Standing at a podium, legendary hip-hop artist Grandmaster Flash, a bright orange hoodie sprouting from under his white leather jacket, shared the story of how he fell in love with vinyl records and turntables while growing up in the Bronx.

His father, a railroad worker and serious collector of vinyl records, wouldn’t let him go near the closet where he kept them. But young Flash, despite the punishments, played the records anyway.

He went on to become one of hip-hop’s pioneering disc jockeys of the early 1970s, assembling one of rap’s first groups, Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five, and elevating the role of DJ to an art form with such techniques as cutting, scratching and mixing.

“My contribution is: I was the first DJ to make the turntable an instrument,” Flash, who recently lorded over turntables at an official Winter Olympics party in Italy, said with the swagger central to hip-hop (more…)