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Portrait of Grandmaster Flash

Popular music · Hip hop

Grandmaster Flash

born 1958 · Barbadian-American

Old-school hip-hop — the Bronx, Sugar Hill Records

Grandmaster Flash is the disc jockey who turned the turntable into an instrument. Trained in electronics, he worked out how to isolate and repeat the drum break of a record by cueing two copies of it, a method he called the Quick Mix Theory, and added punch phrasing and the backspin. With the Furious Five he made "The Message", the record that showed hip-hop could report on the conditions it came from, and in 2007 they became the first hip-hop act inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

How to spot them

  • ▸One of the three founding Bronx DJs, with Kool Herc and Afrika Bambaataa
  • ▸Quick Mix Theory, clock theory, punch phrasing, the backspin, the cutting of two copies of one record
  • ▸The Furious Five, and Sugar Hill Records
  • ▸An electronics training that let him build his own mixer with a cueing switch

Songs & albums

A 1981 single assembled live from three turntables and ten records — arguably the first record made entirely out of other records (1981)

"The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel".

A 1982 single reporting on broken glass and rats in the front room, credited to him and his crew (1982)

"The Message" — largely the work of Melle Mel and Duke Bootee; Flash did not play on it.

A 1983 anti-cocaine record credited to one member of the crew alone (1983)

"White Lines (Don't Don't Do It)", credited to Grandmaster Melle Mel.

A 1979 debut single for Enjoy Records, one of the earliest records by a Bronx crew (1979)

"Superrappin'".

The technique he named for locating and looping the drum break by cueing two copies of the same record (c. 1975)

The Quick Mix Theory, and the 'clock theory' of marking the label to find the break.

The technique of jabbing a horn stab or drum hit from a second record into a track already playing (c. 1976)

Punch phrasing.

Quick-fire facts

  • •Born Joseph Robert Saddler on 1 January 1958 in Bridgetown, Barbados, and raised in the Bronx
  • •He studied electronics at a vocational school, which let him build a cueing system so he could hear one deck in headphones while the other played
  • •The Furious Five were Melle Mel, Kidd Creole, Scorpio, Rahiem and Cowboy; Cowboy (Keith Wiggins) is often credited with coining the phrase 'hip hop'
  • •"The Message" (1982) was written mainly by Duke Bootee and Melle Mel; Flash himself does not appear on the recording
  • •In 2002 "The Message" became the first hip-hop recording added to the US National Recording Registry
  • •Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2007, the first hip-hop act to be so honoured, by Jay-Z
  • •He served as associate producer and music consultant on the Netflix series The Get Down
  • •His scratching technique built on the discovery of the backspin, rewinding a record by hand to repeat a passage
  • •He is conventionally named with DJ Kool Herc and Afrika Bambaataa as one of hip-hop's three founding fathers

Drill it — 7 cards

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Sources