Melle Mel
Melle Mel (b. Melvin Glover, New York City, New York, USA) was a typical black ‘ghetto child’ whose interest in music originally stemmed from the Beatles. He soon embraced the earliest sounds of hip hop in the mid '70s, becoming a breakdancer with the D-Squad. As a DJ with his brother Kid Creole he was influenced by others in the profession like Klark Kent and Timmy Tim who used to talk rhymes whilst playing music. The pair started their own brand of rapping and around 1977 set up with another DJ, Grandmaster Flash—who gave Melle Mel his new name. Flash already had one MC—Cowboy—with him, and so the new team became Grandmaster Flash and the 3MCs. Over the next couple of years they were joined by Scorpio and then Rahiem. Spurred by the success Of Rapper's Delight by the Sugarhill Gang, Flash's team recorded We Rap More Mellow under the name The Young Generation. Both it and a second single (Sugar Rappin) flopped but then they signed to Sugarhill Records as Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. Together they recorded one of rap's greatest standards, The Message. A hugely significant record which took hip hop away from braggadocio into social commentary, the featured vocalist was Melle Mel. Subsequent releases over the next few years came out under a wide variety of names and the battle for best billing plus squabbles with management and record company eventually led to the group splitting in two in 1984. A deep rift between Flash and Mel came about because, according to the latter: ‘We'd known that Sugarhill was crooks when we first signed with 'em, so the plan had always been to build it up to a certain point where…. they couldn't keep on taking the money that they was taking! That's what I'd been banking on, but those that left didn't seem to see it the same way’. Mel retained Cowboy and Scorpio and recruited another of his brothers King Louie III plus Tommy Gunn, Kami Kaze, and Clayton Savage. Flash had inaugurated a $5 million court action against Sylvia Robinson's Sugarhill label to attain full rights to the Grandmaster Flash name, which he lost. The group's new operating title was thus Grandmaster Melle Mel & The Furious Five. The name was forced on the band by Sugarhill, though it infuriated Flash and Mel himself was unhappy with it. Singles like Beat Street Breakdown Part 1, and We Don't Work For Free would fail to break the upper echelons of the charts, though Mel did appear on the intro to Chaka Khan's worldwide smash I Feel For You. There was also a UK Top 10 hit with Step Off, after which his popularity cooled. By 1987 the mutual lack of success encouraged the separated parties to reunite as Grandmaster Flash, Melle Mel & The Furious Five for a Paul Simon hosted charity concert in New York. The intervening years between then and Mel's appearance on Quincy Jones' Back On The Block were lost to drug addiction. Painfully ironic, considering that Mel's best known record remains White Lines (Don't Do It), an anti-drug blockbuster which was credited to Grandmaster Flash and Melle Mel. It first hit the charts in 1983 and re-entered on several occasions. Originally targeted specifically at cocaine, it was revamped in 1989 by Sylvia Johnson because of the crack boom. Its pro-abstinence stance was not physically shared by the protagonists. When Mel was in the studio in 1982, laying down the vocal track, he admits that the ‘only thing I was thinking about in that studio was listening to the record, joking and getting high’. In 1994 news broke that Mel was back and fighting fit (taking the trouble to perform press-ups for interviewers to prove the point), and working on a new album with former Ice-T collaborator Afrika Islam. He also linked with Flash for his ‘Mic Checka’ radio show.