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Grandmaster Flash (b. Joseph Saddler) was one of the most important creators of the new musical genre rap and developed several crucial aspects of the genre. Saddler's love for music was rooted from lessons of childhood. He tells a story of how his father was an obsessed collector of records and each day before he left for work he would tell his son to stay out of his collection. As soon as his father left, Saddler would go into the collection.
Saddler was the DJ of the group that he formed, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. Grandmaster Flash provided the rap genre a musical foundation by manipulating records on turntables, scratching them, and repeating certain instrumental sections, known as sampling. The irony of it was that Flash created new music out of collages of existing recordings. The most important such work was the single "The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash and the Wheels of Steel," released in 1981.
Most of the group's records, however, featured the interlocking raps of the five rappers. The most significant of the songs was "The Message," released in 1982, led primarily by Melle Mel, which turned away from the party subjects of many rap records to focus on social issues. This party type music was Grandmaster's specialty. Flash's early raps were of the let's-party-and-tell-our-zodiac-signs variety with no consciousness, political or otherwise. The music was good for dancing, but not very stimulating.
After the group broke up in 1984, Grandmaster Flash did not resurface on the mainstream scene until 1993. In 1997 Flash reunited with Melle Mel and released the album Right Now which failed to gain much attention. Flash is now the music director and the DJ for "The Chris Rock Show" on HBO.