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Every DJ set you have ever heard — every seamless beat transition, every humanly looped breakbeat, every scratch — is running 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 inarguably 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 problem of how to keep a crowd dancing without ever dropping the beat. In the early 1970s, the solution began with a simple but revolutionary idea — that a vinyl record did not have to be just an audio source.
Grandmaster Flash was the first DJ to use the turntable as a musical instrument by placing his fingers on the vinyl and perfecting beat looping. It's no surprise that The New York Times calls him Hip Hop's first virtuoso.
His determination to manipulate music led to innovations that changed the trajectory of Hip Hop music and culture: the Quik Mix Theory and the wafer - or what is now commercially known as the slipmat.
Today, he's the voice of an entire generation of 1970s Hip Hop pioneers and reminds us of that decades influence through his tours, livestreams, lectures and other projects. Grandmaster Flash is at once a historian, a storyteller, and a cultural force.
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