Grandmaster Flash: ‘HipHop’s message was simple: we matter’

Grandmaster Flash and The Furious Five’s seminal HipHop record was released today in 1982.

History remembers the South Bronx in the 1970s as an urban catastrophe; the ground zero of a city in crisis. Unemployment and poverty were sky-high, as was crime, overwhelming police precincts and fire stations that were squeezed by austerity. Whole blocks were reduced to ghost towns as cynical landlords torched their unsellable properties for insurance money. By the end of the decade, the South Bronx had lost almost 40% of its population. Touring the rubble in 1980, Ronald Reagan compared the neglected neighbourhood to London during the blitz. One local health official called it “a necropolis – a city of death”.

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