While the track’s iconic closing verse originally appeared on the group’s 1979 cut “Super Rappin’,” Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five’s lead vocalist, Grandmaster Melle Mel, performed it on “The Message.” Forever anointed as the father of modern socially-conscious hip-hop, Melle Mel would go on to pen several songs that would inspire generations of MCs to write rhymes that went well beyond braggadocio posturing and the materialistic boasts that were rooted in the genre.įrom “Message II (Survival)” to the iconic “White Lines,” “Beat Street Breakdown,” “New York, New York” and “World War III,” Melle Mel set the lyrical bar high, and many MCs would aspire to emulate his effectiveness. A revolutionary seven-minute record that is a brilliantly compact chronicle of the tension and despair of ghetto life that rips at the innocence of the American Dream.” The very first hip-hop records commanded the attention of urban America and a sizable portion of the mainstream, and, in January 1983, Robert Hilburn wrote in the Los Angeles Times, “Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five’s “The Message” was the most noteworthy single of 1982. Hip-hop as a genre can be traced back to militant spoken-word groups such as The Last Poets and The Watts Prophets just as they reflected the realities of their surroundings, modern day hip-hop would deliver its own missives from the frontline, becoming, as Public Enemy frontman Chuck D put it, “black America’s CNN.” For a better part of a decade, much of the politics of hip-hop revolved around and reacted to the policies of then President Ronald Reagan, who served in office from 1981 through 1989.

On Harlem World Crew’s 1980 release “Rappers Convention,” the lyrics read as a news story ripped from the headlines, reporting back to the people in rhyme: “But we Americans gettin’/sick and tired of this political gong show/So we’re sendin’ our message over to Iran: let our people go/Now we been pushed around a lot but we’re not afraid of war/And Iran, your little cat and mouse game has really become a bore.” Infused with political messagesĭating back to its earliest releases, hip-hop has been infused with political messages. Whether it’s Boogie Down Productions’ KRS-One breaking down the journey of the cow from the slaughterhouse to your dinner plate, or Doug E Fresh (and, later, Common) speaking about the sensitive topic of reproductive rights, hip-hop has always been the genre where no subject is off-limits. Through the spoken word, its MCs have often conveyed the politics of hip-hop even more directly than those of their rock and folk predecessors. Since its earliest days, hip-hop has been inherently political – a powerful vehicle to deliver messages society needs to hear.

80s hip hop fashion documentary