“Don’t push me, ‘cause I’m close to the edge…”—the lyric that is most known in the song “The Message”, which opened a new direction for hip-hop history. “The Message” is told by one of the most remarkable MCs in the early 80s, Grandmaster Flash, and his group, the Furious Five in July of 1982.
Joseph Saddler, other known as Grandmaster Flash, was born January 1st, 1958 in the Bronx, New York. Along with DJ Kool Herc, Flash was one of the first DJs to do what no other musical artist would think is ethically sane and made the turntable its own instrument by scratching the vinyl. Sometimes referred to as scrubbing, scratching is a DJ and turntablist technique of moving a vinyl record back and forth on a turntable to produce percussive or rhythmic sounds.
This interesting technique helped Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five embark on a journey to take note of and further educate young minds of the rise in violence, hate crime, and the stress of inner-city poverty in New York City in the early 80s. This song resonates with me quite well as it was one of the first songs to act on social issues and make a lasting difference. Proudly, it goes down in history as one of the greatest Hip-Hop songs of all time in a 2012 list compiled by experts for Rolling Stone, still being sampled in popular songs to this day.