WARNING: Spoilers ahead for Wednesday night’s episode of “The Masked Singer”
Being an adult is hard. It’s expensive and pressure-filled. And that’s exactly why the man behind the Polar Bear agreed to be on “The Masked Singer” this season — he knew he needed to harness his inner child. But admittedly, he did have to be convinced to do so.
After joining the competition as part of New York Night, Polar Bear was unmasked on Wednesday to be none other than hip-hop legend Grandmaster Flash. And, according to the DJ, it was his family that put him onto the show in the first place. Because he’s always running around, flying from place to place, he could never watch it live, so he went back through past seasons.
“And I gotta tell you, my adult turns on, full tilt,” he explained to TheWrap. “Like, ‘I don’t know … No, no way.’ And then a couple of weeks later, an email comes into the office, and they call me!”
Much like the reaction Grandmaster Flash had to just watching the show, he quickly said no to being on the show. But, after talking to his team, and seeing the enjoyment his family gets from the series, he realized he wanted to let his inner child through.
“My adult turns on, full tilt. I say no,” he recalled. “They call me a couple of times, like, ‘You could do this Flash, you could do this!’ OK, I sign up. And I fly to L.A., a truck meets us at the airport, you know, we make our way to the television studio and I’m getting ready to jump out of the truck. And they’re like ‘No! You can’t get out!’”
He continued, “I’m looking around, OK, what’s going to happen here? And they say, ‘Take your hat off, put this on.’ And they give us this black, Darth Vader, football helmet type hat to put on! And at that moment, I had to turn off my adult and turned on my childlike.”
According to Grandmaster Flash, “you got to be built for something like this.” And while he certainly meant physically built — the costumes are extraordinarily heavy, after all — he also meant mentally built. “You got to be kid-like to do this,” he said. So, “The Masked Singer” ended up being a fun form of stress relief.
“When you’re adult, you know, we’re told to be responsible and pay your bills and do this, to do that, and that, this and that, and that, and that,” he explained. “Being an adult 24/7 is stressing for me, and I need stress relief. So what I do is I go to these 10 children. Some of them are my grandchildren, some of them are children of my friends, you know. And they teach me how to be childlike.”
“I get down on the floor, draw, paint, talk and do things. So I gotta tell you, that helped me the minute they ask you to put that hat on, and that stupid oversized t-shirt, and gloves on my hands.”
In the end, Grandmaster Flash was grateful for the experience, after experiencing “some of the most pressured things, because I’m one of the godfathers in an inventor of the culture” of hip-hop.
“The Masked Singer” airs on Wednesdays at 8 p.m. ET on Fox.