But they liked my arranging, so they hired me. JIGGS CHASE: I first went to Sugar Hill trying to get a deal for an artist. Around The Sugar Hill Gang’s ‘Rapper’s Delight’ we came back: myself, Doug Wimbish on bass, Keith Leblanc on drums. SKIP MCDONALD: I’d played at a company called All Platinum, which was owned by Sylvia, and later became Sugar Hill. But we did a single, ‘Super Rappin,’’ at Enjoy, and I’d later use a rhyme from that on ‘The Message.’ His claim to fame was having people before they became famous. We originally signed with Enjoy Records, owned by Bobby Robinson, no relation to Sylvia at Sugar Hill. People think Flash is Gladys Knight, and The Furious Five were The Pips. When we started, DJs were the important thing, not rappers, so the group was called “Grandmaster Flash and The Furious Five.” When we started making records, we had the option of changing to “The Furious Five featuring Grandmaster Flash.” But our attitude was, it would be Hollywood to change.
Me, Scorpio and my brother, Kidd Creole, we were Flash’s little breakdance crew, then the first MCs. MELLE MEL: Flash became our neighbourhood DJ in the early days, when hip-hop was being formulated in the Bronx. It was everybody’s song.”Įd “Duke Bootee” Fletcher: Co-writer, vocals, keyboards, percussion It was bigger than Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five. People compared it with Bob Dylan, with Stevie Wonder’s ‘Living For The City,’ with The Temptations’ ‘Masterpiece.’ Great songs with the same bloodline. “It wasn’t necessarily even a hip-hop song. “It wasn’t necessarily an ‘urban’ song,” Melle Mel says today, musing on why ‘The Message’ remains urgent. But in the process, an undeniable classic was created. The resulting tensions helped precipitate the group’s break-up. In some respects, it has more in common with The Monkees of ‘Pleasant Valley Sunday’ than The Last Poets. The recording progressed under the direction of notoriously domineering label boss Sylvia Robinson, a canny music industry veteran who then chose Flash and The Five as the perfect faces to front the song for sale. It was conceived, written and largely performed by Ed “Duke Bootee” Fletcher, a studio percussionist who played alongside the Sugar Hill label’s legendary house band. The ironic truth about this song held up as a landmark of “urban authenticity” is that it was the product of a system reminiscent of any old-school Brill Building hit factory. In fact, only one of The Five, Melle Mel, was involved, and he admits he initially participated without much enthusiasm. Flash himself, the pioneering turntablist who formed the group on the streets of the South Bronx in the mid-1970s, had no participation in either the writing or recording of the single. What’s slightly less appreciated about this, the most famous song by Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five, however, is that it wasn’t by Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five at all.
Released in July 1982, it pointed away from the good-times boasting and partying of the genre’s early milestones, toward harsher territories that would be explored by outfits like Public Enemy, BDP and NWA as the 1980s unfolded. “Don’t push me, ’cause I’m close to the edge…” It’s well known that ‘The Message,’ with its slow, spare, ominous groove and downbeat slice-of-life lyric, opened new directions for hip-hop.