Grandmaster Flash
Joseph Saddle, known today as Grandmaster Flash, was born in the Bronx, New York City in 1958. He started to get into the DJing scene as a high schooler after he had picked up an interest in his father’s record collection. It wasn’t until he got to Samuel Gompers Vocational Technical High School until his passion for music deepened and solidified as he learned about stereo equipment and other things. A lot of DJs around that time were under 18 and had little cash so they had to get creative in the way that they built their system. This was the same for Flash and he sometimes went around the city to look for abandoned equipment to repair his stereo. Most of the things he would find and use were parts in abandoned cars scattered throughout the city. As his passion for DJing grew, Flash continued to experiment with it and started performing at block parties and dances in the area. As a DJ, Flash felt like the transition between songs was important and started to experiment with ways to perfect the cohesion of sounds. Unlike most DJs at the time, Flash would physically touch his records and try to manipulate and use them as if they were a musical instrument to create a seamless mix. Eventually, he created the “clock theory” which is where “he treated the cardinal points of the record as twelve, three, six, and nine o’clock” and he used these “hour hands” as a reference to when a break started and ended (Katz 56). As Flash started to perfect and create methods, like quick mixing, he slowly started to become a popular DJ around the city. In his early career, Grandmaster Flash didn’t collaborate with others and usually served as a single DJ at parties and other events. Eventually, he started to team up with other artists in the area until Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five was formed. The Furious Five consisted of Melle Mel, Cowboy, Kid Creole, Mr.Ness, and Raheim. This group soon grabbed audiences in the area as Flash’s DJing skills and the others’ notable rapping formed the perfect mix of hip hop music. The group went on to many well-known songs but their most acknowledged piece is “The Message”. The song served as the first song to really use rap as a voice for the inner city and the people that lived there because of its brutally honest observations of their lives and the environment they were in.