“The Message” — Grandmaster Flash And The Furious Five
It’s easy to forget that early hip-hop songs were often protest songs. Not Bob Dylan-style protest songs, I grant you, but protest songs nonetheless.
I love a protest song, but in the 40-odd years since Grandmaster Flash and The Furious Five released “The Message” hip-hop, the musical style they helped pioneer and popularise, has too often degenerated into tales of conspicuous consumption and disrespectful misogyny. Often both on the same track.
My affection for the more socially conscious early rap records remains undimmed. My disappointment is that most of those records could be released again today and you’d think they were recorded just last week.
The world has changed too slowly for too many people.
In 1982, when Grandmaster Flash and The Furious Five sang…
Don’t push me, ’cause I’m close to the edge
I’m trying not to lose my head
It’s like a jungle sometimes, it makes me wonder
How I keep from going under
…they were singing about life in the housing projects as the deep recession of the early Reagan years hit the poorest the hardest. The economy tanked as the Fed raised the prime rate to over 20% and unemployment quickly spiked to over 10% of the US workforce.
