Suddenly, you couldn't dismiss rap as a weird party-music fad anymore. It changed both the sound and the narrative of rap music. It immediately became the Furious Five's biggest hit: #4 on the Billboard R&B chart, #62 on the Hot 100, top-10 in the UK. Robinson was right about "The Message" being special. The party-rap of the Sugarhill Gang was starting to lose its luster, and she needed something cold and otherworldly, something that could compete with Afrika Bambaataa & Soul Sonic Force's underground electro smash "Planet Rock." She didn't care what the actual Grandmaster Flash thought of it. To Robinson, "Grandmaster Flash" was just a brand name, one that would help "The Message" find an audience. Sylvia Robinson co-produced "The Message." She helped pick out the drum-machine sounds. It didn't matter that Flash didn't want to release "The Message" or that four of the Furious Five didn't rap on it. Melle had already rapped a whole verse from "The Message" in the middle of "Superrappin'." But "Superrappin'" is an uptempo party song, so it's a weird diversion when Melle starts talking about "you'll grow in the ghetto, living second-rate, and your eyes will sing a song of deep hate." On "Superrappin'," immediately after Melle finishes his story about a young man hanging himself in a jail cell, he goes right into "one two three four five six seven, rap like hell and make it sound like heaven." A song like "Superrappin'" exists as something aspirational, a way to imagine a life beyond the squalor that Melle describes on that verse. In fact, he'd been rapping many of the exact same lines.
Melle Mel had been rapping devastation and desperation for a long time. "The Message" didn't make sense to Flash. Flash was dead-set against releasing "The Message," the song that would become his group's biggest hit and most enduring legacy. Most of the time, he barely even got a say in what his group was doing. "The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel" is an exceptional record, partly because it captures a master at work and partly because it's the only record of its kind, the sole moment where Flash really got to assert himself in a recording studio. In one testy moment, Sylvia Robinson once told Flash, "In the real world, no one knows you from a can of paint." But at Enjoy, and then at Sugar Hill, Flash was just a name on a record. In the early days of hip-hop, the DJ was king, and the rappers were just there to complement what he was doing. Grandmaster Flash was the man who put the group together, the unquestioned headliner. The band played on almost all the label's records, doing the work that samples would do in later years.
GRANDMASTER FLASH AND THE FURIOUS FIVE MEMBERS CRACK
Sugar Hill had a crack in-house live band, one capable of replicating the grooves of the funk and disco hits of the day. "Superrappin'" was a local hit in New York, so Sugar Hill Records owners Joe and Sylvia Robinson, flush with cash after the international success of "Rapper's Delight," lured Flash and the Five away from Enjoy and started putting out their singles.
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