Spreading ‘The Message’ 10 Years Later

Long before Gov. Bill Clinton ever heard of Sister Souljah or President Bush was appalled by Ice-T, there was “The Message.”

The 1982 single by rap pioneers Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five never became a political football, but it was a landmark pop single -- one that has been cited by countless contemporary rappers as an inspiration.

“The Message,” which was voted the year’s best single by the nation’s pop critics, decried many of the social conditions that eventually exploded into the L.A. riots.

Key lines:

It’s like a jungle sometimes

It makes me wonder

How I keep from going under.

Now, some of the people involved in the original record are back with a sequel.

Melle Mel, the rapper on the original Sugar Hill recording, and his Furious Five colleague Scorpio bring the song up to date in the just-released “The New Message.”

While the new version discusses such contemporary concerns as AIDS and yuppie white-collar crime, the spirit of the song is quite similar to the original.

“Even though we got some new verses, we didn’t have to change much,” says Scorpio (real name: Ravon Morris). “We didn’t have to rack our minds to see what we could come up with. But there was a whole new crop of people, especially the new generation of rappers and rap fans that may never have heard ‘The Message.’ ”

Mel and Scorpio actually wrote the new words to the song a few years ago, but could not drum up interest in it. To some extent, they were themselves reluctant to tamper with the song. “Certain records you just can’t touch,” he says. “Leave it alone and talk about it 30 years later.”

But last year, a young Dutch singer named Nikolaj Steen, who had long admired the original song, tracked them down in New York, proposing a new recording of the track. The pair jumped at the chance.

In some ways, the new song seems tame compared to the more inflammatory rhetoric of the ‘90s rap of Ice Cube and Public Enemy. Sample lines from the Imago Records release:

You’ll grow in the ghetto living second rate

And your eyes will sing a song of deep hate.

Scorpio prefers the softer tone.

“A lot of times now a lot of rap puts things in intentionally just so the media will pick up on it,” he says. “Sister Souljah, the media put her into stardom. The media plays into her hands. . . . Rap today is more commercialized, even though they act like it’s underground, it’s definitely more commercialized.”