Unlike many early hip-hop hits, like Sugarhill Gang's " Rapper's Delight" or Kurtis Blow's " The Breaks," which turned on thumping, up-tempo disco tracks, composers Ed "Duke Bootee" Fletcher and MC Melle Mel based "The Message" on a slow groove and a reverberated synthesizer hook. And while the song's importance cannot be overstated within the development of Hip-Hop, specifically, its influence extends well beyond popular music: as seen, for example, by its inclusion in academic texts like The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. Indeed, when Public Enemy leader Chuck D proclaimed, famously, in the late '80s, that rap's ongoing documentation of problems for inner city African Americans made it "the black CNN," it was presumably songs like "The Message" and its inheritors that he had in mind. With its hard-boiled chorus ("It's like a jungle sometimes / It makes me wonder how I keep from going under.") and unflinching observation of the perils and anxieties of contemporary urban life, "The Message" compelled Hip-Hop records away from their early emphasis on party anthems and empty braggadocio and toward the fearless social commentary that has dominated many of the form's most important recordings since. "The Message" is the best-known track by legendary hip-hop innovators Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, and is a song that, without exaggeration, changed rap music's tone and content forever.
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