The song was named in 2017 by Rolling Stone as the best hip-hop record of all time and has been archived by the Library of Congress. In the last verse, Melle tells a gut-wrenching story about a young man who drops out of school, ends up in jail and dies by suicide after getting repeatedly raped behind bars. "The Message," which features only Duke Bootee and Melle Mel from the group, was the most prominent hip-hop song at the time to feature social commentary. That's the thing that blew a lot of people away was like, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five made some very danceable hip-hop music, but when that record came out, it totally changed everything."Īsked what the title of the song meant to him, Chuck D said, "It means pay attention to the words of hip-hop instead of just the beat." So the change, it came overnight," Chuck D said. "When 'The Message' came out, there was nothing like it. But the future Public Enemy emcee told ABC News that he was "stunned by it." When "The Message" by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five was released in 1982, Chuck D, who would become a hip-hop icon himself, was only a teenager.
We spoke about environments that were overlooked, that didn't have a voice, you know, that didn't have a say, that didn't have pretty much anything." "Because we spoke our own unapologetic truth. it was that voice of the streets that they didn't know what the next line is gonna be and that scared them," he told ABC News. "It was that voice that America couldn't control. In the early 1970s when hip-hop was born in the Bronx, New York, poverty and brutality plagued Black communities, but discussions on race and racism in America were considered taboo and, in the media, the Black experience was stigmatized and suppressed.ĭetroit rapper and activist Royce da 5'9'' said that amid this void, hip-hop artists in the '80s "pushed the envelope in terms of exercising their First Amendment right" and became "the voice of the streets." Thank You 4 Your Service’ suggests that, while they may never have completely patched things up, Tip and Phife were at least able to set aside their differences before Phife’s passing that same year.Decades before "Black Lives Matter" became a global hashtag touted by celebrities and leading politicians, hip-hop artists were profiled, targeted and vilified for broadcasting those same systemic injustices that plagued Black America - a reality that for decades was shut out of mainstream media. As a post-script to the film, Tribe’s 2016 album ‘We got it from Here.
This beautifully presented documentary also captures the sad moment when tensions between Tip and Phife Dawg, friends since the age of two, finally boil over on tour in 2008. This was a rap group unlike any other before it, friends with an interest in jazz who, with their first four albums, rewrote the hip-hop rulebook.Īs Pharrell Williams says in the documentary, producers like him, Madlib, J Dilla and Kanye West would never have sounded the same were it not for the sampladelic approach of Q-Tip on Tribe albums like 1991’s ‘Low End Theory’. “If they like this, wait til they hear ‘Bonita’.” Cut to a shot from the ‘Bonita Applebum’ video, showing A Tribe Called Quest in all their idiosyncratic glory: four nerdy teenagers rapping over a psychedelic guitar loop, wearing not chains and tracksuits but harem pants, aztec shirts and string bracelets. There’s a moment in this documentary where Q-Tip recalls performing ‘El Segundo’ for the first time to a rapturous reception.
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