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, but the song is mostly the work of Sugar Hill in-house writer Duke Bootee and MC Melle Mel. It is the first time mainstream radio got a hip-hop record that wasn't about the party. Broken glass everywhere. People urinating on the stairs. Don't push me 'cause I'm close to the edge. Three months later, Rolling Stone names it the best single of 1982.

In 2007, Flash and the Furious Five became the first hip-hop act inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. The first. The category had to be invented for them. Every induction since traces back to him doing the work to make hip-hop legible to people who had not been at the parties.