Grandmaster Flash

Joseph Saddler — Barbados-born, Bronx-raised, a vocational-school electronics student — approached the DJ booth like the engineer he was. Studying Kool Herc’s break-spinning, he saw the flaw (Herc dropped the needle by eye, losing the beat) and solved it: marking records, cueing in headphones, and cutting between two copies of a break on time — his “quick-mix theory,” the foundation of turntablism. Around his system grew the crew that became the Furious Five, with Melle Mel and Cowboy (who is often credited with coining “hip-hop” itself) trading rhymes over the loops (Chang 2005).

“The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel” (1981) put pure turntable composition on record for the first time. A year later “The Message” — its synth line icy, Melle Mel’s verses a documentary of South Bronx survival (“It’s like a jungle sometimes…”) — proved rap could carry hard journalism, and was promptly canonized: it pointed the way to Public Enemy, gangsta rap’s reportage, and every MC since who treated the verse as testimony.

In 2007 Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five became the first hip-hop act inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame — the web of this site closing one of its loops: the Bronx party music built from funk breaks, honored in the house of rock, both of them children of the blues.