Hip-Hop pioneer Scorpio of Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five rolled through with a message earlier this week. While hanging backstage at a show, the trailblazing MC had a few moments to rattle off his thoughts about the current rap landscape. Mainly, he was focused on giving props to the next wave of female rappers.
“Everybody is doing their thing, females taking over,” he says in the clip. “Big up to all the sisters out there in the Bronx—Ice Spice, Scar Lip, all of them—even if it’s not your style of music, they gettin’ up out the mud, so we gotta salute.” Scorpio went on to salute a West Coast DJ by the name of DJ AK who’s “doing his thing.”
Scorpio’s sentiments are refreshing in an age where many rap newcomers are sometimes shunned by their elders. But Scorp knows a thing or two about coming up in the music business. With a career that stretches back decades, the Hip-Hop OG has witnessed the culture’s evolution since its inception. He was only 18 years old when Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five released “The Message” in July 1982, one of the most important Hip-Hop tracks in music history.
“The Message” is often considered the first socio-political rap song, with its lyrics depicting a solemn portrait of their New York City environment. As kids, the group didn’t see Sylvia Robinson’s vision for the song at first, but the Sugar Hill Records founder/CEO trusted her instincts. Written in 1980 by Duke Bootee and Melle Mel as a response to the 1980 New York City transit strike, the track details the violence and poverty surrounding them with lines such as, “Broken glass everywhere/People pissing on the stairs, you know they just don’t care/I can’t take the smell, can’t take the noise/Got no money to move out, I guess I got no choice.”
Speaking on the 40th anniversary of “The Message” in July 2022, Scorpio explained how the song signaled the end of their youth. He said, “I think one of the important things about that song is it just have us trusting in things that we didn’t trust in sometimes. Like with music, you gotta get out of your own ego. Because realistically, we hated that song. We couldn’t stand that song. We didn’t think that it had no reality to us, but thank God Ms. Robinson had the better vision.
“Thinking, because we was coming from the Bronx, that it’ll match better versus putting it with somebody else, or whatever the case may be. So just trusting in other people was the biggest lesson. We don’t have all of the answers. No artists have all of the answers.”
It’s not dissimilar to what young rappers are doing today—describing their environments and what they experience in their own neighborhoods. Like many of his peers, Scorpio is celebrating Hip-Hop’s 50th birthday all year long—with the young and “old.” He concludes in the clip, “50 years of Hip-Hop in the m###########’ building. Stop playin’.”