Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame — first hip-hop act

Why it matters

March 12, 2007. At the Waldorf-Astoria in New York, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inducted Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five (Flash, Melle Mel, Kid Creole, Cowboy, Scorpio, and Rahiem) as the first hip-hop act in the institution's history. Jay-Z gave the induction speech. Cowboy could not attend; he had been dead since 1989. This took the Hall a while. Flash's first commercial recordings ("Superrappin'" on Enjoy in 1979) were twenty-eight years old by the time the ceremony happened. "The Message" was twenty-five years old. The institution had inducted disco acts, country acts, blues acts, R&B acts, and dozens of rock acts that came after rap had arrived. Then, finally, in 2007, they got around to the first one. The induction speech Jay-Z gave was warm, generous, slightly bitter on the timing. It should have been slightly bitter on the timing. You wait twenty-eight years for the most popular music in America to be recognized by the Hall of Fame named after one of the genres of music it now eats, you are allowed to be a little bitter.