FEATURE:
Groovelines
Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five - The Message
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MANY people might not…
recognise the song that I am featuring in this Groovelines. Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five’s The Message is seen by many as being the most influential Hip-Hop record of all time. Released in 1982 on the group’s debut album, The Message, this is a song worth getting deep over. Rolling Stone ranked the song as number-one in their list of the best Hip-Hop tracks back in 2012:
“The Message” was a total knock out of the park,” says Chuck D. “It was the first dominant rap group with the most dominant MC saying something that meant something.” It was also the first song to tell, with hip-hop’s rhythmic and vocal force, the truth about modern inner-city life in America – you can hear its effect loud and clear on classic records by Jay-Z, Lil Wayne, N.W.A, the Notorious B.I.G. and even Rage Against the Machine. Over seven minutes, atop a creeping rhythm closer to a Seventies P-Funk jam, rapper Melle Mel and co-writer Duke Bootee, a member of the Sugar Hill Records house band, traded lines and scenes of struggle and decay: drugs, prostitution, prison and the grim promise of an early death. There was a warning at the end of each verse: “Don’t push me, ’cause I’m close to the edge/I’m trying not to lose my head,” each word enunciated like a gunshot.
Flash, born Joseph Saddler, grew up in a neighborhood that closely resembled the song: the South Bronx during the worst of the Seventies urban blight. He and the Furious Five had become the number-one DJ crew in the borough – pushing aside early pioneers like Kool Herc and Pete “DJ” Jones – with a mix of party-hearty showmanship and Flash’s groundbreaking turntable skills. (Among other things, he invented the scratch.)
In a 1983 interview, Flash claimed “The Message” showed that he and the Five “can speak things that have social significance and truth.” But when Flash and the Furious Five first heard Bootee’s original demo (a track the latter called “The Jungle”), they worried that hip-hop clubgoers would not dig the subject matter and slowed-down beat, unusual for an early rap record. As Melle Mel remembered, he was the group member who “caved in” and agreed to record it; Sugar Hill boss Sylvia Robinson got him to write and rap more lyrics to Bootee’s track, and Sugar Hill studio player Reggie Griffin added the indelible synthesizer lick. Despite the credit on the record, Flash and the rest of the Five appeared only in a closing skit, in which they’re harassed and arrested by police.
“The Message” was a commercial success, peaking at Number Four on Billboard‘s R&B-singles chart, but its messy birth was fatal to Flash and the Five, who split into factions. Their most notable reunion would finally come in 2007, when they became the first rap group inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame”.
Like all classic records, it can make an impact now and has not lost any of its significance and power. I have been listening to it when researching it for this feature. One can see other Hip-Hop acts and songs that came in its wake; inspired by its sheer significance. Maybe it was quite a bold and unusual record in 1982 but, looking back nearly forty years later, and one can see how it has shaped so many great Hip-Hop albums since!
I love the background and story of The Message. In 2019, Rhino spent some time outlining the importance of an iconic Hip-Hop record:
“Formally credited to Edward G. Fletcher, Melle Mel, Sylvia Robinson, and Clifton “Jiggs” Chase, “The Message” arrived when rap was still in its infancy as a musical genre (at least as far as mainstream audiences were concerned, anyway), but it nonetheless stood out from the pack by featuring lyrics which tackled a serious issue – inner city poverty – rather than being a bunch of self-congratulatory boasts. In fact, Melle Mel admitted in an NPR interview that the group originally didn’t want to do the song because it wasn’t what they were used to rapping about.
Thankfully, the group changed their mind: “The Message” went on to be one of the most influential songs of all time, and writer Cherese Jackson explained the reasons for its importance in a March 2019 article for Liberty Voice:
The reality in 1982 was that millions from the projects in Brooklyn, New York to the ghettos of Watts in California were given very little in the way of choices or opportunities in how they could live. Contrary to what the White House was saying or the news media were reporting, black and brown people were not just these unsavory characters addicted to drugs, crime, and unwedded pregnancies. They were children born into abstract devastation and were desperately looking for a way of escape.
Often mistaken for a threat, “Don’t push me because I am close to the edge,” was actually a cry for help…or at the least, an acknowledgment. People who felt trapped in these inhumane circumstances were lamenting that life was not all good in the “hood.” The hood had become the place were dreams and people were forgotten. Tucked away neatly out of the line of sight of America, the government could easily throw money, subsidized housing and food stamps at them in hopes they would kill themselves and keep it quiet. But out of those concrete streets grew a restlessness that would not be quilled. There was a story that needed to be heard, and hip-hop became the vehicle in which that was possible.
Mind you, the chart success of “The Message” wasn’t nearly as impressive as its history would lead you to believe: while it climbed to #4 on the Billboard Hot Black Singles chart, it topped out at #62 on the Hot 100. The UK, on the other hand, was far more receptive to the song, sending it to #18 on their singles chart. But in the long run, it doesn’t really even matter how it did on the charts. What matters is the seismic change it caused in music, one which continues to ripple to this day”.
Since its release, The Message has been lauded and ranked high in the lists of the greatest Hip-Hop songs ever. This Wikipedia article shows the song has been celebrated and honoured through the years:
“The song was ranked as number 1 "Track of the Year" for 1982 by NME.
Rolling Stone ranked "The Message" #51 in its List of Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Songs of All Time, (9 December 2004). It had the highest position for any 1980s release and was the highest ranking hip-hop song on the list. In 2012 it was named the greatest hip-hop song of all time.
It was voted #3 on About.com's Top 100 Rap Songs, after Common's "I Used to Love H.E.R." and The Sugarhill Gang's "Rapper's Delight".
In 2002, its first year of archival, it was one of 50 recordings chosen by the Library of Congress to be added to the National Recording Registry, the first hip hop recording ever to receive this honor.
"The Message" was number 5 on VH1's 100 Greatest Songs of Hip Hop.
"The Message" is number 1 on HipHopGoldenAge's Top 100 Hip Hop Songs Of The 1980s”.
I think that the album, The Message, is an incredible listen. One that everyone should seek out and spend some time with. I think that the Hip-Hop scene was fairly new then. We often associate the Golden Age as being between 1986 and 1991 (roughly) - so this was one of the very earliest Hip-Hop records. I can imagine upcoming artists being blown away by it and knowing that they witnessed a moment of history!
To close, there is one more article that I want to borrow from. It states that, whilst the Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five’s reign was fairly short-lived, songs like The Message were hugely transformative and crucial:
“The eponymous Grandmaster Flash was more at home behind the turntables, and although socially-conscious lyrics might not have been something he was closely involved with, he did perfect and popularise several seminal scratching and mixing styles which laid the foundations for the generations of hip-hop music to come.
As a creative force, Grandmaster Flash and The Furious Five didn’t last much past “The Message”. Their follow-up, “White Lines”, by this time without Grandmaster Flash himself, was credited to Grandmaster and Melle Mel, and after that, the occasional attempt at re-grouping apart, Grandmaster Flash and The Furious Five lived on as part of music history, but no longer released records under that name.
Not long after “White Lines”, Sugar Hill Records closed down amidst a blizzard of lawsuits and the record label which took hip-hop mainstream was no more.
In its brief existence, though, co-founders Sylvia and Joe Robinson brought a new art form to the ears of the listening public.
And they brought us one of the most important songs in music history, “The Message”.
If only we’d listened more closely to what Grandmaster Flash and The Furious Five told us 40-odd years ago, and acted on the concerns they raised at the time, the world might not be in the mess it’s in today.
But the question for us here and now isn’t why haven’t we put right what they sang about 40 years ago. The time for that has gone.
The question for us all is what are we going to do differently in the next 40 years…”
I shall close things off here. I am going to go back even further in time for the next Groovelines. I guess a lot of people are aware of The Message but, for anyone who is not, I hope that this feature has provided necessary information and story behind a hugely important Hip-Hop work. It still move you and sound fresh in 2021. I wonder whether we have learned lessons in the time since the song was released or, in years to come, The Message will still serve as a lesson to people around the world. The significance and influenced of The Message is likely to last…
FOR decades more.
