“The Message” is simply one of the greatest Hip-Hop songs to date. Regardless of the fact that it’s 2006, this song is arguably one of the best hip-hop songs ever released. Humor me.

Three years after the debut of the Sugar Hill Gang’s Rapper’s Delight, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five released “The Message.” Once it dropped, Hip-Hop changed forever. It may not have been a big party song, or made them a lot of money, or even given them a lot of notoriety, but it showed that hip-hop music had a serious message to offer the world about social problems in a decaying inner city setting.

A song like this is unheard of at this point in time. In it’s time, this song truly brought the harsh realities of the city to everyone that was foreign to such issues. Especially in the aftermath of the Vietnam War when Reaganomics were frustrating, American unemployment was skyrocketing, and price of living was dumb-high. Crime was also on the increase and the Cold War over-shadowed all of these domestic issues. Whew, that made you rack your brain something serious right? It’s like that, this song, a direct expression of all those problems bombarding society at once.

“Got a bum education, double-digit inflation
Can’t take the train to the job, there’s a strike at the station
Neon King Kong standin’ on my back
Can’t stop to turn around, broke my sacroiliac
Midrange, migraine, cancered membrane
Sometimes I think I’m going insane, I swear I might hijack a plane!”

What we have here is inner city pathology, or near insanity, by the matrix of the city’s problems.

Sometimes I wonder why mainstream Hip-Hop artists don’t express problems the way Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five did. Although the problems of N.Y.C aren’t quite as bad, they ain’t much prettier. See, we need the level of consciousness to elevate, not so much in the underground, but in the mainstream.

We need 50 cent, Nelly and P. Diddy to stress more important messages. Why? Because people listen to them. A LOT OF PEOPLE. This is crucial. Once the issues of the ghetto and the world are expressed wholeheartedly in Hip-Hop, it will regain the prominence it deserves.

Thursday says:

P ositive

E nergy

A lways

C orrects

E rrors

2 Responses to “Message!!”

1. Punctu Says:
   February 24th, 2006 at 4:32 am

   Big ups on writing up some old school hip-hop, ’cause kids need to realize that hip-hop existed before 50. The Message was also a good choice- hitting levels of consciousness and hip-hop history. As for the mainstream having a conscious voice, well Nas, even though his air play is limited, is the mainstream’s social voice. Kiss was able to drop some knowledge, or atleast provke heads to think with “Why”. Now, thanks to Mr. West, the unfocused mainstream has come to accept the message that Common has been spitting for years. There are others who have drop important messages in their songs in the mainstream’s chilly waters, but the main problem is the audiences of popular rap acts do not want to think about anything important when listening to music; so the people in charge of brainwashing humans with sonic vile are not readily willing to play the thinking man’s music. When heads believed that rap was a fad, artists could be as open and truthful as needed with their art, and the listener was willing to practiced the art of listening-and-thinking (mainly because both were of the same struggle and understood the power of the music). Hip-hop may never be like that again with all this money circulating around the U.S. Your best bet, don’t pay too much attention to the mainstream, or at least serious attention. Check some of that independent stuff out, or better yet, foreign hip-hop (i.e. almost anything that does not have american english in it, like French and Brazilian hip-hop). Casper.

2. ryan Says:
   March 2nd, 2006 at 4:00 pm

   hey this is ryan in boston cool website:

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