"...Kool Herc couldn't draw a crowd after people saw Flash." (Chang, pg. 114)
In chapter 6, Chang highlights the work of a young man who, today, is an obscure figure in the minds of Hip-Hop headz. Grandmaster Flash took DJing to a ho nuva level. Being the inquisitive type that he was, he looked at DJing with a scientific eye and listend to it with supersonic hearing. When people thought Herc was doing damage on the wheels of steel, Flash heard Hearc doing real damage on the wheels of steel. "The break went around, but it never came back on beat because Herc was dropping the needle all over the place" (pg. 112).
Grandmaster Flash understood how to move the crowd like no other. Hi introduced the world to scratching, though his prodigy Grand Wizard Theodore, and displayed scratching techniques never seen before. Teaming up with his homies Cowboy, Melle Mel and Kid Creole, only made his shows hotter than before. And to think that it all started "(b)ack in his room with his screwdriver, soldering iron and insatiable curiosity...trying to figure out how to turn beat-making and crowd-rocking into a science" (pg. 112).
I take issue with Chang for giving the impression, all the way up until chapter 6, that Kool Herc mastered the aft of Djing. It's only at this point that we learn that Herc was pretty "sloppy" on the one's and two's. And yet Flash, who actually elevates DJing to a science, is mentioned rather briefly in no more than a page and a half. Just because Herc agreed to do the forward to Chang's book, that shouldn't have skewed his representation of how DJing took shape.
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