KingsOfKings
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Legendary DJ Grandmaster Flash is set to host The Birth of a Culture: A Conversation and Master Class with Grandmaster Flash at D.C.'s Kennedy Center on Friday November 3.
As Hip-Hop 50th anniversary celebrations continue, Grandmaster Flash, one of the culture's founding fathers will host an intimate conversation and master class highlighting his pioneering use of the turntable as an instrument. Flash's "quick mix theory" served as a quantum leap in Hip-Hop, seamlessly combining the breakdown parts of previously existing recordings.
According to Grandmaster Melle Mel, Flash's former group mate in Grandmaster Flash & The Furious 5, this technique was a great improvement on Kool Herc's idea to extend break beats.
"Kool Herc would play the records and they'd be jumbled up, and then the next record would come in," he told The Foundation. "Flash actually had clean cuts, and he mastered that, but once he did that back spin [it introduced] extended breaks. You could rap through the breaks and it was a whole other dynamic as far as being entertaining. It was some real mixology, and that's what always stuck out. MC's were now able to say rhymes 16 bars and longer, because there was a steady beat to rap over."
As a recording artist, Flash, along with his group The Furious 5, delivered some of the genre's most innovative recordings including "Superappin'," "Freedom," "It's Nasty," "The Message," and "Scorpio." Grandmaster Flash is credited as the first artist to release a recording featuring scratch-mixing with 1981's "Adventures On the Wheels of Steel." 1982's "The Message," which the group cites as the cause of their breakup the following year, was groundbreaking as the first rap record to inject social commentary into the once party-heavy music.
