The Message (Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five song)
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"It's like a jungle sometimes it makes me wonder how I keep from going under." --"The Message" (1982) by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five |
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"The Message" is a song by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. It was released as a single by Sugar Hill Records on July 1, 1982, and was later featured on the group's first studio album, The Message.
"The Message" was an early prominent hip hop song to provide a social commentary. The song's lyrics describe the stress of inner-city poverty. In the final verses it is described how a child born in the ghetto without perspective in life is lured away into crime, for which he is jailed until he commits suicide in his cell. The song ends with a brief skit in which the band members are arrested for no clear reason.
"The Message" took rap music from the house parties of its origin to the social platforms later developed by groups like Public Enemy and KRS-One. Melle Mel said in an interview with NPR: "Our group, like Flash and the Furious Five, we didn't actually want to do 'The Message' because we was used to doing party raps and boasting how good we are and all that."
The song was first written in 1980 by Duke Bootee and Melle Mel, in response to the 1980 New York City transit strike, which is mentioned in the song's lyrics. The line "A child is born with no state of mind, blind to the ways of mankind" was taken from the early Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five track "Superrappin'" from 1979 on the Enjoy label.
Legacy
The song's signature synthesizer riff has been sampled by popular rap artists such as Ice Cube on "Check Yo Self", Puff Daddy on "Can't Nobody Hold Me Down" on No Way Out (1997) and Ahmad on "Only If You Want It." The song's chorus of "Don't push me 'cuz I'm close to the edge" has become one of the most well known choruses in rap music history. Lyrics from the song have also been used (albeit with varying degrees of alteration) many times in hip hop songs by artists such as Andre Nickatina ("Jungle" and "The Stress Factor"), AZ ("Sunshine"), Mos Def ("Close Edge"), Talib Kweli ("Broken Glass"), Snoop Dogg ("2 of Amerikaz Most Wanted" and "Gangbangin 101"), Coolio ("County Line"), Mickey Avalon ("Waiting to Die"), dead prez ("Psychology"), Common ("Chapter 13 [Rich Man vs. Poor Man]"), and Immortal Technique ("Obnoxious"). In addition, it was sampled in the song "Magic Spells" by the Toronto based chiptune-band Crystal Castles.
"The Message" was included as ingame radio music for the 2002 video game Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, and the 2006 video game Scarface: The World Is Yours, an adaption of the 1983 film. For the MTV-produced compilation album Lit Riffs: The Soundtrack in 2004, the band Katsu supplied a stripped-down cover version of "The Message". It also appears in the film Happy Feet. The second and last verse of the song are sung by Mushroomhead in the song "Born of Desire" off their XX album. Additionally, The Madow Brothers have parodied this song with dental lyrics for their dental seminars. American singer-songwriter Willy Mason also covered this song for BBC Radio 1's Live Lounge on the 25th of February 2005.
In 2007, the 25th anniversary of "The Message", Melle Mel changed the spelling of his first name to Mele Mel and released "M3 - The New Message" as the first single to his first ever solo album, Muscles. 2007 is also the year that Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five became the first hip-hop act ever to be inducted into The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. "The Message" was number 5 on VH1's 100 Greatest Songs of Hip Hop.
References
Jeff Chang Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation. (2005) New York: St. Martin's Press.
