Giving Grandmaster Flowers his flowers

The Bronx – with good reason – figures heavily in scholarly discussion of the early years of hip hop and its influences. At the same time, this focus has marginalized the surrounding boroughs of New York City and their contributions to the genre. While placing Bronx as a focal point is justified, the approach to scholarship tends to overemphasize the Bronx at the expense of other crucial locations. Scholars such as Jeff Chang and Nelson George have examined in great detail hip hop’s beginnings, but only recently have scholars such as E. Moncell Durden focused on decentering the Bronx and refocus hip hop as a progression of cultural practices. Scholarship has provided evidence of proto-hip hop elements being utilized such as the toasting traditions in Jamaican Dancehall music that influenced MC traditions and multiple bands used to provide continuous music akin to deejaying. Yet, when addressing the technical elements of deejaying, the Bronx remains the focal point with little pre-hip hop history discussed other than Jamaican influences. This article argues that while early hip hop studies should certainly continue to acknowledge the importance of the Bronx, the field must also incorporate technological advancements and innovations of pre-hip hop deejays. The significance of this approach is to remove the ‘direct line’ narrative that connects Jamaica to Kool Herc to hip hop and address the complex web of more immediate influences on hip hop. In this article, I complicate the influences of pre-hip hop by navigating the musical practices of Brooklyn DJ Grandmaster Flowers, a deejay who has been cited as one of the first to beatmatch (playing two or more songs at the same speed and time so that the beats seamlessly sync) and use multiple turntables to create new music. This article provides a summary of what is generally known of Grandmaster Flowers, what is contested with his practices and why his name is consistently removed from literature about early hip hop studies.