THE MESSAGE AT 40: CELEBRATING DUKE BOOTEE'S CONCEPTUAL GENIUS BY SHELDON TAYLOR

 

Dig deep in rap’s archival history and you'll unearth many watershed moments. One of them is undoubtedly the release of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s 1982 single The Message forty years ago this month.

Painting panoramic scenes of urban blight and decay, The Message pushed rap beyond typical party-hearty themes that resonated with listeners. I was 13 years old when the record dropped. In my mind's eye, I can still see Furious Five lead emcee Melle Mell on Soul Train menacingly wielding a baseball bat. His depiction of dopefiends with larceny in their cold hearts was chilling: Junkies in the alley with the baseball bat......

Reveling in its vividness I committed the song to memory. It was next-level freshness. Young rap fans like me loved it. Older listeners weaned on Gil Scott-Heron or The Last Poets' would connect the dots and lavish praise. 

Rap records were arriving at a dizzying pace. While the East Coast streamed the music with no interruption, the rest of us residing beyond the eastern corridor caught these urban episodes in syndication or piece-meal;  Picking up the signal when we could, The Message's telegraphic signal was clear. In '82 it was the only rap song (alongside Whodini's Magic's Wand ) that I heard that was ever played on daytime radio.

Already considered one of rap's elite groups, the song's instant success caused Flash and the Furious Five's star to rose higher, separating them from the rest of the rap pack. Despite crossover moments (Run-D.M.C.) and blinding career highlights (Jay-Z), nothing could dwarf The Message's seminal impact. 

Even when the group's fortunes waned, adulation and acclaim remained. 

The Message lived on as samples in popular records. In certain circles, the song is still considered the pinnacle of rap music prompting a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction for the Furious Five---the first for a rap group. In 2021, a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award would follow.

Core fans may point to selections from their 1979-1981catalog---Superrappin, Freedom, It's Nasty, The Birthday Party, The Adventure of Grandmaster Flash On The Wheels of Steel, and Flash To The Beat as worthy career validations but it would be The Message that forever sealed rap's first super group's place in music immortality.  

The Message's back story is well known. 

The song is presented to the group. They reject it. Lead emcee Melle Mel consents and records it. Plucked from an early recording, his brilliant "A Child Is Born" rhyme ends up becoming The Message's climactic ending. 

The entire group's name is featured on the record sealing their historical fate. It's a industry practice that's not uncommon: Diana Ross and the Supremes' Love Child (1968) and Someday We'll Be Together (1970) only features Ross's leads. Background vocals are performed by the Adantes. 

Philly soul anthem Wake Up Everybody (1975) is a Teddy Pendergrass solo moment yet it's billed as a Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes recording.

Pre-Message and keeping with rap hierarchy of the time----Flash is the group's de facto leader. Success shatters that dynamic. Financial disputes, implosions, and lawsuits dismantle the group at the apex of their career. 

A comet-like career trajectory came crashing down to earth. 

Cemented as rap's undisputed king emcee, Mel leaves the party rhymes behind for good. He campaigns for Jesse Jackson (rap single "Jesse") and teams up with Chaka Khan ("I Feel For You"). A rap soothsayer and hip hop Spartucus rolled into one---Mel delivers dynamic and apocalyptic performances on a series of Message-inspired songs while holding his own against rap's new galaxy of stars who've supplanted the old. 

Less celebrated is The Message's main songwriter: Duke Bootee. 

Aside from occasional write-ups or odd interviews, public acknowledgment is elusive. By choice or committee---Bootee's been absent from commemorative and milestone moments associated with his compositional brainchild. His 2021 passing closes the chapter of hopeful possibility forever. Squandered moments will never be rectified. 

 Ten to twelve years older than most members of the Furious Five--- thirty-one-year-old Bootee didn't view rap through the lens of his younger Sugar Hill colleagues (most were in their late teens and early twenties). It was the biting spoken-word commentary of his youth---Gil Scott- Heron's Small Talk At 125th Street (1970), Pieces of A Man (1971), and The Last Poets' This Is Madness" (1970) coupled with the withering world outside  Elizabeth, New Jersey window that was his inspiration.

Bookended by Mel's granite growl, Bootee's baritone is in lockstep with Scott-Heron's telegraphic timbre. An ex-school teacher with an English degree---through Bootee's command of language peeks precursors to future styles of rap's legendary emcees. 

There's bits of Ice Cube's side-eyed cynicism:

"And all the kids I just smoke reefer, I'd think it be cheaper

  If just got a job learned to be a street sweeper"

While Mel adds the drama,  Bootee plays it straight. When he does switch things up, he reaches back to his academic past, flaunting complex vocabulary, internal rhyme schemes, syncopation, and alliteration associated with a parade of emcees from LL and Kane to G-Rap and Rakim. It foreshadows what's next on hip hop's horizon:

"Got a bum education, double-digit inflation 

 Can't even get a job there's a strike at the station

A nee-on King Kong standing on my back

Can't even turn around broke my sacroiliac 

a midrange migraine cancer membrane.....  

Bootee-penned couplets in the song's second verse (performed by Mel) anticipate Rakim's signature syncopated push-and-pull: 

"Said she danced a tango, skipped a light fandango

  A zircon princess, seemed to lost her senses"

Bootee's "zircon princess" line---code for The Message's delusional wayward female wandering 42nd Street's seedy blocks---is a prelude to the abstract coded metaphors associated with groups like De La Soul and Wu-Tang Clan.

Bootee's lyrical putdown---"All My Children in the daytime/Dallas at night/can't even see the game/ or the Sugar Ray fight" is a three-punch combination. 

It's a dismissal that informs Public Enemy's 1987 She Watch Channel Zero:

"Two, seven, five four, eight she watched

 all added up to zero---ain't nothin' in her head

 she turns and turns

and she hopes the soaps are real...." 

Besides lightening the song's heavy mood, early 80s TV and sports references give The Message a real-time immediacy, predicting future emcees' penchant for dropping pop culture lines in their rhymes (see: Grand Puba, Kane, Biggie, Kanye among many). 

It's akin to Rakim's sly aside in Eric B For President dropped in the sea of Janet Jackson's '86 chart domination:

"But now it's out of hand cuz you told me you hate me

  And then you ask me what have I done lately"

Like Nas said, no idea is original. Poetry is infinite. Bootee understands this. His lethal weapon is his mind. Less a creator, he's still an innovator in the first order.  

Bootee and Mel would collaborate on two more releases in 1983: Survival (The Message II) and New York, New York. Bootee's brainchild would live on in subsequent Melle Mel releases White Lines, Beat Street, and revamped Furious Five album cut World War III. 

Other rappers tried on Bootee's conceptual shoes for size. 

Between '83 and 85 a slew of records mining Bootee's seminal concept. Run-D.M.C. would go to the well three times: It's Like That, You're Blind ("tenement buildings and skyscrapers") and a remake of Kurtis Blow's 1980 proto-Message track Hard Times. Four years later Blow would re-up with Eight Million Stories. Divine Sounds released What People Do For Money.

Queens funk band The Fatback Band's third exploration into rap (following up '79s ill-timed Personality Jock and '80's Gotta Get My Hands On Some (Money)---1983's  Is This The Future? finds the sonorous voice of  New York WWRL dj Gerry Bledsoe standing in for Bootee's weary baritone.

The list is endless: there's Whodini's manic Escape and Nas' N.Y. State of Mind ("laughin' at baseheads/tryin' to sell some broken amps"). From West Coast/Midwest rap and Southern trap, The Message's influence is far-reaching. It brought respectability and range to rap music. Entire regions and coasts would find their voice in The Message's accessible alternative to New York's fly party-rock and muscular braggadocio. It's the wind beneath Melle Mel's wings elevating him from super to superb to supreme.

Duke Bootee is rap's poet laureate. Not quite an emcee---he's a true lyricist in every sense of the word---not in terms of hip hop's complexity camouflage cloaked in elitism, but in a simplistic genius that whittles the most intricate sixteen bars down to size.