(AllHipHop News) One of the advantages of Hip Hop being just 40 years old is the ability to still hear first-hand accounts from the culture’s forefathers. For example, Grandmaster Flash recently discussed his contributions to Hip Hop during an interview with Channel 4’s Krishnan Guru-Murthy in the United Kingdom.
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Flash was in the country to perform at the Meltdown Festival. During a sound check for his show, the DJ pioneer spoke about why he feels Hip Hop successfully spread across the globe.
“Hip Hop to me – from a musical perspective – is poetry to the beat of music, but it started with music first,” said Flash. “We were using all these different genres of music from some of the greatest bands in the world. So when it left The Bronx and left America it was already imprinted to be something pretty big. We just didn’t know that.”
The Rock & Roll Hall of Famer later revealed what inspired him to revolutionize DJ techniques like punch phasing (clock theory) and back spinning (quick-mix theory). According to Flash, listening to instrumentalists like drummers get solos during songs set him on the path to creating a similar style for turntablists.
“That angered me to go into my room for about four years when I was a kid, and come up with some sort of turntable science on how I could take this incredibly brief moment that was the best part of the record in my mind, and expand on that,” explained Flash. “I would take a 10-second break and make it 10 minutes seamlessly, and that started the bed for rappers do what they do.”
Grandmaster Flash and The Furious Five are considered one of the early Hip Hop acts that helped the genre spread beyond its origins in New York City. Their 1980’s classic record “The Message” has been named one of the greatest rap songs in history by numerous publications. The group was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2007.
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Watch Grandmaster Flash’s interview below.
