The father of turntablism breaks down DJing, Drake, and Netflix’s new series The Get Down.
AS A MUSIC-OBSESSED teen growing up in the Bronx in the 1970s, Joseph Saddler noticed that every party song had one drum break or keyboard solo that made dancers go wild. What if you could string those fragments together to create a nonstop frenzy?
So Saddler, an electronics student at Samuel Gompers Vocational High School, set about transforming the humble turntable into an instrument. Using a jerry-rigged cross fader and two platters side by side, DJ Grandmaster Flash, as Saddler rechristened himself, helped lay the foundation for the emerging “hip-hop” style. He and his now-estrang ed crew, the Furious Five (which he won’t discuss due to a legal dispute), shared in some of the genre’s earliest hits, such as “Freedom,” “New York New York,” and “The Message.” In 2007, they were the fi rst hip-hop artists inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Now Flash is revisiting those seminal days as an associate producer on The Get Down, a new Netflix drama set in ’70s-era New York. The series, which launches in mid-August, was created by movie director Baz Luhrmann and includes actor Mamoudou Athie as the youthful Flash. We asked Alan Light, a founding editor of Vibe and former editor-in-chief of Spin magazine, to run a mic check with the Grandmaster.
ALAN LIGHT: So how did you and Baz Luhrmann connect?
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