Apparently we just can’t make a list. After stirring up a hornets’ nest with last week’s THIS IS WHAT IT LINKS LIKE: The 50 Hottest Rap Blogs, we’ve done done it again with The Best Rapper Ever, a NCAA-style, four bracket tournament, pitting 135 rappers against each other in a head-to-head competition to determine, well, the best rapper ever, as chosen by visitors to VIBE.com. The Play-In bracket is going on now (get your vote on, here), and the controversy is already full blown.
Now, unlike so many out there in the peanut gallery, we happen to think we know what we’re talking about over here. We’re VIBE after all. So when so many of you took to the Net to take issue with our brackets, (including, now infamously, Joe Budden, the New Jersey rapper seeded number 32 in Bracket IV, who asked in the video below: “Cowboy? I don’t even know who that is”), we figured that it was only right that we helped the world get familiar.
To that end—and not to affect your vote— Senior Associate Editor, Keith Murphy, reached out to Melle Mel, the legendary MC who rapped alongside Cowboy (he's wearing the baseball cap in the picture above) when they were both a part of the groundbreaking group, Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five. (Cowboyd himself had he not tragically passed away on September 8, 1989, when he was just 28.) Here’s what Melle Mel had to say:
“You know I heard the little controversy with Joe Budden thinking that he should be higher on the list. But he has to understand that once you go down chronologically, every MC had some type of influence that made them who they are. Yet everything Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five, and MCs in our era, did was self-influenced. And that makes it harder to achieve that greatness status. Yet we stand today as legends, not just pioneers.
“When a lot of cats try to come up with Well, what did Cowboy do?it’s like what didn’t he do? Cowboy was definitely one of the most important MCs because of the fact that his natural talent and presence onstage was huge. He was one of the first cats to rhyme off the top of the head; he was the first to master the crowd response; [he] came up with a lot of the lines that rappers say now onstage. Cowboy came up with the phrase hip hop! He did it all. It just so happened that he passed at a young age and that’s what really put a void in Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five. He was the spark of the group. When we would step onstage it was all about his presence and aura which were so big that if I had gotten one girl after the show he would have five [laughs].
“When you hear someone say When was the last time you heard Melle Mel?Well, when the first time you heard Melle Mel? You heard him in 1977. That’s sick for me to still be around when I helped start the genre that we perform in 2009. I don’t even believe that there are truly 50 great rappers. There are probably less than 20 for the sake of being real. After Rakim and a few others, you don’t really have one rapper that was an influence on the entire art form. To this day I don’t think there is a more important hip hop record than Grandmaster Flash & The Furious 5’s ‘The Message.’ We took hip hop out of the party age with just one record.
“People today look back at pictures of us and they think that we were these weird guys who dressed funny. But what we were trying to do was break into the business on a rock ’n’ roll level. Forget about the rap and hip hop thing, because we conquered that. So a lot of the things we did went off the charts, just like a lot of things Cowboy did. He is pretty hard to sum up in one verse. Just like how 2Pac is not to be described by one verse—but by who he was, the impact he made and the life he lived—Cowboy, in his own way, is on that level. He is beyond what any other MC did that you could put on a list. He’s a legend amongst legends. When you ask what’s the story of Grandmaster Flash & The Furious 5 and they think that Flash or Melle Mel is the story, but we are not. Cowboy is the story. If Joe Budden is No. 32, he probably deserved to be No. 32. If you don’t understand it, that’s not my fault that you didn’t have a better career. It is what it is. Sometimes destiny trumps the talent of youth.”
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