Word: flash
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...black, young and ineffably, unflappably cool: "chilly the most." It also shows signs of traveling well. Groups like The Bronx's Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five tour the country, and some new wave nightspots have devoted evenings to the new street music where post-punkers can check out the sartorial flash of the hip hoppers. There are already rap clubs in London, and last summer's No. 1 song on the German charts was a bit of Euro-rap called Der Kommissar...
While the vanguard of this scene may have passed into their 20s, the audience is largely high school. The boys may like to imitate the cocky flash of what a graffiti artist named Phase 2 calls "the stickup kids," but most of them score their clothes as gifts from parents or-goodbye to another bit of downtown mythology-pay for them with money from part-time jobs. Clothes in this culture are seminal enough to work hard for. "People tend to think if you're poor, you're not supposed to have anything," Phase 2 says. "But when...
...premier deejays of the rap scene is Grandmaster Flash, who, with his MCs, the Furious Five, turned out one of 1982's best singles, a seven-minute-long and atypically political number called The Message. Flash and the crew are treach, which is short for treacherous and slang for what a decade ago would have been called superfine. Grandmaster favors leathers, tip to toe, and has FLASH spelled out in lightning-bolt letters on the back of his jacket. Mr. Ness, of the Furious Five, favors metal studs, while his compatriot, Melle Mel, currently opts for fur. This...
...Flash and the Five sport a wardrobe that goes for a lot of "gusto," money, in straight talk, so their audience would be hard pressed for direct imitation. Like rapper talk, which pulls in language from such diverse sources as '40s hipster, '60s hippie and even cockney rhyming slang (Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn's crime-haunted Bedford-Stuyvesant ghetto, is "Do or Die"), rapper flash is eclectic. The jeans, the leathers, the heavy personalized belt buckles, even the jewelry, are modifications of street-gang uniforms. A lot of the aggressive energy that once went into street fighting...
...arguing continued for five full minutes. Finally, the man wearing the flag relented. He nodded his head. He hugged the carabinieri one at a time, kissing them on both cheeks Tears--or was it sweat--were visible on his face. The carabinieri smiled, while the blue lights continued to flash in the background...