Bristol represents the Old Skool!

Even if you've never heard of my home town of Bristol, UK you'll know that there's love for hip hop when promoters bring the The Furious 5 and Kurtis Blow to town.

That's what's happening in March 2010! Ok, it may not be all the lights and lasers that accompanies a Jay-Z show, but it'll be a trip back in history that every rapper since the 1980s will recognise and respect.

Kurtis Blow was big, but Grandmaster Flash and The Furious 5 were just gritty and real...still to this day. Imagine...Melle Mel still representing hip hop for the love of it?! In 2007 Grandmaster Flash and The Furious 5 entered the "Rock & Roll Hall of Fame" (later joined by Run-DMC.) If you missed that bit of hip hop trivia watch the videos below that put you right in the centre of that historic moment! Serious old skool, right there!



Grandmaster Flash and The Furious 5 tunes of note:

"Flash to the Beat" (my fave from 1979!! Check the beats below!)
"Superrappin’" (on Enjoy in 1979)
"Freedom" (on Sugarhill in 1980)
"Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel" (1981)
"The Message" (1982)

“'The Message' was [the first record] to prove that rap could become the inner city’s voice, as well as its choice.” This slice of unvarnished social realism sold half a million copies in a month, topped numerous critics’ and magazines’ lists of best singles for 1982, and cemented Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s place in hip-hop’s vanguard. “I ask myself to this day, ‘Why do people want to hear this?’” Grandmaster Flash wondered of “The Message” in 1988. “But it’s the only lyric-pictorial record that could be called ‘How Urban America Lived.’” Rolling Stone