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Hip-Hop Makes the Hall of Fame

Hip-Hop Makes the Hall of Fame
Sam Boyle  |  by online.wsj.com. All rights reserved. 17.03 | 13:06
Hip-Hop Makes the Hall of Fame

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But Sense of History Isn't Unique to Rappers
March 16, 2007
The first time I heard Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, I think I was riding on a bus with the members of my high-school cross-country team. When our squad won, we would typically celebrate with good music and bad dancing. This was around 1982: Rap was new to most people, but it was already familiar to many of us.

I memorized the lyrics to Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five's "The Message" soon after I heard it. (Listen: | ) Years later, I don't remember much about whom we beat or how much we beat them by, but I can still feel the beat of that boombox at the back of the bus blaring out our victory songs.
Earlier this week, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five became the first rap act inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum.

They were part of a class of inductees that included alternative-music godfathers REM and rockers Van Halen; the old-school rappers are now enshrined alongside such Hall of Famers as the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix and Buddy Holly. "Every break dancer, every graffiti artist, every MC, every deejay -- we're here!" Grandmaster Flash shouted from the podium as he was inducted.

For hip-hop, it was a long trip from the mean streets to the halls of glory.
The induction of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five is a noteworthy moment in the history of a genre that's always been conscious of its own history and heritage. Part of rap's foundation is sampling, the art of taking snatches of oft-recognizable songs and using those bits to construct a new musical piece.

Some rap songs now sample the rap songs of yesterday -- Puff Daddy, who now goes by Diddy, drew from "The Message" for his hit song "Can't Nobody Hold Me Down." (Listen: | ) And many of today's rappers, such as Nas, pay tribute to the rappers of the past in their lyrics. From one point of view, hip-hop is nostalgia set to a beat.


Rap was initially seen by many as a passing fad, a symptom of the streets, a flashy phenomenon that lacked deep meaning and strong roots. Now, decades after the form was first popularized in the 1970s, it has found a featured place in the musical establishment -- seemingly as all-American as apple pie. Or rock and roll.


"Thirty years later, rappers have become rock stars, movie stars, leaders, educators, philanthropists, even CEOs," rapper-mogul Jay-Z said in an induction speech for Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. "But none of this would be possible without the work of the men I have the honor of inducting into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame tonight."
It often takes decades for a new musical form to gain mainstream respect and recognition in the U.

S. The blues, ragtime, gospel, and rock all had their early critics (and some of these genres still have opponents today). In the case of rap, many of the commonly held assumptions about it are wrong mdash;and the career of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five is a perfect vehicle to examine some of those inaccuracies.


One reason rappers often pay tribute to their own history is because, especially at the beginning, nobody else was. It's a practice that started back when the old school was young and has continued on through today. (Listen to Nas's "Carry On Tradition": | ) Of course, shout-outs, name-dropping and glorifying the past goes on in other genres as well, as these examples from Bob Dylan, David Bowie and Stevie Wonder show.

(Listen to Bob Dylan's "Song to Woody": | , David Bowie's "Song for Bob Dylan": | ) and Stevie Wonder's "Sir Duke": | )
These sorts of songs are part of the reason the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame exists. It seems that all musical forms with roots in the blues -- from rock to rap -- feel a need to justify their worth by honoring their greats. Perhaps it's because so many of those founding blues performers -- like Memphis Minnie, Son House and Bessie Smith -- never got the fame and fortune their talents might have merited.

Whatever the reason, many musicians long to be respected and understood. Rappers are still explaining themselves and their chosen medium against an onslaught of misconceptions.
Rap is often seen, incorrectly, as a purely American art form.

It's true that it was nurtured in the Bronx in the 1970s and intimately connected with a whole new culture of break dancing and street art. The music drew from the ache of the blues, the soul of R B and the bravado of rock and roll. At its heart was a radical idea: You didn't have to be a musician to make music.

Songs could be composed of bits of other songs. Lyrics could be spoken without being sung. And all one needed to be a star was two turntables and microphone.

As Jay-Z put it in his induction speech, "what Les Paul and Chuck Berry did for the electric guitar, Flash did for the turntable."
That's the most commonly told story of hip-hop's birth, and the Bronx and New York City certainly played a major role. But rap's roots were actually broader than the five boroughs.

The form has international roots as well, specifically in the Caribbean. A few years ago, when I was working on a book about Jamaican music, "Before the Legend: The Rise of Bob Marley," I was struck by how many rap stars originally hailed from the Caribbean. For example, Grandmaster Flash (Joseph Saddler) was born in Barbados and moved to the U.

S. when he was young. Some of the other founding fathers of the form also had island ancestry: DJ Kool Herc, considered the godfather of rap, was raised in Jamaica before moving to the Bronx.

(Last time I saw him, a few years ago, he was sporting Marley-style dreadlocks.) The Notorious B.I.

G.'s mother is from Jamaica. And the Jamaican art of "toasting", or speaking and rhyming over recorded music, is seen by many as a precursor to hip-hop.

RUN-D.M.C.

once paid tribute to rap's Caribbean connections in their song "Roots, Rap, Reggae." (Listen: | )
Violence is something else that some critics commonly associate with rap, and clearly it's the lyrical focus of more than a few gangsta rappers. But some of the pioneers of rap, like RUN-D.

M.C., built their careers on songs that rejected violence rather than glorifying it.

Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five's "The Message" had a message: violence is a dead end. And the group's song "White Lines (Don't Do it)" made clear in its parenthetical title that it was an anthem against drugs. (Listen: | )
Rap is a self-conscious art form; many of the performers in the field are very aware of their images and the state of the industry.

Rappers often beat up on their own genre, criticizing it for being too meek or too extreme, too commercial or not commercial enough. And numerous rap acts, it seems, have declared the form dead. (Listen to Nas's "Hip-Hop Is Dead": | ) But despite what you might think, that's far from unique to rap.

Every indie-rock star with a hit album must face cries of "Sellout!" And rockers, when the form was a bit younger, also railed against the dying of the light. (Listen to the Who's "Long Live Rock": | )
Perhaps the greatest misconception about hip-hop is that it's an exclusively urban phenomenon.

Almost from the start, rap had fans in the suburbs. I grew up in Brockport, a small college town in Upstate New York, and I can testify that many years before they were recognized by the Hall of Fame, a school bus full of suburban kids had already placed Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five in their own personal music pantheon. Our bus never traveled that fast, but it took the rock establishment a few decades to catch up.

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Keywords: Grandmaster Flash, Furious Five, Hip Hop, Hop Is, Roll Hall, Hip Hop Is, Bob Dylan, Run d, Violence Is, i Can
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