The University Times

While America danced the Brooklyn Hustle, spellbound by the endemic musical craze that was ‘70s disco, a Bronx-based teenager was tearing apart his sister’s radio. He was desperate to decipher how it worked, and how his dual passions of electronics and music could combine to form….something. Joseph Saddler didn’t quite know what. Yet he knew that if he mastered it, the result would be ground-breaking. It was perhaps the same drive which propelled him every day of his childhood toward his father’s record collection, despite warnings to stay away.

The same drive that led him to take capacitors and resistors from abandoned or burnt-out cars in his neighbourhood, and request discarded jugs from supermarket managers. He would use the latter as cabinets for his base speakers. The result of his ability to seamlessly blend his scientific knowledge with creative instinct wasn’t just his unsophisticated but workable turntable, needles and mixers. It was, ultimately, what many consider the genesis of commercial hip-hop.

This nerdy kid, with a curiosity for electronics and an insatiable urge to learn the workings behind what made people dance, went onto revolutionise music by developing the  means for DJs to listen to cues on one table, while the crowd heard music only from the second.

“You mark a section of the record and then you gotta just count how many revolutions go by sampling existing pieces’’.
Scratching, cutting, laying down a backtrack of manipulated, instrumental sections; he reads as blasé and humble, but Grandmaster Flash lay down the standard methods and rhythms behind the hip hop genre. Make your way behind a DJ booth, and you will see the records covered in adhesive strips, which denote the points of break lines.

The visual of Grandmaster Flash dragging a record backwards on a turntable at precisely-timed segments, and the resulting sound, would soon elevate Saddler to eminence. His mastery of backspin and punch-phrasing would secure his place as the first hip-hop artist to be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame

Saddler went onto take the Western music realm by storm, as the mastermind DJ of the group Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash and the Wheels of Steel, released in 1981, was lauded for its trailblazing, creative audacity. Superrappin’ and other embryonic rap tracks focused on a celebratory, infectious theme, and resisted consciousness of localised or world issues.

The Message, released in ’82, is arguably responsible for the political, cultural, and socially-reflective lyrics intrinsic to the rap and hip-hop genre which dominates charts and airwaves today. Though materialistic self-assertion and a spirit of carefree revelry still feature heavily in terms of content, The Message taught rappers that their medium was conducive to more intelligent and powerful messages.

Flash recently worked as music director and DJ for The Chris Rock Show. Now, in what may be the most impressive musician booking for Ents to date, the Master is coming to us. He will headline Trinity’s 2012 Rag Ball next Wednesday.

Tickets go on sale this Wednesday, January 18 at 10am from www.trinityents.com & SU Shop.