Steve 'Flash' JuonDespite his prominent role in one of the most important singles of rap history, Edward Gernel Fletcher b/k/a Duke Bootee was a largely forgotten figure when he passed away in 2021. Shamefully I’m no exception to this disrespect of Mr. Fletcher — I didn’t include him in my RIP list for that calendar year. I could of course retroactively edit him in but I’d rather man up and own my failure rather than pretend it never happened. Today’s review of “Bust Me Out” represents an overdue opportunity to right that wrong and give Duke Bootee his due.
At least some of the blame for his being forgotten should fall on the shoulders of Sugar Hill Records. It would exceed the length of this review to tell you all of the shady shit that went on at one of hip-hop’s first preeminent labels, but if you want to know more I highly recommend the documentary film I Want My Name Back. To make a long story short here’s how they did Mr. Fletcher wrong. “The Message” can be described one of two ways — a song by Duke Bootee featuring Melle Mel, or a song by two equals who can share co-billing. You know what it isn’t? Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five.
If you dig deeper though it gets worse. Melle Mel’s verse on “The Message” isn’t even an original rap — he recycled and re-recorded his bars from “Superrappin’” back in 1979. (It’s a very long song so if you want to hear it skip ahead to 9:57.) I’m encouraging you to be as cynical as possible about this fact. Even a generous interpretation is that Sugar Hill told Melle Mel to add a verse to Duke Bootee’s song and not giving a shit about it he pulled out his old notebooks and said “yeah this will do fine.” Why bother at all then? Simple — nobody knew who Duke Bootee was then or now. They knew they had a potential hit on their hands but they needed a star to appear on it. By first adding Melle Mel to the track and then retroactively making it a Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five record, they continually pushed Duke Bootee from the forefront to the background. He’s not even seen in the video for the song and the majority of the record is his!
Now you might want to argue they tried to make it up to him by releasing “Bust Me Out” in 1984… but they DIDN’T because it was actually released by PolyGram & Mercury Records. I was already a rap music consumer by the age of 10 and owned records by the aforementioned Furious 5 along with Kurtis Blow and the Fat Boys, but I never saw or heard a Duke Bootee album. Okay I lived in in the rural Midwest so the chances of that were pretty low anyway, but it doesn’t feel like they bothered pushing this album beyond their basic contractual obligation to do so.
Even though I’m going out of my way to give Duke Bootee the posthumous recognition he should have received all along, “Bust Me Out” is still a strange record. The title track certainly has the observant intellectual eye that “The Message” did, but lacks the catchy hook or funky groove of that single. I’m not sure any song with the refrain “bust me out, why don’t you bust me out” was ever actually going to bust out on the charts. Spoiler alert — it didn’t. Well, that’s because it wasn’t ever released as a single. Perhaps I’m being a little glib here. “Same Day Service” actually was released as a single off this record and I don’t have any proof it did anything, so it and the title track are more co-equal than Duke Bootee and Melle Mel ever were in real life.
This song actually had the potential, and as the words “censored version” indicate in the clip above, they genuinely had intent behind releasing it. Long before parental advisory stickers became the norm on rap records, Duke Bootee was actually cursing on this song, alternating between his desire to get “right to the point, the legit sure shit” and to bemoan the fact his lover works long hours because “all work’s no good without some play.” There’s a palpable pulsing beat and smooth guitar riff going on here, mixed in with a little of that talk box funk that’s so quintessentially 1980’s. It sounds like a song that could have been on the Ghostbusters soundtrack without being out of place.
Beyond those two songs “Bust Me Out” is a wide array of strange and/or bad decisions that I will generously not give Mr. Fletcher the sole blame for. “Slow Down” has nothing to do with the Brand Nubian track of the same name and I wish it did. I don’t want to hear Duke singing R&B. Do you? No. Trust me, you don’t. The label was also apparently enamored with the song “Live Wire” enough to put two versions of it on the record, even though it feels like a bad clone of “Planet Rock.” If you thought that was bad though, imagine an uptempo disco Kraftwerk take on the same called “Zip Me Up” complete with actual zipper sounds and (again) Duke crooning. I’m sorry Mr. Fletcher, it’s hideous.
That’s just the kind of album “Bust Me Out” is though — one by a record label that had some understanding that Duke Bootee should be a star, but one that didn’t commit to him doing what he actually did best — RAPPING. Instead of taking his strengths and building an album around it, they copied the sound of other successful records, then gave him stage direction and tried to mold him to fit those tracks. It just doesn’t work and the failure of it to work doomed this to be the one and only solo album of Duke Bootee’s career. Now the good news is that Edward Fletcher took being robbed blind by Industry Rule #4,080 better than most folks would. When any hope of musical success faded, he went back for higher education not once but twice, becoming a high school teacher and a college professor in succession. He taught the young minds of the state of New Jersey for decades and if we remember him today it shouldn’t just be for “The Message” but for being humble enough to put his dreams behind him and inspire the youth to chase their own. Bless you sir. You live on in the generations that you taught.