By Erin O'Hare '15
There was a “Flash mob” inside Siena College’s Sarazen Student Union last week. It wasn’t an impromptu dance, but rather a crowd of students, and community members who came together to hear music revolutionary DJ Grandmaster Flash deliver a firsthand account of his role in the birth of hip-hop, one of the world’s most popular music genres and cultural movements.
Grandmaster Flash’s appearance kicked-off Siena’s second annual Hip-Hop Week, which is sponsored by the Damietta Cross-Cultural Center.
“If there was a Mount Rushmore of hip-hop, Flash would be in the middle of it,” said Todd Snyder, Ph.D., assistant professor of English during his introduction. Snyder teaches a course titled Hip-Hop and Rhetoric(s).
The BET Hip-Hop Icon Award winner, born Joseph Saddler, is best known for his work with the group Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five and their production of the iconic song, “The Message.” The group was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2007, making Grandmaster Flash the first DJ to receive that honor.
Grandmaster Flash is currently touring and beginning to enter the digital world of DJing, but it was his development of groundbreaking techniques, including “cutting,” “back-spinning” and “phasing,” that paved the way for much of the hip-hop music being produced today.
Flash told the audience that his frustration with music in the 1970s, particularly the feeling that drummers were not given enough time in songs, led to the style he made famous. Grandmaster Flash sampled from famous bands such as Thin Lizzy and Led Zeppelin and incorporated music from a variety of genres to make his tracks. Still, when Flash was developing this new sound as a teenager in New York City, he struggled to get people to connect with it.
“Never in my wildest dreams did I think this would turn into the way music was going to be played,” Flash said.
During his lecture Grandmaster Flash described hip-hop as “people’s music,” explaining that artists strive not to surpass each other, but to make music that people will want. “My biggest competition has and will always be, you,” he said to the crowd.
Grandmaster Flash said that hip-hop has also helped to bring people together because it incorporates musical elements from so many genres and cultures. “Music is a wonderful, incredible blur,” said Grandmaster Flash. “I’m still reading the blur.”
Despite his success, Grandmaster Flash still maintains his modesty. “What’s so great to me is that I do not know it all,” he said. “There’s always something new to learn.”
He challenged the Siena College students in the audience to pursue their interests, chase their dreams and make an impact on society as a whole. “Somebody in this room can be the next person to serve the world with what’s going on inside your head,” said Grandmaster Flash.
Hip-Hop Week concluded with another memorable event on Friday, the Street Art Expo sponsored by the Student Events Board. Graffiti artist Justin Rosales spent the day creating an original piece of art inside the Sarazen Student Union. The video below is a time lapse that shows you how Rosales created the “Siena Student Life” painting.
“During the course of the week students had the opportunity to hear a hip-hop legend deliver a keynote, celebrate the College’s first spoken word competition and see a graffiti artist tag an original piece for the community,” said event organizer, assistant director of the Damietta Cross-Cultural Center Valencia Constant.
Constant added that Hip-Hop Week, which has now become an annual tradition, opens students’ eyes to various aspects of hip-hop culture to show them that it is an outlet to talk about real issues.
