“The Message, released on July 1, 1982, offered a series of unflinchingly honest and discomfiting observations about life in the ghetto, with lead rapper Melle Mel returning to the same weary conclusion: “It’s like a jungle sometime, it makes me wonder how I keep from going under.”
As Rolling Stone observed, “’The Message’ was [the first record] to prove that rap could become the inner city’s voice, as well as its choice.” This slice of unvarnished social realism sold half a million copies in a month, topped numerous critics’ and magazines’ lists of best singles for 1982, and cemented Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s place in hip-hop’s vanguard. “I ask myself to this day, ‘Why do people want to hear this?’” Grandmaster Flash wondered of “The Message” in 1988. “But it’s the only lyric-pictorial record that could be called ‘How Urban America Lived.’” Read more here.
