The Greatest Songs Ever! The Message

In June 1982, Joseph “Grandmaster Flash” Saddler, the DJ and founder of the Bronx-based rap group the Furious Five, was nervous. His group had just recorded their latest single under duress from Sylvia Robinson, the owner of Sugar Hill Records. He had reservations about how this gloomy slice of ghetto life would be received by a hip-hop audience accustomed to party songs.

“I remember one person scared the daylights out of me,” Grandmaster Flash admitted a year later. “He said, ‘Flash, I’ve always been your devoted fan, I love you, but I don’t like that record.’ I just stayed in the house, but Mrs. Robinson said, ‘Flash, this is gonna be a big thing.’ You gotta respect the woman for her intuition. All of a sudden, she made one dub, boom, that was it: It blew up. ‘Like a jungle, like a jungle’ on every station.”

That line — “It’s like a jungle sometimes, it makes me wonder how I keep from going under” — didn’t just become the Furious Five’s defining lyric: It marked the dawn of social commentary in hip-hop. A worldwide hit at the time, “The Message,” two decades later, is the only rap record to be included in the Library of Congress’ National Recording Registry. Yet it was the brainchild of a moonlighting percussionist from a rival band, and only featured one member of the Furious Five — MC Melle Mel — ultimately contributing to the tearing apart of the group. Says Grandmaster Flash: “It was the biggest record we ever did, but it was the beginning of the end.”

If not for Robinson’s persistence, “The Message” wouldn’t have been recorded at all. Ed “Duke Bootee” Fletcher, a session percussionist for the Sugarhill Gang, came up with the “jungle” line to accompany an African-influenced rhythm track. He took it to Robinson, who detected the germ of a mold-breaking hit that could move hip-hop forward from the frothy party rhymes of records such as the Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight.”

The Furious Five, however, weren’t convinced. “Nobody liked the song,” Melvin “Melle Mel” Glover says. “It was totally different from what we were doing. Even [Duke Bootee] didn’t think much of it. He had two songs, ‘The Message’ and ‘Dumb Love,’ and he wanted to do ‘Dumb Love.’ Sylvia was the only one who really wanted to do ‘The Message.’ We dodged it for a year or two and then she cornered us.”

For months, the Furious Five failed to come up with lines to accompany Fletcher’s verses and chorus until Robinson picked up on a verse Melle Mel had written three years prior for the “Superrappin’ No. 1” single (“A child was born with no state of mind…”) and asked him to rerecord it for “The Message.” Con-vinced the record only needed two MCs, Robinson tried out Furious Five member Guy “Rahiem” Williams, but ultimately decided against using him on the track. The musical inspirations for the dark, documentary-style accounts of poverty and desperation were politically astute funk poets such as Gil Scott-Heron and the Last Poets. Melle Mel’s lines about jail were partly drawn from a five-day spell he served at the age of 15 for robbing an undercover policeman dressed as a homeless man. The rest came from what he and Fletcher had seen around them on the streets of the Bronx.

The vocals were laid down in Sugar Hill’s studios at 96 West Street in Englewood, New Jersey. “It took maybe a day to cut the track, another day to get the vocal right and maybe three or four days to mix,” Melle Mel recalls. “Everybody wanted to come down to the studio to check out how the song was going.” The backing track, which had transformed beyond recognition from Duke Bootee’s original demo, was assembled by Sugar Hill’s house producer Clifton “Jiggs” Chase. His shivering, arcing synthesizer line formed the song’s musical spine.

Even at that stage, not everyone shared Robinson’s confidence in the song. “It’s like there was no middle,” Grandmaster Flash explains. “For something like this, the risk factor was so high: Either it was going to be a big hit or it was gonna be a miss.” They realized it would be the former when they heard it played at tastemaking Bronx hotspot Disco Fever. “When they played a record like that to a party crowd and people still partied off it, we knew it was a hit record,” Melle Mel says.

“The Message” went gold in 21 days, topped the Village Voice’s prestigious “Pazz & Jop Poll,” and in November 1982, it peaked at 62 on Billboard’s Hot 100 Singles chart.

However, it dealt a death blow to the group’s unity. “My biggest problem with that song is the entire Five wasn’t on it,” Grandmaster Flash says. “That’s probably where Sylvia and I started falling out with each other.” The Furious Five’s subsequent album, also called The Message, failed to match the single’s success. The following year, Grandmaster Flash sued Sugar Hill for $5 million in unpaid royalties, a move which split the group in two, with Furious Five members Melle Mel, Scorpio and Cowboy in Sugar Hill’s corner and Flash, Mel’s brother Kidd Creole and Rahiem in the other.

“Some of the guys went to court, and I stayed around trying to make records,” Melle Mel says. His explanation for the group’s messy demise is simple: “If you don’t have money, you’re looking around for reasons why you ain’t got money, and one of the reasons might have been because we was with a record company that didn’t do business right. But another reason was that we was all fucking high. Everybody was coked out.”

Ironically, the group’s final hit was the anti-cocaine anthem “White Lines (Don’t Do It).” A lawsuit over that song’s unauthorized use of a bassline from punk-funkers Liquid Liquid helped bankrupt Sugar Hill. But the label’s misfortunes didn’t end there. In October 2002, the studio at 96 West Street burned down.

Although Flash and Mel reunited in 1988, they remain polarized over the hit. “‘The Message’ wasn’t one of my favorites,” Grandmaster Flash maintains. “What [Robinson] wanted out of us was totally the opposite of what we were. We were into the DJing thing, the party thing.”

“A hit record is a hit record,” Melle Mel says. “Whether you have a problem with Sylvia and Sugar Hill Records or not, anybody who has a problem with ‘The Message’ is an idiot, because that’s the biggest record that you ever had. If you’re gonna be mad at her, be mad at her for something else but you damn sure can’t be mad at her for that.”

“The Message” has been sampled on hits by Puff Daddy and Ice Cube, while its lyrical legacy is incalculable. By revealing a public appetite for sociopolitical lyrics, it pioneered material that is now fundamental to hip-hop. “It was a heartfelt experience for people to hear that record,” Melle Mel says. “Am I proud of it? It’s one of the greatest records ever. You’ve gotta be proud of it.”