Grandmaster Flash Beats Back Time - The New York Times
▻http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/28/nyregion/grandmaster-flash-netflix-series-the-get-down-brings-attention-to-the-hip-h
Grandmaster Flash might easily have missed the hip-hop revolution. Born in Barbados and transplanted to the South Bronx as a child, he began his adolescence far from the city, in a group home for foster children in rural upstate New York. By the time he returned to the borough’s Fort Apache section in 1971, things were changing fast. Music was getting more percussive; teenagers with spray cans were scrawling hieroglyphic names and full-fledged murals on subway cars.
He was Joseph Saddler then, a nerdy high school student who liked to take appliances apart to see how they worked. In a few short years, though, in the hardest-hit part of a hard-hit city, he helped to invent what many would agree was the most sweeping cultural movement of the last 40 years, and then he barely hung on to see it bloom.