The Sugarhill Gang - “Rapper’s Delight” The Best Rap Album of All Time Song released in 1979. Compilation released in 1999. Hip Hop
“Rapper’s Delight” by The Sugarhill Gang is the most important song in the history of hip hop music. Period. It was the genre’s first commercial record and it sold millions of copies around the world. It suddenly introduced white people and everyone outside of the tri-state area, as well as countless people in other countries, to a Bronx-born, organic subculture whose popularity had previously grown through mostly word-of-mouth. It’s not the first hip hop song ever recorded (that honor belongs to “King Tim III (Personality Jock)” by The Fatback Band), but historians unanimously agree that it is indeed the genre’s runner-up record. And without its commercial success, hip hop might have only become a late 70s-early 80s New York fad, only to be cherished by its small set of original participants and Pitchfork-reading hipster types who wax nostalgic about those halcyon CBGB’s and Max’s Kansas City days where the city’s various strains of new wave, glam rock, punk, art punk, no wave, and the like all converged.
But I’m here to tell you that this iconic song, the one that made hip hop a viable commercial enterprise and enabled it to eventually become the biggest music genre on the planet, is actually a total fraud. And that’s for a couple reasons. Now, before you go all Rocko lavender hippo lady on me, let me just say that “Rapper’s Delight” is by no means a bad song. In fact, it’s one of the greatest songs ever made. But it was a total fucking cash grab, too; an absolute sellout record. And that’s ironic because, for a genre that’s had so many insufferable purists who bristle at the idea of inauthenticity (full disclosure: I was one of those people), they have no problem with calling this song an indispensable piece of “real” and “true” hip hop music.
Let me explain some hip hop history, first though.
Hip hop culture began in the south Bronx in the summer of 1973, about a full six years before “Rapper’s Delight” came out. It was started by a DJ from Jamaica named Kool Herc. Herc is the genius who figured out how to isolate the instrumental break on a record and extend it by having two copies of the record and lining up the second one to start after the break from the first one finished. This allowed people to dance to the same beat for extended periods of time, which gave birth to breakdancing and dance battles. Another thing the extension of the break enabled was rapping. Rapping came out of toasting, a Jamaican DJ tradition in which the DJ would bust out a nifty and rhythmic, spoken-word rhyme, often shouting out someone of note who was in attendance. But then that eventually morphed into an extended series of rhymes, which gave way to the MC.
Rapping at that point was largely a poetic, improvised stream-of-consciousness. MCs would rap for minutes on end, displaying their mental dexterity as they would do their best to keep on beat and try to make sense while rhyming the last word of each line with the next.
That’s where Sylvia Robinson comes into this story. Robinson was an R&B / soul / funk / disco artist and producer who had appeared plenty of times on the R&B charts and landed a top-three national hit with “Pillow Talk” in 1973. In 1979, she started her own label, Sugar Hill Records, which would become the most important hip hop label in the early part of the next decade. Robinson’s first interaction with rapping didn’t come inside a Bronx club or at a Bronx block party though. It was instead at her niece’s birthday party in Harlem, where DJ Lovebug Starski was doing a bit of call-and-response with his audience.
From The Independent:
"The DJ [was talking] over the music, and the kids were going crazy. He would say something like, 'Throw your hands [up in] the air' and they'd do it," she recalled. "All of a sudden, something said [to me]: 'Put something like that on a record, and it will be the biggest thing you ever had'. I didn't even know you called it rap."
At first, Robinson had no takers. No rapper or DJ she approached thought making a hip hop record was a good idea. It was just a fun thing people did at parties. It wasn’t something that would ever end up being profitable. According to cultural critic Harry Allen, when Chuck D of Public Enemy first heard that rap was going to be put on records, he asked, “'How are you going to put three hours on a record?' Because that's the way MCs used to rhyme. They'd just rhyme and rhyme and rhyme for hours."
But Robinson would eventually find some people to rap on a record. It’s unclear whether or not it was her son or her herself who initially found the first member of her rap group, but it happened at a pizza shop in Englewood, New Jersey, where Big Bank Hank was spotted rapping while working his shift. Robinson then brought Hank out in front of the parlor to audition. The next member, Master Gee, would then audition in her car, followed by Wonder Mike. Robinson couldn’t decide which rapper she liked most, so she decided to sign all of them. And thus, the Sugarhill Gang was born.
However, it should be noted that Big Bank Hank, Master Gee, and Wonder Mike were absolute nobodies at the time. They weren’t serious MCs or DJs. The guys who had been putting it down since hip hop’s inception like Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa, Grandmaster Flash, and Kool DJ AJ had never had these guys rap on their stages before. They were total amateurs.
But Robinson didn’t care and not long after she signed them, “Rapper’s Delight” came to fruition. The #1 song in the country at the time happened to be Chic’s “Good Times,” and coincidentally, it was also a superb beat for rapping over. Robinson probably thought that using an uber popular instrumental for her rap record would move units, too, and ultimately, she would be proven right. She enlisted a funk band called Positive Force to recreate the “Good Times” instrumental, and, incredibly, they and the Sugarhill Gang pumped out “Rapper’s Delight” in a single nineteen-minute take. There were no lyrical flubs and no mistakes by any of the players. It was an amazingly efficient use of studio time.
That nineteen minutes was then pared down to 14:30 and the recording was pressed to wax and then went to sale. However, “Rapper’s Delight” failed to catch on at first. Radio DJs were reticent to play such a ridiculously long song and hip hop party DJs had no idea who the Sugarhill Gang was. But once a radio version was cut, which is the version I’ve posted today, the record got radio play, which then translated to immense record sales. It made the Billboard Hot 100, peaking at #36, while hitting #4 on the R&B chart. And it became an even bigger hit outside of the U.S., reaching the top-five all across Europe, Canada, and South Africa. It also sold literally millions of records. The second hip hop song to ever be recorded for commercial purposes was a suddenly and completely unexpected global phenomenon. Hip hop had hit the big time.
But outside of the fact that this monstrous song was clearly a mere ploy to make money and was actually not an organic piece of Bronx-bred hip hop culture, there was even more fraudulence to it. Big Bank Hank, the second MC to grace the track, actually stole all of his verses from another rapper, the legend Grandmaster Caz. Caz was a member of a foundational hip hop group called The Cold Crush Brothers, who were known to rap at parties in the Bronx. Hank offered to become Caz’s manager and took out a loan to upgrade Cold Crush’s soundsystem. Then, to pay off that loan, he got a job at the pizza shop that he was eventually discovered in. But when he was seen rapping while working and was quickly auditioned afterwards, he used Caz’s lyrics. So, when Hank introduces himself on “Rapper’s Delight” with, “I’m the C-A-S-A, the N-O-V-A, and the rest is F-L-Y,” know he is spelling out one of Grandmaster Caz’s nicknames, and without his permission. And to this day, Caz hasn’t seen a single dime from “Rapper’s Delight”’s sales. Criminal shit.
But in the grand scheme of things, despite that bad sleight on Caz and the ultimate motive to record the song, “Rapper’s Delight” is still, by absolute happenstance, a masterpiece. It’s not just one of the first hip hop records, but it’s just so infectiously fun. But because of how fun it is, another thing that apparently pissed off other rappers at the time was that the song wasn’t about anything important. A lot of rappers were angry at the conditions in which they lived and they thought it was lame that a bunch of outsiders had cashed in on their artform while not even channeling any of the south Bronx’s inner rage. But a few years later, Grandmaster Flash and The Furious Five would release hip hop’s second unmitigated classic, “The Message,” a socially conscious-painted picture of the South Bronx. And it was released on, funnily enough, Sugar Hill Records.
There’s a moral or something to this story somewhere. Without the selling out and without Big Bank Hank’s lyrical theft, who knows where hip hop culture would be today? “Rapper’s Delight” sure wasn’t made for the purest of reasons, but it exposed hip hop music, and then eventually the actual authentic Bronx culture, to the entire world. Had Sylvia Robinson not seen dollar signs in this fun and unique party gimmick, would Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five or Afrika Bambaataa or Kurtis Blow become household names? Would hip hop ever be sold commercially? Would the following, more lyrical Def Jam wave with acts like Run-D.M.C. and LL Cool J ever happen? And then would N.W.A happen or the Native Tongues posse with A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul, Busta Rhymes, Queen Latifah, and Black Sheep? I could go on, but you get the picture.
