Grandmaster Flash in front of 40,000 Bestival goers!

This interview was just published on Grandmaster Flash's YouTube channel. It was recorded just after he partied with the 40,000 Bestival goers on the main stage. BBC Radio 1 DJ Rob da Bank is behind this annual music festival and he invited Flash onto his show last year...in return Flash dropped 5 mixes for our listening pleasure! Go check out Flash's musical dexterity here.




Did you know? According to the video, Grandmaster Flash has won 30 international awards and plays up to 100 gigs a year?! I didn't.

I do know that he was enrolled into the Rock and Rock Hall of Fame in 2007! That is BIG. And it's even better that he and most of the Furious 5 were still alive to celebrate. RIP Cowboy.

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

Run DMC...Roll & Rock Hall of Fame!!!

This month I heard on the radio that Run DMC has made it! Huh?

Yep, it's taken 25 years for the rap pioneers to get recognized by the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio.

Did you know Run DMC isn't the first hip hop act to be honored? Nope...Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five planted that flag back in 2007 when the band was awarded the RIAA’s Lifetime Achievement Award!

First in da game But no rap act has won these medals...First rap Top 10 album, first rap Grammy Award nomination, first rappers on MTV and Saturday Night Live and first Rolling Stone cover! Run DMC went against the grain by replacing the funk and RnB grooves and rhythms with something harder...and whiter to get their message across. They popularized rock breakbeats like Billy Squier's "Big Beat" and took the hard rock guitar attitude and sound and crossed over to the rockers as well as open up new avenues for rap.

Love or hate? If you were an Aerosmith fan you might have thought Run DMC's cover of "Walk This Way" was blasphemous back in 1985! That was the only time I ever paid attention to Steve Tyler...well, there was Liv too ;)

RIP Jam Master Jay, 2002