More stories

  • in

    Coi Leray Borrows a Hip-Hop Classic, and 8 More New Songs

    Hear tracks by Ethel Cain, PinkPantheress, 100 gecs and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage.Coi Leray, ‘Players’It takes a certain audacity to sample Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s “The Message,” but, as the 25-year-old rapper Coi Leray puts it on her punchy new single “Players,” “when you a boss you could do what you want.” The track has a playful swagger, and a relatively straightforward, if potent, message: “Girls is players, too.” LINDSAY ZOLADZPinkPantheress, ‘Boy’s a Liar’Insecurities and fragmented bits of heartbreak ping across the weightless atmosphere of “Boy’s a Liar,” the latest two-minute missive from the TikTok phenomenon PinkPantheress. “Every time I pull my hair, well, it’s only out of fear/That you’ll find me ugly and one day you’ll disappear,” the 21-year-old British musician confesses, melancholically, to an unappreciative guy. The producer Mura Masa, though, turns out to be an attentive accomplice: His kinetic, carbonated beat bolsters the energy of PinkPantheress’s vocal and makes her sound like the heroine of her very own video game. ZOLADZ100 gecs, ‘Hey Big Man’Ahead of their much-anticipated second album “10,000 Gecs” — which finally has a release date of March 17 — the beloved hyperpop enfants terribles 100 gecs have released a surprise three-song EP, “Snake Eyes.” The whole thing is very much worth your time (and it’s only six minutes long): “Torture Me” features Skrillex and effectively compresses his glossy production style into the gecs’ lo-fi universe; “Runaway” is Dylan Brady and Laura Les’s warped version of a piano ballad, all AutoTuned operatics and melodramatic sonic explosions. The opener “Hey Big Man” is the EP’s most potent adrenaline shot, a scream-along live staple that updates the sound of “Treats”-era Sleigh Bells and piles on absurdist quotables. They’ve rarely been more audacious, or funnier: “I smoked two bricks, now I can’t pronounce ‘anemone.’” ZOLADZEthel Cain, ‘Famous Last Words (An Ode to Eaters)’Ethel Cain — the darkly gothic yet high-gloss songwriter Hayden Silas Anhedonia — quietly released to SoundCloud this prettily morbid waltz inspired by “Bones and All,” the Luca Guadagnino film about a romance between cannibals. “Eat of me, baby, skin to the bone/Body on body until I’m all gone,” she sings, over strummed, echoey guitar chords and a wavery keyboard, serenely offering to sacrifice herself for love. JON PARELESserpentwithfeet, ‘The Hands’“Look at the hands that fed me today/Bless the hands that wiped the tears from my face,” serpentwithfeet (Josiah Wise) sings in “The Hands.” It’s a hymn of gratitude that arrives with sonic undercurrents of dread. As serpentwithfeet harmonizes with himself, joined by a choir, piano chords give way to inhuman electronic tones and drumbeats rumble like distant thunder. He sings about finding a refuge, but the production makes clear that he’s still very much at risk. PARELESKali Horse, ‘In the Water’Kali Horse, formerly Kaleidoscope Horse, is the style-hopping Canadian duo of Sam Maloney and Desiree Das Gupta with assorted backup musicians. “In the Water” works up to beat-driven psychedelia: motoric like Krautrock, using the sound of dripping water as percussion, flecked with violin and harp sounds, cheerfully offering advice — “Don’t ask for much/Don’t ask if you will ever change” — and kicking up a ruckus before dissolving into a welter of vocal overdubs and a cryptic postscript: “Guilt takes many forms,” they sing. PARELESAnna B Savage, ‘In|Flux’The English songwriter Anna B Savage sings about one more tense, failing relationship in “In|Flux,” the title track from an album due in February. The song is a contrasty two-parter. Sustained woodwinds breathe a chord behind her at the beginning as she sings, between fraught pauses, about an angry, unsatisfying lover. But then a beat arrives, and it turns out that separation is liberation. Her low, troubled voice starts to leap upward as she exults, “I want to be alone/I’m happy on my own.” PARELESJelly Roll, ‘She’Jelly Roll — the stage name of Jason DeFord — has a Southern-rock yowl to rival Chris Stapleton or Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Ronnie Van Zant; he can also rap. In “She,” he just sings. It’s a song about an addict — as strings and horns join him, all he can do is warn, “She’s afraid of coming down.” PARELESFievel Is Glauque, ‘Save the Phenomenon’Fievel Is Glauque — the duo of the singer Ma Clemént and the instrumentalist Zach Phillips — glides easily through the musical and verbal acrobatics it packs into “Save the Phenomenon.” It’s from their new album, “Flaming Swords,” a set of 18 jazzy, hyperactive miniatures, all but one lasting less than three minutes; “Save the Phenomenon” runs 1:46. Over knotty chords and brisk meter shifts, Clement tosses off head-scratchers like “By parting the leaves you meet the sublime/and there a fake you find,” all with an utterly charming nonchalance. PARELES More

  • in

    The Fall of Kidd Creole: Inside a Rap Pioneer’s Tragic Descent

    The video is grainy, the sound raw, but it’s hard to look away. A small, nervous man is describing the previous night’s commute to a police detective. In his telling, he has exited Grand Central Terminal onto East 43rd Street, heading to a midnight shift at a copy shop.“I cross the street on Lexington Avenue — I notice him standing on the side right there,” he says.The detective interrupts. “When you say him, who are you referring to?”“The guy that I stabbed,” the man says.The interview continues, and the nervous man explains why he stopped to talk to the man he stabbed: He did not want to alienate a potential fan. “I have a social status,” he says. “I’m part of this rap group called Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five.”The fatal encounter came on the first day of August 2017. The following day, Nathaniel Glover, better known as Kidd Creole, who helped create the blueprint for rap music, was under arrest for the murder of John Jolly, 55. He spent the next four and a half years in jail awaiting trial, was convicted of manslaughter in April and, last month, at the age of 62, was sentenced to 16 years in prison.“I didn’t mean to kill him,” he told the detective the night after the stabbing. “I wish that I would just have stayed home. I didn’t even want to hurt him. He just made me so afraid, that’s all. And I just didn’t want him to hurt me.”South Bronx RisingKidd Creole, right, with Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five in 1984.Anthony Barboza/Getty ImagesThe saga of Kidd Creole, from the pinnacle of hip-hop stardom to a Bronx rooming house and a series of menial temp jobs, is a parable of rap’s first generation. It is a story of extravagant creativity, an industry that took advantage of its very young creators and a man who never stopped dreaming of a way back into stardom.“This entire music genre was founded by us,” said Grandmaster Caz, a contemporary of Kidd Creole. “And how much is it worth? How much do we own?”The answer, for most of the genre’s pioneers, is not much.Nathaniel Glover Jr. was born Feb. 19, 1960, the third of five children in a working-class Bronx family. His father, Nathaniel Sr., was a handyman who would repair floors; his mother, Sarah, took care of the home.“We basically were sheltered,” said his sister, Glander, one year older. “We weren’t allowed to hang out late at night, be outside, be late.”Nathaniel was a shy, undersized adolescent who favored soft rock and Motown. He and his younger brother Melvin would sneak away with their sister’s poetry notebooks, enchanted by the rhymes. In the Bronx, at that time, it was a useful interest to cultivate.By the mid-1970s, neighborhood D.J.s started holding parties in parks and community centers. In July 1977 — the month of a blackout that left New York City dark — the brothers met a D.J. named Joseph Saddler, who called himself Grandmaster Flash.Flash worked with a bowlegged teenager named Keef Cowboy, who energized the crowds with simple rhymes and exhortations. When a friend enlisted in the military, Cowboy teased him on the microphone: “Hip, hop, hip, hop!”The new culture would soon have a name.Nathaniel and Melvin were the next to join. Nathaniel became Kidd Creole, from the Elvis Presley movie “King Creole”; Melvin became Melle Mel.The Great ReadMore fascinating tales you can’t help but read all the way to the end.Using the Vatican’s own archives, a soft-spoken scholar has become arguably the most effective excavator of the church’s hidden sins.TikTok choreography, dancing umpires, a ballet-trained first-base coach: The Savannah Bananas, a collegiate summer league baseball team, has amassed a following by leaning into entertainment.There is growing evidence that MDMA — the illegal drug known as Ecstasy or Molly — can significantly lessen or even eliminate symptoms of PTSD when the treatment is paired with talk therapy.They were the Three M.C.s — later the Furious Four, and finally, Five — giving shape to what hip-hop would become. Their parties were epic, and they were stars — untrained, disrespected by mainstream artists and creating the music that would define much of Black culture for the next 50 years.“We didn’t have any idea that it would be an original form of American music,” Mr. Glover said last month, speaking from the floating jail barge where he spent years waiting for his trial. “We was just trying to have fun, make a couple of dollars, meet some women. It wasn’t that we had in our head, ‘Oh, this is going to be the start of something big.’”Creole was not as lyrically deft as the other group members, but he had a way of connecting with audiences, said MC Sha-Rock, a member of the Funky Four Plus 1, the Furious Five’s chief rivals in the early days. “Every rhyme, every word made you feel like he was talking to you,” she said. “It was strange: being a teenager, how did you just know that this is what you had to do to engage a crowd?”From another D.J.’s party, Creole picked up a phrase and made it a hip-hop fundamental: “Yes, yes, y’all.”Major record companies saw the music as a fad, leaving it to independents: Enjoy, Sugar Hill, Tommy Boy, Tuff City. When Sugar Hill offered the group a contract in 1980, the rappers signed the papers on the trunk of a Lincoln Town Car at the Englewood, N.J., home of the label’s owners, Sylvia and Joe Robinson, according to Guy Todd Williams, better known as Rahiem, another member of the Furious Five. He was under 18, the others just over. Like the other performers on the label, they knew nothing about the music business.The gloss of the studio and the authority of the engineers made Mr. Glover feel like he was a member of the Motown groups he looked up to, one of the Temptations, maybe.“We kind of felt like we were walking in their footsteps,” he said.What followed was music history and decades of litigation.Sugar Hill became the group’s managers, publishers, producers and recording company. Tension grew when the record label selected Melle Mel as a de facto frontman, alienating the others. Mel was the only member who participated in the Furious Five’s highest charting hit, “The Message” — it is his voice reciting the song’s familiar refrain: “Don’t push me ’cause I’m close to the edge / I’m trying not to lose my head.”The invention, the crowds, the concerts, made the six members of the group into celebrities. But it wouldn’t last. Even as the group recorded songs that defined the new genre, they never received any royalty payments, Rahiem said. (Flash, Melle Mel and Scorpio all declined to be interviewed for this article; Cowboy died in 1989.) Eventually, Grandmaster Flash had to sue just for the right to use his own stage name.It was a familiar story, said Rocky Bucano, executive director of the Universal Hip Hop Museum, which is scheduled to open in the Bronx in 2024.“This goes not just for the guys in hip-hop, but the guys in R&B, soul and every other music genre,” Mr. Bucano said. “The early guys who started as teenagers got taken advantage of and ended up with the short end of the stick.”The band ultimately made some money when the label paid the performers to settle two lawsuits in 2002 and 2007; another is still ongoing.Leland Robinson, son of the label founders, said that Sugar Hill paid the performers all royalties due them, and that any lingering litigation would soon be resolved. “We are one,” he said, claiming close relationships with Scorpio and Melle Mel. “I’m just tired of bad press.”Styles ChangeKidd Creole, right, and his group became stars, helping to create the genre that would define much of Black culture for the next 50 years.Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty ImagesOnstage, the group was dynamic and seamless. They toured the world. But offstage there were problems: egos, drugs, friction over loyalty to the Robinsons, which helped seed a rift between the Glover brothers that persists to this day.Styles were also changing. In 1983, the group Run-DMC. from Queens, came out with a stripped-down sound and look that made the Furious Five, with their flashy hair and designer leathers, seem dated. They still performed, but the hits stopped coming and the audiences were smaller. Mr. Glover was just 23, and his star turn was ending. The first generation of hip-hop pioneers — the oldest of the old school — were disappearing from view.“There was never a Plan B for them,” said Sha-Rock. As her career waned, she went on to become a corrections officer in Texas. (She couldn’t do it in New York, she said, “because I would know all the people coming through.”)Mr. Glover spoke candidly about the pain of losing his star status. “It was disappointing to stand on the sideline and watch people achieve,” he said.After a last brief turn in New York’s spotlight in 1994, hosting a call-in radio show on Hot 97 that was canceled the next year, Mr. Glover began to take on temporary jobs — security guard, maintenance, office work — which gave him flexibility for occasional gigs or short tours. In 1997, he moved into a modest rooming house in the West Bronx, still believing the group had the talent to get back on top.He bought himself a beat-making machine and an eight-track recorder so he could produce his own songs, but he could never get anyone to take much of an interest. In 2012, he posted a series of videos of himself rapping, hoping to drum up a following on YouTube. Five years earlier, the group had been inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, but now his videos rarely got more than a few hundred views.“You went from having everything to having almost nothing,” his sister said. “That’s a deep dive.”And in the rooming house, he was essentially anonymous.“Hardly anybody knew I was part of the recording industry,” he said. “I kept that to myself.”It was a life he never quite got used to.“Ain’t like nobody was walking up to him, ‘Ain’t you so-and-so from Grandmaster Flash?’” said Van Silk, a promoter who worked with the group. “Because the time has passed.”A Fatal ConfrontationInduction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2007. Mr. Glover, center right, went from “having everything to having almost nothing,” his sister said. “That’s a deep dive.”Peter Kramer/Getty ImagesIn the summer of 2017, Mr. Glover thought he had finally caught a break. Capitalizing on growing nostalgia for old school hip-hop, the surviving Furious Five MCs were booked to perform at the 6,000-seat Dell Music Center in Philadelphia, on a bill with other veteran hip-hop acts. It would be Mr. Glover’s first time in front of an audience in more than five years, and he hoped it might lead to a full tour.“I always enjoyed being out on the road performing,” he said in a call from jail. “It’s in my blood. I can’t get away from it.”On Aug. 1, three weeks before the Philadelphia gig, Mr. Glover rode the subway to Grand Central Terminal for his midnight shift in Manhattan. Since being robbed after a trip to the store for milk and beer a dozen years prior, he had begun carrying a steak knife attached to his forearm with a rubber band.“I went across Lexington Avenue, that’s when I noticed the guy,” he would tell Mark Dahl, a prosecutor from the Manhattan district attorney’s office, the next night. He said that seeing a man standing alone was “a red flag for me.”But Cheryl Horry, John Jolly’s cousin, doubted there was anything unusual going on: “Most likely my cousin was standing there drinking a beer,” she said. “When he’s drinking his beer, he’ll lean against the wall, and he’ll speak to everybody.”According to Ms. Horry, Mr. Jolly was born in Charleston, S.C., but moved to New York with an uncle after his parents died. As an adolescent, he left school for a series of jobs, Ms. Horry said, including a stint at White Castle. He had a habit of distancing himself from his family, and this became more pronounced as an adult, particularly after he’d been drinking heavily. Ms. Horry and others lost touch with Mr. Jolly, seeing him only occasionally, often during the holidays.“We never knew why,” she said. “When he’d come around, we always used to tell him: ‘We’re family. Even if you don’t want to be around family, call us, let us know you’re all right.’”According to Mr. Glover and surveillance video of the confrontation, Mr. Jolly said something to Mr. Glover as he passed by that August night. But Mr. Glover had earbuds in, listening to a song by the Eagles. Take it easy, take it easy / Don’t let the sound of your own wheels drive you crazy.Mr. Glover said that he took out his earbuds, not wanting to be rude, in case the man was a fan — in which case, he would have apologized for initially ignoring Mr. Jolly and thanked him for the recognition. But when he realized that Mr. Jolly had only said, ‘What’s up?’ he responded in kind. “Nothing, bruh, nothing,” he said and put the buds back in.Surveillance video from a neighboring office building shows Mr. Glover then strolling out of the frame. After several seconds, Mr. Jolly is seen gesticulating in the direction that Mr. Glover has gone. He then walks purposefully toward him, still gesturing, until he is right in the face of Mr. Glover, who has walked back into the frame. Mr. Glover makes to leave, and Mr. Jolly follows him. Both men drift out of sight. What happened next was not caught on camera.Throughout his four and a half years in jail, Mr. Glover has never denied that he stabbed Mr. Jolly, even pantomiming for the prosecutor during the interview the following night the motion he used, two sharp jabs to Mr. Jolly’s chest. On the phone recently from the Vernon C. Bain jail barge, he was just as blunt.“I’m backing up, and he’s moving toward me,” he said. “He was sweating and his eyes was bulging.” Mr. Glover backed off, he said, and Mr. Jolly moved forward. “And then that’s when I stabbed him.”Rahiem, who stayed in touch with Mr. Glover as he awaited trial, said that the rapper never appeared broken. “He seemed determined, resilient, innocent, but disappointed in the way the justice system was working against him,” Rahiem said.But while he expressed deep remorse in his initial interviews with law enforcement, Mr. Glover became increasingly fixated on the surveillance video during his years in jail, telling family members, friends and reporters that it had been manipulated to make Mr. Jolly seem less aggressive. (The New York Times asked a video expert, Catalin Grigoras, the director of the National Center for Media Forensics at the University of Colorado, Denver, to analyze the video in question, and he said it bore no signs of manipulation.)Finally, this March, a trial commenced. Mr. Glover’s trademark long hair was shorn, his face creased by time. He looked small and uncomfortable in an oversize suit, and he did not testify, leaving it to Scottie Celestin, the fifth in a string of lawyers representing him over the years, to argue that Mr. Jolly died from mismanaged care at the hospital, not from his two stab wounds.Mr. Glover’s supporters were irate when the judge, Michele S. Rodney, told the jurors not to consider whether Mr. Glover acted in self-defense. New York law says that deadly physical force is permissible only in response to an aggressor who is also using deadly physical force; Mr. Jolly was unarmed.On April 6, the jury returned a verdict acquitting Mr. Glover of murder — which requires intent — but convicting him of manslaughter. On May 4, Mr. Glover was sentenced to 16 years. If he serves the full term, he will be 73 when he leaves prison. Asked to speak before the sentencing, he made no apology to anybody, as Cheryl Horry noted bitterly afterward.Mr. Glover said to the judge, “I’m very disappointed in the way that the whole situation has played out,” adding that he had been portrayed as a person with no remorse or humanity. “I also feel that at a certain point the truth of all this will be revealed and I will be exonerated,” he said. Mr. Celestin said he planned to appeal.The day of the sentencing, Sylvia Robinson, who had been the chief executive of Sugar Hill Records, was posthumously inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. The music that she, Mr. Glover and a small handful of others brought into the world is now almost 50 years old, and it is the dominant form of popular music today. Hip-hop’s legacy includes revolutions in fashion and language, lasting fame and enormous fortunes — but it left Mr. Glover working a midnight shift over a photocopier.The tragedy of Kidd Creole, the rapper, is that the culture he helped create had so little need for him. The tragedy of Nathaniel Glover and John Jolly was a random encounter of no more than seven minutes. Mr. Glover believed to the end that he was one break away from relaunching his music career.Sha-Rock, now 60, sees in Mr. Glover’s fall a legacy of neglect: first by the city, and then by the industry.“Sugar Hill Records created the space for people to hear us outside of New York City,” she said. “But we were supposed to be protected as young teenagers. He shouldn’t have had to be working at a copy shop, I shouldn’t have to be working as a corrections officer. We were supposed to have been protected. We gave you everything that was dear to our heart and dear to the culture of hip-hop. That’s real.“We gave you our blood, sweat and tears, and transformed rap records,” she continued. “You were supposed to protect us.”Mr. Glover agrees. “If I was doing anything that had any relation to the industry, I wouldn’t have been there,” he said. “I would have been home.”He protests the case against him, talking to anyone who will listen about his issues with the surveillance video. Though he has never stopped admitting to the stabbing, the contrition he displayed on the night after the killing has disappeared. “My conscience is clear,” he said.“He initiated this whole thing,” he said of Mr. Jolly. “I didn’t want anything to do with him.” He mentioned the show scheduled for later in the month. “The group was ready to get back together,” he said. “I was getting ready to go back to my life the way it was.”The concert in Philadelphia went on without him. More

  • in

    Duke Bootee, Whose ‘Message’ Educated Hip-Hop, Dies at 69

    AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyDuke Bootee, Whose ‘Message’ Educated Hip-Hop, Dies at 69His 1982 hit about the “jungle” of urban poverty charted a new, grittier path for rap music in its early days.Edward Fletcher, better known as Duke Bootee, in 2013. He was a studio musician at Sugar Hill Records when he began writing “The Message,” which Rolling Stone has called the greatest song in hip-hop history.Credit…Geoff L JohnsonJan. 29, 2021, 2:53 p.m. ETEdward Fletcher, who as Duke Bootee was the driving force behind “The Message,” the 1982 hit that pushed hip-hop from merry escapism toward chronicling the daily grind of urban poverty, died on Jan. 13 at his home in Savannah, Ga. He was 69.The cause was heart failure, said his wife, Rosita Fletcher.Mr. Fletcher started writing “The Message” in 1980, the same year he became a studio musician at Sugar Hill Records, which released the early work of groups like the Sugar Hill Gang and Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. Mr. Fletcher toured with Sugar Hill acts, contributed to the recording of seminal tracks and occasionally composed music.“We wrote the first chapter in the history of rap,” he said in a 2013 interview broadcast on Channel 28 in Savannah.The sound of hip-hop was initially cheerful and upbeat, with lyrics that encouraged dancing crowds to “throw your hands up in the air/and party hardy like you just don’t care,” as the Sugar Hill Gang rapped on their landmark 1979 single, “Rapper’s Delight.”In his mother’s basement one night, in the tough and increasingly impoverished city where he grew up, Elizabeth, N.J., Mr. Fletcher was smoking a joint with a friend and fellow musician, Jiggs Chase. Thinking about his hometown, he began piecing together a different approach to hip-hop.“The neighborhood I was living in, the things I saw — it was like a jungle sometimes in Elizabeth,” Mr. Fletcher told The Guardian in 2013. In another interview, with the hip-hop historian JayQuan, he recalled how often someone would “ride by and you hear a bottle get broken.”The images of the jungle and broken glass contributed two signature motifs to the lyrics of “The Message,” which sought to define everyday life in a tough urban world. The rhymes included “Got a bum education, double-digit inflation/Can’t take the train to the job, there’s a strike at the station.” Mr. Fletcher wrote most of the lyrics and the lurching, ominous electro melody.It baffled Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five.“It was just too serious,” Melle Mel, a member of the group, told Uncut magazine in 2013. “We were making party tracks,” he added, “and wanted to keep in the same lane. Nobody wanted that song.”Melle Mel eventually caved to pressure from Sylvia Robinson, one of Sugar Hill’s owners. He contributed a final verse to “The Message” and shared rapping duties with Mr. Fletcher, who also played all the instruments except guitar. As a rapper, Mr. Fletcher’s baritone voice registered a cool impassivity that stood in contrast to the excitability of many of his peers.“The Message” was credited to Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, although it was mostly the work of Mr. Fletcher (not seen here).Credit…Sugar Hill RecordsThe song was an instant hit. In years to come, it would be sampled nearly 300 times, according to whosampled.com. Rolling Stone called it the greatest song in hip-hop history and a major influence on rappers like Jay-Z and the Notorious B.I.G. It also helped earn Grandmaster Flash and his band a place in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, even though Melle Mel was the only one of them to appear on what was called “their masterpiece,” aside from a short closing skit.“The world (me included) absolutely froze in its tracks the week it debuted on radio,” the musician and songwriter Questlove wrote in Rolling Stone. “Hip-hop was once known as party fodder, a fad. ‘The Message’ pulled a 180 and proved it could be a tool of sociopolitical change.”Mr. Fletcher was credited as a co-composer of “The Message” and received royalties for his work on it. But he did not appear on the album cover, and Rahiem of the Furious Five lip-synced to Mr. Fletcher’s voice in the music video.Mr. Fletcher’s feelings about being cut out of the public image of the song were mixed. At times he saw a shrewd marketing strategy. “It worked with a group like Flash and them because they had that threatening, street image,” he said in the interview with JayQuan. “There aren’t any other groups from that time that could have pulled that record off better than them.”But his gratitude had limits. “If I’d known what it was going to do,” he told The Guardian about his hit song, “I’d have kept it for myself.”Edward Gernel Fletcher was born on June 6, 1951, in Elizabeth. His father, Ernest, was a truancy officer, and his mother, Helen (Bridges) Fletcher, taught elementary school. When he was 16, Ed began dating Rosita Ross, a classmate and family friend. They married in 1976 and stayed together for the rest of his life.Ed took drum and xylophone lessons as a boy, and he played in cover bands at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania. After graduating in 1973 with a degree in English, he played with local New Jersey bands. He first gained notoriety for playing on Edwin Starr’s disco single “Contact,” and two years later he started working at Sugar Hill.Mr. Fletcher left the music industry while still a young man; the money he was making, he decided, was not worth all the travel and the time away from his family. Back in New Jersey, he turned to what he called “the family business”: teaching.He got master’s degrees from the New School in media studies and from Rutgers University in education. He worked at a juvenile detention center, a high school and two colleges, spending the last decade of his career as a lecturer in critical thinking and communication at Savannah State University. He retired in 2019.Mr. Fletcher left the music industry while still a young man and turned to what he called “the family business”: teaching.Credit…Geoff L JohnsonIn addition to his wife, Mr. Fletcher is survived by two children, Owen Fletcher and Branice Moore, and five grandchildren.The frank discussion of everyday problems in “The Message” informed Mr. Fletcher’s sensibility as a teacher. He propounded what he called the Fletcherian Principles. In the Channel 28 interview, the rap godfather explained the ultimate Message he had worked out for young students:“Figure out a way to take care of yourself, legal. Find somebody you can stand that can stand you. Pay your taxes. Take care of your teeth.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More