3. Grandmaster Flash
Yup, all three figures in the “trinity of hip-hop music,” as writer Jeff Chang described Herc, Bam and Flash in his book Can’t Stop Won’t Stop, are Caribbean. The man who pioneered the backspin, popularized scratching, first incorporated a drum machine into hip-hop and generally turned the turntables into an instrument (and founded hip-hop’s first supergroup in the Furious Five), Joseph “Grandmaster Flash” Saddler grew up in the Bronx, but he was born in Bridgetown, Barbados.