2023-08-06 00:28:00
Attendees dance as American DJ Mister Cee plays during the 50th Years of Hip-Hop Celebration in Brooklyn, New York on August 5, 2023. – New York City Mayor Eric Adams has offered the 5X5 Block Party series and live conversations between leaders in hip hop. (Photo by KENA BETANCUR / AFP)
By Maggy DONALDSON
As a teenager, Grandmaster Flash was one of the pioneers of hip-hop in the New York Bronx that revolutionized the music industry and the American metropolis.
The musician and producer, born in Barbados 65 years ago and whose real name is Joseph Saddler, performed late Friday on an open-air stage in the South Bronx, an emblematic neighborhood for African-Americans and recently born ghettoized rap. half a century.
“It’s not a concert, it’s a party!” exclaimed the sixty-year-old before hundreds of ecstatic fans.
The 50th anniversary of hip-hop will be celebrated on August 11, with a giant concert at Yankee Stadium in New York.
On that day in 1973, on the ground floor of a low-income building at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx, Jamaican-born DJ Clive Campbell, aka DJ Kool Herc, broke new ground: spinning the same record on two turntables , isolated sequences of rhythms and percussion and made them last in the loudspeakers, in a precursor technique of the “breakbeat”, an essential component of hip-hop music.
Graffiti and “breakdancing” sessions in libraries, public parties known as “block parties”, concerts are part of the endless initiatives that will take place throughout the boreal summer to celebrate half a century of a movement that was born in the Bronx as a Escape from poverty and discrimination for African Americans and Hispanics.
Now it has become a multi-million dollar phenomenon that inspires not only music, but also sports and fashion.
– “Another era” –
“It was music that really resonated with the times in New York,” says Quentin Morgan, 54, who rode his bike to the concert to soak up the atmosphere of remembrance and nostalgia.
“New York was a raw, rough city, almost outlawed, a different time,” he adds.
Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five released their hit song “The Message” in 1982, whose lyrics and video clip shed new light on the harsh urban, economic, and social conditions of New York, then ravaged by poverty and crime.
On Friday night, Flash managed to recreate the electric vibe of the ’70s and ’80s by inviting rappers “MC” (“Master of Ceremonies” in Spanish) Melle Mel (Melvin Glover) and Scorpio (Eddie Morris), members of the Furious Five.
The AFP spoke with Coke La Rock, 68, who was present on the historic day of August 11, 1973 and who is considered by musicologists to be the true founder of hip-hop.
– The “sons” of rap –
For Coke La Rock, the Bronx and hip-hop are the same thing, because “he doesn’t see any difference between” the neighborhood and the genre.
The artist even sees himself as the father, the “patent” of rap, and all young American and foreign musicians today as his “children,” his “products.”
For Flash, the party on Friday was reminiscent of those of his youth.
“Our mothers always told us to go out and play. I never imagined that I would be part of the best music in the world,” the musician told AFP after the concert.
According to the organizers, Flash had 20 years without performing on stage. In the face of such an event, the Democratic mayor of New York, Eric Adams, a former African-American police captain with a reputation for toughness, declared August 4, 2023 as “Grandmaster Flash Day.”
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© Agencia France-Presse
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