Grandmaster Flash’s Remix of Hip-Hop History

Anna, in Flash’s telling, was a kind of verbal virtuoso, a proto-rapper who rallied her similarly talented girlfriends to provide lines for the largely male m.c.s who rhymed over Flash’s soundscapes. The point of these anecdotes isn’t to direct sole credit to Anna—there are many rival accounts of the origin of the name “hip-hop”—but to illustrate the communal nature of the beginnings of the music and the culture.

This teeming togetherness becomes evident even in Flash’s music. Listen, for instance, to “The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel,” from 1981, the first record to showcase the Quik Mix Theory. During the recording session, Flash used three turntables instead of the customary two, so urgently did he feel the need to crowd the song with intriguing earfuls. The cut luxuriates in the pure sound of the songs that make up its collage. The cool, feline bass lines from Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust” and Blondie’s “Rapture” are enlisted to form a spine, jangling against each other with a dissonant elegance. A snippet of the falsetto vocal from “Good Times,” by Chic, materializes and dissolves like a sun shower. “Apache,” that favorite track of the nascent hip-hop cognoscenti, appears with a knowing wink. Each of these references is made to dance via hypnotic repetition, each graffitied by the sleek scratches that Flash made with his fingers on the vinyl.

Flash is always, in different ways, calling himself a cloistered geek in his book. But “The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash” is the work of a confident cosmopolitan, someone who achieves his most important education outside on the streets, after dark. The scenario that comes to mind is of standing on a city corner at the promising beginning of a hot Saturday night, under a blue-black sky, perhaps waiting for a group of friends to show up, listening with a passive intensity to the music pouring out of car windows as they speed by. The rock kids, the funk kids, the disco-ers, the club rats are all fleetingly conjoined by one pair of highly attuned ears loitering on the streets. It’s the ultimate dance music, the flowering of Flash’s initial desire: to keep the liveliest part of the party going forever.

New York City in the seventies and early eighties, the crucial backdrop for hip-hop’s rise, was a Technicolor place of exaggerated ironies. In 1975, banks stopped underwriting the city’s daunting debt, which caused a fiscal crisis. The answer was austerity. Layoffs swept New York, and youth services suffered cutbacks. People left in droves. Landlords in search of insurance payouts set fire—often fatally—to abandoned buildings in the Bronx, dozens at a time at the height of the phenomenon; the now famous conflagrations glowed like bright symbols of urban decay. Drugs ravaged the streets, leaving needles and even more emptiness in their wake.

But the hollowed-out city became an impromptu stage, especially for the Black teen-agers who, in ad-hoc and decentralized fits and starts, bred the culture with which Flash is so clearly still besotted. Privation couldn’t stop the creative urge. Kids were spray-painting impressive murals on the sides of buildings and the bodies of subway cars. Others practiced a new form of highly kinetic, implicitly aggressive dance which would later be called b-boying, or break dancing. One of these early hip-hoppers was Flash’s eventual friend Fred Brathwaite, known on the streets as Fab 5 Freddy. Earlier this year, Freddy released his own memoir, “Everybody’s Fly.” He was a natural sophisticate whose father was close friends with the jazz drummer Max Roach, and he was a lifelong museumgoer who didn’t understand why he and his fellow-graffitiers couldn’t be considered fine artists. He came into the company of Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, plus Debbie Harry from Blondie.

Hip-hop wasn’t the only growing vogue—punk was coming of age, and New Wave was becoming more popular. Black or white, uptown or downtown, it was art-obsessed kids who gave New York its brilliant spark back. Freddy straddled all these worlds, observing their points of intersection and grooves of adjacency. In his book, he muses, for instance, about how “dancehall reggae’s toasting, New York City’s mobile d.j. scene, and rap developed almost simultaneously . . . largely inspired by slick, jive-talking Black disc jockeys on the radio.” And he was dazzled by Flash, too, whose heretically physical way with records—touching and scratching the vinyl like a vandal—reminded him of the heedless white kids he’d come to know downtown. “He was breaking all the rules, which was the most punk thing you could do,” Freddy writes of Flash. “Rap and punk: They were both so wrong they were right.”