But sometimes tension sparks creativity, too, and with ''The Message'' that seems to have happened to Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. Some of those ties make for a contradictory tension between entertainment, idealism and anger. Aside from the primacy of rhythm, there were the same flamboyant costumes, the same choreography, the same efforts to involve the audience, and even the same tired invocations of astrological information, requests for peace signs and the reiterations - right after the tortured fury of ''The Message'' - that the theme of the evening was ''unity.'' And there can be no denying the appeal of a group as energetic and charming as the Furious Five.īut what struck this listener more than the novelty of the act was its links to black popular music of the last 30 years. But in so doing it focuses attention on rhythm, fulfilling what had been implied in so much earlier soul, disco and funk. Rap has its limits, in that it eschews the melodic element that has been essential to most popular music. But it was preceded by several other set pieces, interspersed with ritualistic invocations to the audience to participate that were so lively and clever that the set became a dancing, pulsating whole.
''The Message'' owes its appeal to dramatic ''hooks'' and its graphic depiction of the frustrations and anger of an urban black - the refrain, chanted with odd, ominous rhythmic dislocations, is ''Don't push me, 'cause I'm close to the edge I'm trying not to lose my head.'' The song formed the climax of Wednesday's show. But sometimes Flash and his partner chant, too, and sometimes they abandon their turntables to dance and gyrate with the rest. The Furious Five, in turn, are the front line of rappers, trading off the lines and sometimes chanting together. In this group, Grandmaster Flash himself is the principal disk jockey, and he and an assistant used three turntables Wednesday. Usually the instrumental background is provided by a live disk jockey who switches between turntables, cross-fading tracks and tricking them up in a variety of ingenious ways. Rap is a form that blends chanted black street dialect in rhyming couplets with a jumping funk rhythm track. The result was the kind of dancing, shouting excitement that is supposed to define the rock experience. Grandmaster Flash and his five -who are actually six, making seven in all - brought ''The Message'' in live performance to New York Wednesday night with a single set at the Peppermint Lounge.
Such enthusiasm is currently being felt, among rock tastemakers and New York dance-club audiences, for a rap song called ''The Message'' by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. But one of the things that enlivens pop is the very way in which a consensus can suddenly form about a particular group or song. At the same time, they gained noteriety thanks to socially conscious singles like ' The Message ' or ' White Lines (Don't Do It) '. Backed primarily by the Sugar Hill house band early on, the group wrote party-friendly anthems.
Elitists condemn popular music for its faddishness. Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five were one of the first hip-hop groups to come out of NYC in the late 70s early 80s. Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five discography and songs: Music profile for Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five, formed 1978.
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