Grandmaster Flash smoked freebase cocaine, not crack

July 29, 10:34 AMMusic ExaminerBen Westhoff

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Throw some D's in that bitch

Grandmaster Flash belongs to the holy trinity of hip hop founders, alongside DJ Kool Herc -- who appears to have been the first to harvest the "breakdown" or "breaks" of songs to form rap's sound -- and Afrika Bombaataa, who was an influential party-starter, gang member, impresario and DJ in the South Bronx. Flash's contribution was putting his fingers on the records to manipulate their sounds. Though other DJs initially thought this was blasphemy, the crowds eventually came around to his style of cutting, and he rocked increasingly large neighborhood parties. As I write in my profile of him in Metro:

In his youth Flash studied electronics at a vocational school and scavenged for spare parts to construct sound systems. He built his reputation playing outdoor parties, sometimes harvesting electricity from lamp posts to power his speakers. The police didn’t mind.

 “The cops didn’t really bother us, because they could just sit back and not worry about anything happening in the neighborhood, because everyone was all in one place,” he says. “We made their jobs easier.

He was also likely the first DJ to include multiple emcees on his tracks, and together with the Furious 5 put together probably the one or two most famous rap songs of all time, the slightly homophobic "The Message." (Of course, opinions vary. This guy puts Soulja Boy in his top 5 "cuz’ come on it’s Soulja Boy.")

Natually the women and the money and the power followed, and sooner than you can pronounce the 'g' in "Tony Montana," Flash was a drug addict. Only, as he tells New York magazine's Vulture blog, it wasn't a crack addiction, it was a freebase addiction.

There’s a sad chapter — the one called "Hell" — where you describe your battles with crack in the eighties.
Not crack. Base. Crack is a man-made drug. Base is actually the essence of a coca leaf. There’s a difference.

I’ve actually never done crack or base.
[Laughs.] Man, they’re both bad. But I would have rather been a basehead because with base, at least you get the essence of a coca leaf, which comes from the ground. Versus crack, which is man-made chemicals. It could be bleach, Tide, or whatever. I was never a crackhead. I was a basehead.

And that was better than being a crackhead?
Here’s what it is. You had to have money to be a basehead. And I’m not waving the flag like "Yay!" for it. It really was an awful habit, but you had to be able to have … in order to get cocaine down to base, you have to cook it in such a way and burn out any impurities that might be in what you’re sniffing to get it down to base. So let’s just say — and I’m gonna be pretty bad here — let’s say if it was a quarter in weight, by the time you purified it, it might be ten times less that. So you had to buy a whole lot of cocaine to base.

Wow.
Yeah. Base was a very expensive habit. I think you could buy crack for ten dollars. To base you had to easily spend five, six, seven hundred dollars, minimum.

Jeez!
Just to get somewhat of a decent high.

Anyway, Flash eventually got cleaned up, and I highly recommend his new autobiography with David Ritz, The Adventures Of Grandmaster Flash. And I highly recommend smoking base instead of crack.