You got to have a con in this land of milk and honey Wear a shirt and tie and run with the creepsĬause it’s all about money, ain’t a damn thing funny If I just got a job, learned to be a street sweeper Many of the lyrics seem particularly relevant in today’s highly aspirational and Conservative political climate: Sometimes using problematic stigmatising language to describe the desperate situations experienced by people living in a forgotten ghetto, it acts as a first person account of the frustration and despair experienced when being suffocated by one’s circumstances. ‘The Message’ was written by Duke Bootee and the late “ mother of Hip-hop” Sylvia Robinson. (According to Melle Mel, the group were used to doing party raps boasting about how good they were.) Speaking about the track to NPR a decade later, rapper Melle Mel said that he hadn’t thought the record “would be pivotal either way” and was therefore shocked by positive responses to test plays in both a Manhattan record shop and Bronx club ( Disco Fever), having assumed the record would result in “a lapse in the intensity of the crowd”.
Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five‘s hit was widely credited as the “ first prominent Hip-Hop song to provide a lyrical social commentary” but was not immediately embraced by members of the group when they were introduced to it by their label Sugar Hill.
In the early 1980s, before the political hip hop standard ‘ The Message‘ was released, hip-hop was largely about partying. Socially conscious hip-hop co-produced by Sugar Hill founder Sylvia Robinson
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