Word: flash
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...became Grandmaster Flash. He played his turntables as if he were Jimi Hendrix, cuing records with his elbow, his feet, behind his back. He invented "scratching"--spinning a record back and forth to create a scratchy sound. He tried rapping, but he couldn't do it, so he gathered a crew around him--the Furious Five, rap's first supergroup...
Things happened fast. This is the remix. There were start-up labels like Sugar Hill and Tommy Boy. Then in 1979 came Rapper's Delight--the first rap song most people remember. Grandmaster Flash warned, "Don't touch me 'cause I'm close to the edge." Then there was Run-D.M.C. rocking the house, and the Beastie Boys hollering, "You gotta fight for your right--to party!" and Public Enemy saying, "Don't believe the hype," and Hammer's harem-style balloon pants. Then gangsta rap: N.W.A. rapping "F____ tha police"; Snoop drawling "187 on an undercover...
Friday night at Life, a dance club in lower Manhattan. Grandmaster Flash pulls the 11-p.m.-to-2-a.m. shift, and he's doing his thing. The Furious Five have long since broken up. Flash had drug problems, money problems and a court battle with his old record company, Sugar Hill, but he says today he has no ill will. He's the musical director on HBO's popular Chris Rock Show. And he's helping to develop a movie script about his life. "I was bitter a while back because I got into this for the love," says Flash...
...Well, while this album isn't a creative breakthrough, it does have charm and verve. A number of songs are anthem-like and uplifting, and when Alexander howls the choruses, he seems convinced that what he's doing is powerful and revelatory, and now and again, for a sweet flash, he makes the listener believe it too. One other thing: he is a better performer than Marilyn Manson...
...sheer dimensions of the brutalization in Freetown in the past few weeks have been hard even for resolute aid workers to withstand. The images that flash by them are otherworldly, they say. Marie de la Soudiere, who heads the International Rescue Committee's Children in Armed Conflict Unit, is still haunted by the shy six-year-old girl outside Freetown who raised the stump of her arm and asked, "Will my fingers grow back...