Blondie, Grandmaster Flash and the Future of Hip Hop

On Valentine’s Day 1981 Deborah Harry was the headlining musical guest on “Saturday Night Live.” A product of the fertile downtown Manhattan musical scene, centered around the CBGB club on the Bowery, she had gone pop with a series of hit singles, including Blondie’s “Rapture,” which reached No. 1 in 1981. The track, a tribute to an uptown musical culture that most Americans viewed as a curiosity or fad (if they had any awareness of it at all), name-checked a few seminal New York figures, including Grandmaster Flash, the pioneering D.J. whose group the Furious Five formed in 1976 and broke musical ground at house parties in the South Bronx before cracking into the Top 100 in 1982 with the socially conscious rap anthem “The Message,” and Fab 5 Freddy, a Brooklyn-based graffiti artist who acted as a liaison between street artists, the commercial art world and downtown clubs. At the urging of Blondie’s Harry and the band’s guitarist Chris Stein, “S.N.L.” booked the Bronx’s Funky 4 + 1 (four male rappers and pioneering female M.C. Sha-Rock) to perform their single “That’s the Joint” for the show’s final number of the night. Harry’s rapped verse on “Rapture” was, for most people, a proxy introduction to hip-hop, but it was the Funky 4 + 1 that gave network television viewers the first true taste of what young New Yorkers had been experiencing in parks, subways and schoolyards for several years already.

From “How It Changed…Music, Language, Downtown—and White People” by Nelson George for New York Times Style Magazine; Photo of Grandmaster Flash’s turntable from the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution

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