Grandmaster Flash

Every DJ set you have ever heard—every seamless beat transition, every manually looped breakbeat, every scratch—runs on an operating system that one person built in a bedroom in the South Bronx.

Born and raised in the South Bronx, Grandmaster Flash is widely recognized as one of Hip Hop’s original innovators.

Grandmaster Flash is one of Hip Hop’s Founding Fathers and its first scientist: a teenager trained in electronics who spent two years applying the scientific method to the challenge of keeping a crowd dancing without ever losing the beat. In the early 1970s, his solution began with a simple but revolutionary idea—that a vinyl record could be more than just an audio source.

Grandmaster Flash became the first DJ to use the turntable as a musical instrument, placing his fingers on the vinyl and perfecting the art of beat looping. It is no surprise that The New York Times has called him Hip Hop’s first virtuoso.

His determination to manipulate and transform music led to innovations that changed the trajectory of Hip Hop culture, including the Quik Mix Theory and the wafer—now commercially known as the slipmat.

Today, Grandmaster Flash serves as the voice of an entire generation of 1970s Hip Hop pioneers, sharing the history and influence of that era through his tours, livestreams, lectures, and other projects. He is simultaneously a historian, a storyteller, and a cultural force.