| Grandmaster Flash:
Immortalized by Blondie, feted by the hip hop cognoscenti, Grandmaster Flash is the man who turned the humble record deck into an instrument as potent as the piano or guitar. He was the first DJ to put out a rap record and in “Adventures On The Wheels Of Steel,” he created an aural template that let the world at large into the secrets of the New York ghettos. If Afrika Bambaataa provided the ingredients and Kool Herc a rough method, more than any other, it was Grandmaster Flash who refined the recipe and turned hip hop from a boroughs novelty into a worldwide phenomenon. He’s the decknician with magic in his fingers. The DJ who put the hip in hop. Flash is fast. Flash is cool. And then some. Born in Barbados but raised in New York, Grandmaster Flash (aka Joseph Saddler) was an electronics student with a desire born of seeing his heroes Pete DJ Jones and Kool Herc to turn the music they were playing into an art form. "I didn’t find the way he played exciting," says Flash of Herc. "What I found exciting was what he was playing." Kool Herc had had the idea of eschewing the disco hits of the day the Donna Summers, the Trammps in favour of old funk records. More than that, though, he was mainly playing the breaks, those instrumentally-sparse and rhythm-heavy parts of the records where the dancers could really cut loose. Flash’s idea was simple. He would take the types of tunes played by Herc and assimilate them using the methods of beat-mixing he’d seen employed by DJs like Pete DJ Jones. "What I liked about Pete’s style is that he kept the music continuous. He didn’t take out a certain section of the record or continuously go back and forth, he just kept everything going." |
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