Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five

Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five were a pioneering American hip-hop group formed in the South Bronx, New York City, in the mid-1970s. The lineup paired turntablist Grandmaster Flash with five MCs — Melle Mel, Kidd Creole, Cowboy, Mr. Ness/Scorpio, and Rahiem — combining innovative DJ techniques like backspinning and the quick-mix theory with tightly interlocking group vocals. Flash's technical mastery of the turntables as an instrument, developed at Bronx block parties, helped establish the foundational vocabulary of hip-hop DJing.

The group's most celebrated achievement is «The Message» (1982), a stark, socially conscious track about urban poverty and desperation that expanded what rap music could address lyrically, moving beyond party rhymes into reportage on ghetto life. Earlier tracks like «Superappin’» and «Freedom» captured the group's dynamic live energy, while «The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel» (1981) stands as one of the first recorded showcases of turntable scratching and mixing as a compositional technique.

Their influence on hip-hop, and popular music broadly, is difficult to overstate: they set standards for MC interplay, DJ showmanship, and socially engaged lyricism that generations of artists built upon. In 2007 the group became the first hip-hop act inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, cementing their status as founding figures of the genre.