As a teenager, Grandmaster Flash was one of the pioneers, in the Bronx in New York, of hip-hop that revolutionized the music industry and the American megalopolis.
Real name Joseph Saddler, the American musician and producer born in Barbados 65 years ago performed on an outdoor stage on Friday in the South Bronx. This emblematic neighborhood for African-Americans saw the birth of rap in the ghettos just half a century ago. But Friday night, Flash managed to recreate the electric climate of the 1970s and 1980s by inviting on stage the rappers MC (Master of Ceremonies) Melle Mel (Melvin Glover) and Scorpio (Eddie Morris) members of the Furious Five. The 60-year-old Sha-Rock (Sharon Green), who was one of the first female MCs of the New York rap scene, was also at the party. “It’s not a concert, it’s a party!” exclaimed the 60-year-old in front of hundreds of fans gathered in a park on a hot and humid summer evening. “It was really the music that resonated with the times in New York,” sums up Quentin Morgan, 54, who came to the concert by bike. “New York was a rough and gritty city, almost outlawed, another era,” breathes the fifty-year-old.
On the sidelines of the concert, AFP met Coke La Rock, 68, who was on the historic day of August 11, 1973 and whom musicologists consider to be the true founder of hip-hop. According to the organizers, it had been 20 years since Flash had performed on a stage. New York Democratic Mayor Eric Adams, a reputedly tough former African-American police captain, made August 4, 2023, “Grandmaster Flash Day.” Hip-hop’s 50th anniversary is set for August 11, and a giant concert at New York’s Yankee Stadium celebrates the occasion.
On that day in 1973, on the ground floor of a low-rent housing at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx, a DJ of Jamaican origin, Clive Campbell, alias DJ Kool Herc, innovated. By spinning the same record on two turntables, he isolates the sequences of rhythms and percussion and makes them last in the speakers, prefiguring the “breakbeat”, an essential component of hip-hop music. There are also graffiti or breakdance sessions in libraries, “block parties”, concerts, etc.
Grandmaster Flash and the group Furious Five released their flagship title The Message in 1982. Upon its release, the lyrics and music video shed new light on the harshness of city life and the economic and social conditions in New York City, a city then stricken with poverty and crime.
For Coke La Rock, the Bronx and hip-hop are one because he “sees no difference between” the neighborhood and the musical genre. The musician even considers himself the father, the “patent” of rap, and all young American and foreign musicians today as his “children”, his “products”. For Flash, Friday’s party was reminiscent of those of his youth. “It was recreational, our mothers would tell us to go play outside. I would never have imagined being part of the best music in the world”, launches the artist to AFP, after the concert.
Other initiatives flourish throughout the summer to celebrate the half-century of a movement born in the Bronx to escape poverty and discrimination against African Americans and Hispanics. Hip-hop has become a billion-dollar phenomenon. The genre inspires music, but also sport and fashion.
