Grandmaster Flash: ‘Hip-hop’s message was simple: we matter’

Ahead of Baz Luhrmann’s TV dramatisation of rap’s roots, The Get Down, we turn back the clock to 1970s New York, when the youth of the neglected South Bronx sowed the seeds of a musical revolutionHistory remembers the South Bronx in the 1970s as an urban catastrophe; the ground zero of a city in crisis. Unemployment and poverty were sky-high, as was crime, overwhelming police precincts and fire stations that were squeezed by austerity. Whole blocks were reduced to ghost towns as cyni