Grandmaster Flash’s Remix of Hip-Hop History
Check out a dance floor the next time you get a chance. Take note at the point in a song when the real dancers stop messing around. (“That was my part,” one of them might later say, or, like the grownups I used to know, “It got good to me.”) Usually, it has something to do with drums. A snare, or a kick, or a tom, or the rattle of an 808 tickles something in the groin or the hips, and the focus of the dancers sharpens. Their movements become more spiteful than woo-woo, more sculpture than painting, more an argument than an idle thought. Now, the sorcery of the dance floor is that this is never happening to only one dancer. This thing with the beat, the heightened part of the song that makes the room get suddenly serious—somehow it’s as objective as math, observable by everybody in the room. The drum hits just so, and it gets good to a whole crowd, all at once. Somebody cries out “Ay!!!” or “Whooo!!!” to acknowledge what’s going on.
One of the luckiest art-related miracles of the past century or so is that there was a young boy named Joseph Saddler, who’d later go by the name Grandmaster Flash and become the Promethean d.j. whose technique on the turntables would help usher into being the mix of sounds and attitudes that we now call hip-hop. Joseph got so obsessed with this moment of collective frenzy, and frustrated by the fleetingness of the part of the song that made it happen, that he spent his life learning to extend it indefinitely. In his new book, “Birth of a Culture” (Amistad), written with Scoop Jackson, Flash reminisces about spying on parties put on by his parents and older sisters. A favorite song at these parties was Curtis Mayfield’s “Move On Up”:
It’s funny: the great Grandmaster Flash, born in 1958, in the Bronx, calls himself a “toddler” in this anecdote, even though he was twelve at the time. Maybe this is because he views his adolescent self, enjoying a sensual perception whose implications he hadn’t yet begun to puzzle through, as still a baby in the context of the history of the music he’d eventually help invent. From the beginning, he had a scientific cast of mind, and not only about the fervors of dance. Confronted with the mystery of his father’s nighttime habit of listening to records—where’s the music coming from, and what does it have to do with this needle and that black disk?—Flash sneaked, over and over, despite many hard-handed spankings from his dad, into the closet that housed the vinyl.
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Joseph, Sr., was physically abusive to his wife, as well as his son, and before long the family split up. Flash and his siblings moved with their mom from Throggs Neck to Fox Street, in the South Bronx. Amid so much chaos, and perhaps—although Flash never makes this connection—because of it, Joseph, Jr., hyper-fixated on electronics. He ripped apart record players and other gadgets, terrorizing the rest of his family with his curiosity and his surgeon’s willingness to attempt to operate on the bodies of household appliances. The tunnel vision that would make him a genius to the wider world first marked him as bad at home.
His mother had the wisdom to send him to a vocational-and-technical school where Flash learned the rudiments of amplified sound. Soon, he could put the gadgets back together, and even produce versions of them. Pining after the power of the disco d.j.s on the radio, he made his own d.j. set. But he still wanted to know: How could he keep the best parts of his favorite songs playing over and over? “The root of everything I was trying to discover was based on science and math,” he wrote.
Flash tricked out his homemade d.j. set, adding a felt bed for his records instead of the standard metal platter. He marked up the surface of his vinyls with crayons so that he could know when exactly the “break” of a song—the drum break that dependably made the partyers go wild—began and ended. He then figured out a blasphemous move: touching the surface of the records with his fingers to drag them in the opposite direction of the turntable’s motion, thus starting the break over. He used two copies of every record—toggling back and forth, catching the beat each go-round with impeccable timing, giving the illusion that the drum break never stopped, that it had always, at least implicitly, been a slice of something infinite, and that now, under his trance, it would never stop, until he gave it a chance to mercifully die. Then he mixed one break with another, sometimes letting them bleed together, sometimes making an abrupt switch that felt like a natural fact. True to his lifelong experimental bent, he called his invention the Quik Mix Theory.
Flash knew of the two other d.j.s who were working in the Bronx at the time, with whom he’d later share credit for the genesis of hip-hop. There was Kool Herc, who was one of the pioneers of the “needle drop” technique for extending breaks, and who had the best speaker setup in town. And there was Afrika Bambaataa, who had the widest and most cosmopolitan collection of records of the three, the most sophisticated sense of the history of Black sound, and a reputation for uniting rival gangs and reorienting them toward peaceful community aims. Neither, though, had the technical mastery of Flash, nor did they have his knack for the mathematics of the dance floor. Flash would glide from break to break, taking parts of the Incredible Bongo Band’s rendition of “Apache”—whose great effect, according to his “science,” “was the way they put the reverb on the snare,” their kick like “thunder and lightning”—and fitting them together with, say, “Heaven and Hell Is on Earth,” by 20th Century Steel Band, knitting a quilt of sometimes quite disparate older music and making of it something thrillingly new. He couldn’t stand to let the tension drop for even a second. If hip-hop seems excessive, this is why: its sound was invented, at least in part, to deliver too much of a good thing.
The early chapters of “Birth of a Culture” are devoted to telling Grandmaster Flash’s origin story, but the rest of the book is an episodic telling of hip-hop’s later history; Flash talks about or interviews rappers such as LL Cool J and Q-Tip in order to establish bonds of continuity between his achievement and theirs. (His first book, “The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash: My Life, My Beats,” from 2008, was a more straightforward memoir.) He is careful not to make his accomplishments, or hip-hop itself, sound like the product of a solitary genius. He always gives credit to Herc and Bambaataa, despite his personal (and, often, sonic) conflicts with the former. And he points out the aspects of life in the tough South Bronx—“no crystal stair,” to borrow a phrase from Langston Hughes—which enabled the rise of hip-hop. A party at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, on August 11, 1973, thrown by Herc and his sister, has been mythologized as the unofficial beginning of the genre, but the truth is that throughout the seventies there were dozens of events like this, many of them held outdoors, in parks. Flash would rewire a street light to provide power for his turntables and speakers, and local kids—usually girls—passed out fliers and served as impromptu publicity teams. Shared space and equipment were put to rogue purposes, funkily repurposing municipal goods for the people. The d.j.s practiced in community centers and Police Athletic League locations, or, say, in the basement of a building where somebody’s dad was the superintendent or had otherwise come into possession of a spare key. Parents of friends would give Flash records from their collections, scarcely aware of what transformations their dusty music would undergo. A neighborhood girl named Anna, according to Flash, improvised the word “hip-hop” while drilling her brother who had signed up for the military:
Anna, in Flash’s telling, was a kind of verbal virtuoso, a proto-rapper who rallied her similarly talented girlfriends to provide lines for the largely male m.c.s who rhymed over Flash’s soundscapes. The point of these anecdotes isn’t to direct sole credit to Anna—there are many rival accounts of the origin of the name “hip-hop”—but to illustrate the communal nature of the beginnings of the music and the culture.
This teeming togetherness becomes evident even in Flash’s music. Listen, for instance, to “The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel,” from 1981, the first record to showcase the Quik Mix Theory. During the recording session, Flash used three turntables instead of the customary two, so urgently did he feel the need to crowd the song with intriguing earfuls. The cut luxuriates in the pure sound of the songs that make up its collage. The cool, feline bass lines from Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust” and Blondie’s “Rapture” are enlisted to form a spine, jangling against each other with a dissonant elegance. A snippet of the falsetto vocal from “Good Times,” by Chic, materializes and dissolves like a sun shower. “Apache,” that favorite track of the nascent hip-hop cognoscenti, appears with a knowing wink. Each of these references is made to dance via hypnotic repetition, each graffitied by the sleek scratches that Flash made with his fingers on the vinyl.
Flash is always, in different ways, calling himself a cloistered geek in his book. But “The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash” is the work of a confident cosmopolitan, someone who achieves his most important education outside on the streets, after dark. The scenario that comes to mind is of standing on a city corner at the promising beginning of a hot Saturday night, under a blue-black sky, perhaps waiting for a group of friends to show up, listening with a passive intensity to the music pouring out of car windows as they speed by. The rock kids, the funk kids, the disco-ers, the club rats are all fleetingly conjoined by one pair of highly attuned ears loitering on the streets. It’s the ultimate dance music, the flowering of Flash’s initial desire: to keep the liveliest part of the party going forever.
New York City in the seventies and early eighties, the crucial backdrop for hip-hop’s rise, was a Technicolor place of exaggerated ironies. In 1975, banks stopped underwriting the city’s daunting debt, which caused a fiscal crisis. The answer was austerity. Layoffs swept New York, and youth services suffered cutbacks. People left in droves. Landlords in search of insurance payouts set fire—often fatally—to abandoned buildings in the Bronx, dozens at a time at the height of the phenomenon; the now famous conflagrations glowed like bright symbols of urban decay. Drugs ravaged the streets, leaving needles and even more emptiness in their wake.
But the hollowed-out city became an impromptu stage, especially for the Black teen-agers who, in ad-hoc and decentralized fits and starts, bred the culture with which Flash is so clearly still besotted. Privation couldn’t stop the creative urge. Kids were spray-painting impressive murals on the sides of buildings and the bodies of subway cars. Others practiced a new form of highly kinetic, implicitly aggressive dance which would later be called b-boying, or break dancing. One of these early hip-hoppers was Flash’s eventual friend Fred Brathwaite, known on the streets as Fab 5 Freddy. Earlier this year, Freddy released his own memoir, “Everybody’s Fly.” He was a natural sophisticate whose father was close friends with the jazz drummer Max Roach, and he was a lifelong museumgoer who didn’t understand why he and his fellow-graffitiers couldn’t be considered fine artists. He came into the company of Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, plus Debbie Harry from Blondie.
Hip-hop wasn’t the only growing vogue—punk was coming of age, and New Wave was becoming more popular. Black or white, uptown or downtown, it was art-obsessed kids who gave New York its brilliant spark back. Freddy straddled all these worlds, observing their points of intersection and grooves of adjacency. In his book, he muses, for instance, about how “dancehall reggae’s toasting, New York City’s mobile d.j. scene, and rap developed almost simultaneously . . . largely inspired by slick, jive-talking Black disc jockeys on the radio.” And he was dazzled by Flash, too, whose heretically physical way with records—touching and scratching the vinyl like a vandal—reminded him of the heedless white kids he’d come to know downtown. “He was breaking all the rules, which was the most punk thing you could do,” Freddy writes of Flash. “Rap and punk: They were both so wrong they were right.”
Lots of people were running around the Bronx with the name Grandmaster back in the day—a d.j. named Grandmaster Flowers was first, according to Flash. Grandmaster Caz, of the Cold Crush Brothers, was another. Nothing too new there. As a kid, I always wondered if that title, this in-group’s slightly humorous mark of high-ranking nobility, was a fly retort to the dorky Grand Wizards of the Ku Klux Klan, the dangerous losers in the pointy hats with so much terror on their minds. The realm of racism and hatred and death, that kingdom whose violence had spurred the Great Migration, which had in turn created the sometimes harrowing urban conditions that gave hip-hop its environment and raison d’être—they had their weird nomenclature, so why not us?
“Birth of a Culture” might have a similar joke embedded in its title, sharing, as it does, a phrasal structure with “The Birth of a Nation,” D. W. Griffith’s racist apologia for the K.K.K., which also happened to be the first-ever multi-reel blockbuster. Like all of hip-hop’s early heroes, Flash is fixated on the genre’s history—righting its wrongs, fighting a headwind of faulty tellings over the years. He knows that the practice of d.j.’ing—the real origin of hip-hop—has long since been overshadowed by the art of rapping. (He helped this along, too, by recruiting talented rappers—guys nicknamed Kidd Creole, Melle Mel, Scorpio, Cowboy, and Rahiem—to form his backing group, the Furious Five.) But, still, he feels he has to get things straight, perhaps because he knows that the power of a people, and of a culture, comes in part from the practice of fruitfully and generously interpreting the facts that gave them their rise.
In one omission, however, Flash praises Bambaataa’s message of love and peace, but conspicuously fails to mention the many credible allegations of child sexual assault that marred Bambaataa’s later life and career. And Flash has gripes with how things went down. One of the most famous songs in the history of hip-hop, “The Message,” was released as a Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five record, even though Flash and his Quik Mix Theory appear nowhere in its music. (“I think it would have been a bigger record had our formula as a group been on that record telling that story,” he wrote.) He doesn’t like that Herc claims to have invented the “merry-go-round” technique of multiple d.j.s taking turns on the table, balancing the beat together, without citing Flash. When everyone goes gaga for the practice of sampling, he feels left out in the cold: “It becomes weird and very alarming when you watch something—a concept, an idea, a practice, a love, a theory—that you created evolve in front of your eyes, and you do not get any credit for what that idea has been turned into.”
In 2007, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five became the first hip-hop act to enter the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. In 2023, Flash was the subject of a soft-focus interview on the “Today” show, to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of hip-hop’s invention. He emphasized his happiness at the genre’s development. “Something that is loved by so many people has to change and has to go through its changes and do different things,” he said. “It has to.”
Here’s all the credit he needs: get some friends together, ones who really know how to catch a beat and feel it in their bodies, put on a Grandmaster Flash record, and watch the world spin. ♦