THE MESSAGE
“The Message” is a song by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. It was released as a single by Sugar Hill Records on July 1, 1982 and was later featured on the group’s first studio album, The Message. “The Message” was the first prominent hip hop song to provide a social commentary rather than the self-congratulatory boasting or party chants of earlier hip hop. Featuring alternating lead vocals by Melle Mel and Ed “Duke Bootee” Fletcher, the song’s lyrics describe the stress of inner city poverty. (More from Wikipedia)
The first rap song that I remember liking is “The Message” by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. I first heard it as a video, probably on the USA Network’s Night Flight program and others like it that showcased cutting-edge music videos. The song came out in 1982, and I likely saw it around that time period. (MTV launched on August 1, 1981, but not everyone had it on their cable system right away, leading to the common chant: “I want my MTV!”).
The performance in “The Message” is mostly unadorned, with the music having an under-stated intensity and the vocalist intoning in a manner just short of singing; the scratching initially put me off when I heard most early rap performances, and there was none of that on this song. According to Wikipedia, this was the first prominent hip hop song to have social commentary; “The Message” led directly to the “gangsta rap” era with groups like Public Enemy and N.W.A. but was enormously influential in its own right. The repeated lines that serve as the chorus – “Don’t push me cause I’m close to the edge / I’m trying not to lose my head” and “It’s like a jungle sometimes / It makes me wonder / How I keep from goin’ under” – give an urgency to the description of life in the ghetto that forms most of the lyrics.
From Wikipedia: “‘The Message’ has been reused and re-sampled in so many different ways that it would be easy to reduce its legacy to cliché. Music critic Dan Carins described it in a 2008 edition of The Sunday Times: ‘Where it was inarguably innovative, was in slowing the beat right down, and opening up space in the instrumentation – the music isn’t so much hip hop as noirish, nightmarish slow-funk, stifling and claustrophobic, with electro, dub and disco also jostling for room in the genre mix – and thereby letting the lyrics speak loud and clear.’ Not only does the song utilize an ingenious mix of musical genres to great effect, but it also allows the slow and pulsating beat to take a backseat to the stark and haunting lyrical content.”
Rolling Stone magazine, in its list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time placed “The Message” at #51, higher than any other song from the 1980’s and also the highest ranked hip hop song. In 2012, Rolling Stone named “The Message” the greatest hip hop song of all time.
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Also mentioned in “Rapture” by Blondie is Grandmaster Flash. I saw an interview with him once where he talked about the effect that “Rapture” had on his musical vision, which led to the release of “The Message” by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. I was amazed when I heard him say that.
(September 2016)
