Before hip-hop had a name, it had a scientist. Grandmaster Flash — born Joseph Saddler in the Bronx — was a self-described nerdy kid who figured out how to turn two copies of the same record into an entirely new music. On September 22, he told that story in full with Birth of a Culture, his second book, written with award-winning journalist Robert “Scoop” Jackson and published by Amistad, an imprint of HarperCollins. Flash also narrates the audiobook himself.

The book is deliberately different from his 2008 memoir, The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash: My Life, My Beats, which dealt with childhood trauma and addiction. Birth of a Culture is about the culture itself — a chronological origin story that runs from Bronx block parties and park jams through the merging of DJing, MCing, break dancing and graffiti into a movement. At its center is Flash’s Quick Mix Theory — he spells it “Quik Mix Theory” — the technique of extending a drum break into a seamless loop, which became the bed MCs would speak over. “This thing that I did with duplicate copies of a record became the music bed for human beings to speak on,” Flash says in the book. “Today they call it rap and I am the inventor.”

The memoir also weaves in interviews with the people who built hip-hop alongside him, tracing how their relationships shaped the culture. “This story has been on my mind for a very long time,” Flash said when the book was announced. “It depicts the early history and many subject matters that pertain to the culture called Hip-Hop. It entails joy, pain, real life, fun, drama, math, and science.”

The credentials behind the claim are not in dispute: Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five became the first hip-hop act inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, in 2007, and Flash has received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. Birth of a Culture is a founding father setting the record straight — with the receipts, the math and the music to back it up.

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