It started with gibberish. "I said a hip hop, the hippy, the hippy to the hip hip hop, you don't stop the rock to the bang-bang boogie, say, up jump the boogie, to the rhythm of the boogie, the beat."
It made people say, "What is that?" It sounded like a joke. It sounded like a secret code. It sounded like a beginning. And it was.
Of course, millions of musical and cultural revolutions could be launched each day, as artists and would-be artists try to create something new. They cobble together inspirations, both great and small, hoping to build something inventive and at the same time comfortable. Nearly all of them fail.
On paper, "Rapper's Delight," a 15-minute opus slapped together in 20 minutes by Sylvia Robinson and her Sugar Hill Gang should have failed, too. Though they set out to capture the fledgling hip-hop scene of the Bronx and Harlem 25 years ago, they were doing it all wrong.
Hip-hop's founders would have told them how hip-hop culture was all about the live performance rather than a single song. The DJs would have explained how their musical manipulations were the center of attention, not the rappers' rhymes. Radio programmers would have pointed out that the songs they played were only about three minutes long and that they would never dream of playing one that was 15 minutes.
The funny thing was, Robinson and the Sugar Hill Gang - a high school student, a candy factory worker and a pizza parlor manager - didn't know any better.
A successful formula
The even funnier thing? They ended up creating a groundbreaking song that not only introduced the rest of the world to hip-hop but provided hip-hoppers with a blueprint that works to this day.
For better and for worse, pretty much all of hip-hop's current trends, both behind the mic and behind the scenes, can find their roots in "Rapper's Delight." The Sugar Hill Gang boasts about being the greatest. They tell jokes. They objectify women. They call for racial unity. They convey fatherly advice. They offer shout-outs to Johnny Carson and Frankie Crocker. They name-drop Perry Mason and Farrah Fawcett.
Even the controversies resonated. There were calls for banning the record. There were parents upset about the control the song had over their children. There were claims from rival rappers that the Sugar Hill Gang wasn't "keeping it real," because the members were from the suburbs of New Jersey and not the projects of the Bronx, where hip-hop was born in 1974 and nurtured for five years before "Rapper's Delight" was conceived.
None of that mattered, though, once people heard the song.
"Rapper's Delight" burst onto the R&B charts on Oct. 13, 1979, and 25 years later, the hip-hop revolution it spawned is in full bloom. Hip-hop is now a $10 billion a year business, touching nearly every segment of pop culture and used in selling everything from platinum jewelry to back-to-school clothes to hamburgers.
"I had that feeling, that 'This-is-something-important- that's-happening' feeling," says Michael "Wonder Mike" Wright, Sugar Hill Gang's leader. "I had it when I met the guys. I had it when I heard the track recording. I had it when I first heard it on the radio. All of it still really hasn't sunk in."
Financial problems
It all began because Sylvia Robinson needed money. Though she had a successful run as a producer and songwriter, as well as her hits - "Love Is Strange" and "Pillow Talk" - Robinson's All Platinum Records company was bankrupt by 1979. The cash-flow problems had taken their toll on her spirits when a friend invited her to Harlem for a party.
There, she got her first dose of rap, where DJs built a new musical backdrop out of repeating the instrumental snippets of popular dance songs and MCs (short for "mic controllers," though "masters of ceremonies" works) rhythmically recited their poetry over them.
In those days, during the twilight of disco and the birth of job-shedding, gas-crisis stagflation, the energy of hip- hop was building a wide following. Even Nile Rodgers, leader of the band Chic and co-writer of the dance hit "Good Times," remembers the thrill of the early days of hip-hop parties, then known as "hip-hops," when breakdancers, DJs and MCs would perform to his music.
"I would go to a hip-hop, and the only song you would hear for five hours, six hours, would be 'Good Times,' and you would just hear one clever rhyme after the next," Rodgers says. "I would think there's just an inexhaustible pool or fountain of ideas that are just all going over my groove. And to think, I wrote it, and I'm not bored. I could just sit there for hours and hours and see different MCs come up all night long. It was political. It was everything."
Hooked on hip-hop
After her first hip-hop, Robinson was hooked, too, and within days she and her 17- year-old son, Joey Jr., put together a plan that they thought could save her label. They'd make a hip-hop record.
It was a revolutionary thought. How could you condense three hours of rhyming and partying into one song? There had been rambling bootleg tapes that captured hours of DJ performances. And the only other hip-hop single to hit stores - Fatback's "King Tim III," released a few months earlier - was already sinking into oblivion by the time the Robinsons went looking for rappers in the Jersey suburbs.
Joey told his mother that he knew a manager of a pizza parlor not far from their Englewood home who could rap. So they climbed into their car and headed over to the Krispy Krust to meet Henry "Big Bank Hank" Jackson. Jackson also managed the hip-hop group The Cold Crush Brothers when he wasn't earning money at the pizzeria to buy a sound system for the act.
He closed his place and climbed into the Robinsons' car to audition, still covered in flour. They liked what they heard, and his performance started to draw a crowd in front of the Krispy Krust. Guy "Master Gee" O'Brien happened to be walking past the car and auditioned on the spot, battle-rhyming with Jackson the way rappers on street corners in the Bronx would to determine who was better. Wright, a friend of friends, later rounded out the trio. Robinson dubbed them the Sugar Hill Gang after a section of Harlem, and they were soon making plans to go into a studio to record a single.
But before they stepped before the mics, Jackson went to see the leader of The Cold Crush Brothers, Curtis Brown, aka Casanova, aka Grandmaster Caz. He had a favor to ask: Could he use some of Brown's rhymes?
"When he came to me, I was, like, 'You? For what? You don't even rap. Why didn't you tell them about me?'" he says. "But when opportunity comes along for your group, you don't pass it up. I didn't lend a lot of credence to it...I figured this would be some novelty thing, but if something came out of it, I would be next.
"I write rhymes in my sleep; I am most prolific, so if he took a couple of my rhymes, that's not going to hurt me," Brown continues. He remembers tossing Jackson a notebook and telling him to take what he needed. "He was down with me. I knew we would share in anything that happened."
Rhymes and improvisations
Armed with Brown's rhymes - including his signature "I'm the C-A-S-an-the-O-V-A and the rest is F-L-Y" - and a groove from the Chic hit "Good Times," Jackson and the group improvised the rest in the studio.
"None of that was written down except for the intro, which I wanted to give the flavor of the 'Outer Limits' show," Wonder Mike says. "We only had one stop in recording - right after I said, 'Come on, Hank, sing that song.' He wasn't ready for me because I added things since the audition, and when I said that, it kind of startled him."
He admits they tried a little bit of everything. Wonder Mike began with what has become the traditional hip-hop call for dancing - "Me, the groove and my friends are gonna try to move your feet." Big Bank Hank offered up the birth of bling- bling rap with rhymes such as "I got more clothes than Muhammad Ali, and I dress so viciously." Master Gee captured the "1- 2-3-4, come on girls get on the floor" rhyme on vinyl for the first time. What held the far-flung rhymes together was the same Chic sample, which studio musicians had recorded and looped over and over.
"Rapper's Delight" was a huge, immediate success. By 1980, it crossed over to become a Top 40 pop hit, reaching No. 36.
"It was hard to deal with mentally because of the immediacy of it," says Wonder Mike, who was working for a moving company and at a candy factory when Robinson selected him. "We couldn't appreciate the scope. When the record came out, we thought it would be big in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. But within two weeks, we were opening for Parliament/Funkadelic. Within two months, we were touring West Germany."
With their success came the creation of another hip-hop archetype: the hater.
Role reversal
"There were the musicians and such that didn't appreciate what we were doing," Wonder Mike says. "They didn't think that rhythmic poetry set to music was worth anything. Well, the world thought it was clever, and it caught on. Those people who wouldn't show us respect at the beginning were opening for us six months later."
When "Rapper's Delight" became a hit, no one was more surprised than Grandmaster Caz. "I was dumbfounded," he says. "I heard the record before it came out. I almost fell asleep. They were just saying general things that everybody said in hip-hop. Except for my stuff, it really didn't have much new."
The record's success created confusion among his fans. "What happened was that everybody knew my rhymes," says Caz, who continued working with The Cold Crush Brothers. "My rhymes were classics in the street, so for three years after the song came out, I'm explaining that it wasn't me on the record, and, no, I didn't get paid. When it came out, it was on every station, no matter what they played. Country? Easy listening? It was there. It was kind of traumatizing for three years."
What might've been
Though The Cold Crush Brothers became local legends in the Bronx for their performances, they never achieved a fraction of the success of the Sugar Hill Gang. "It's a bitter pill to swallow," Caz says. "Those guys were just there. They blew up behind you. That song for 25 years - that could've put my kids through college, and I have eight kids. My life could've been a lot different. Maybe for the better, maybe for the worse. Everything happens for a reason. But sometimes, I do get a twinge."
(The Sugar Hill Gang declined to talk about the contributions of Grandmaster Caz. Asked about that, Wonder Mike says, "With anything, any issue in life, there's always going to be controversy.")
Caz says he is gratified that some people do know his role in hip-hop history. "I'm a lot like a unicorn," he says laughing. "I'm hip-hop's mythological figure."
Rodgers of Chic, a successful musician and producer, is philosophical about the role the tune he wrote with bandmate Bernard Edwards played in the success of "Rapper's Delight." "Hip-hop is like a collage, where you take bits and pieces of something and you create a new piece of art," he says. "What's really interesting is that the person who makes the collage is the one who gets all the credit and not the person who made all the little pieces. So you hear 'Rapper's Delight' and you think Sugar Hill Gang. Well, wait a minute. If you take away the music, there is no 'Rapper's Delight.'" That collage of inspiration, desperation and imitation has outlasted any controversy over who wrote what rhymes or composed what music or recorded the first hip-hop single.
Sharing lyrics and rhymes
The Beastie Boys sampled a snippet of the song for their current single, "Triple Trouble." Rapper Chingy used the rhymes on his double-platinum debut last year. Missy Elliott gave the rhymes to Mary J. Blige to sing to create some old-school ambience on her most recent album. And the granny from "The Wedding Singer" still gets laughs for delivering the song from start to finish in the Adam Sandler flick.
"Some people are reluctant to give us the credit," Wonder Mike says. "Many in the press enjoy finding the counterpoint, giving anti-popular opinions ... With hip-hop, you can pinpoint where the first commercial record came from. You can pinpoint that it was my voice that started it."
Despite that distinction, Wonder Mike says he and the rest of the Gang live relatively normal lives.
"When I wake up in the morning, I just see Mike, I don't see a living legend," he says. "The part that I really like about this business is the people. I like that on a Friday or Saturday night people will come to see us and be excited about coming to see Sugar Hill. They'll meet up with their friends and talk about who's picking up who and be excited about going out, the way I was excited to see Earth, Wind and Fire or The O'Jays. I like that the music is going into people's homes, that they've invited us in."
Sugar Hill Gang headlined the annual KTU Disco Ball, sponsored by dance station WKTU, at the Taj Mahal in Atlantic City in May, showing that their fans will still mobilize to see them. For nearly three hours, singers came and went from the stage. There were platinum-sellers such as James "J.T." Taylor of Kool and The Gang, and one-hit wonders such as Thelma Houston, revered divas such as Martha Wash and Loleatta Holloway. Actors from "The Sopranos," and KTU personalities introduced acts, as did Sherman Helmsley and Gary Coleman.
The audience response ranged from polite to raucous but nothing compared to what happened after Helmsley took the stage to say, "Straight outta New York, the originators, not the imitators, the godfathers of what is known today as hip-hop music - the Sugar Hill Gang!" As soon as Wonder Mike took the stage with an "Everybody say 'ho!'" the crowd in Etess Arena was on its feet and screaming.
"Can you remember 1979?" Wonder Mike asked the crowd after a few songs. "Thanks for making this the largest-selling record of all time."
Wide range of appeal
As soon as the familiar bass thumps of "Rapper's Delight" began, audience members rushed the stage, filling it with people of all ages. They all knew the words to the song. A young Asian woman was freak dancing with Wonder Mike. A college-age white guy was screaming "Ho-tel, mo-tel, Holiday Inn!" along with the group. Helmsley was doing his George Jefferson dance. It was a multigenerational madhouse.
"It's amazing how we're really catching on again," Wonder Mike says. "People call us living legends, that we helped start hip-hop. Well, fact is fact. That is the case. But it's strange that people get excited about seeing us the way I would get excited about seeing my heroes, like Redd Foxx and Lena Horne."
Jeff Zuchowski, program director at WKTU, says the massive fan reaction shows the power "Rapper's Delight" still has today. "The record is an anthem," he says. "It's something that works really well. It's still a high-testing record for us. We don't play much rap, but it has the energy, and everybody knows it. It spans across the generations. You can hear it at a wedding, or you can hear it at a club, and people will still love it."
HIP-HOP timeline
- Nov. 12, 1974. Herc DJs a Bronx house party and repeatedly plays songs' percussion breaks, picking up the needle after the break ends and starting over again, creating the sound that will become the basis of hip-hop.
- 1976. Afrika Bambaataa makes his debut as a DJ at the Bronx River Community Center.
- 1977. Rock Steady Crew, which would become the most well-known breakdancing group, is formed.
- 1979. Fatback records the first rap song, "King Tim III (Personality Jock)."
- Sept. 16, 1979. "Rapper's Delight" is released by The Sugar Hill Gang.
- Oct. 13, 1979. "Rapper's Delight" appears on the R&B charts for the first time.
- October 1980. Kurtis Blow appears on "Soul Train," becoming the first rap artist to appear on national TV.
- Feb. 14, 1981. The Funky 4 Plus One More perform on "Saturday Night Live," becoming first hip-hop rap group on national television.
- March 28, 1981. Blondie's "Rapture" becomes the No. 1 pop single in Billboard, becoming first hip-hop chart topper.
- September 1981. Grandmaster Flash and The Furious Five release "The Message," one of the first popular hip-hop records to address serious issues.
- 1983. Run-D.M.C., above, releases its first single, "It's Like That/Sucker M.C.'s."
- 1983. The documentary "Style Wars" and the low-budget feature "Wild Style" provide the first cinematic glimpses into the underground rap, grafitti and breakdancing culture of New York.
- April 15, 1983. The Rock Steady Crew appears in the movie "Flashdance." It's the first mainstream appearance of b-boying or breakdancing.
- 1984. Los Angeles' KDAY becomes the first rap-only radio station in the United States.
- 1984. Russell Simmons and Rick Rubin found the influential rap label Def Jam.
- Dec. 17, 1984. Run-DMC's debut becomes the first hip-hop album to go gold.
- Nov. 1, 1985. The Recording Industry Association of America, in a compromise with the Parents Music Resource Center, agrees to put "Parental Advisory" stickers on albums; 2 Live Crew's "As Nasty as They Wanna Be," is one of the first albums to get the tag.
- July 15, 1986. Run-D.M.C.'s "Raising Hell" becomes the first platinum rap album.
- 1986. MTV begins airing Run-D.M.C.'s video for "Walk This Way," featuring Aerosmith.
- 1988. David Mays launches The Source magazine.
- August 1988. MTV debuts "Yo MTV Raps!" which becomes one of its most popular shows.
- 1989. N.W.A.'s "Straight Outta Compton" ushers in the age of gangsta rap.
- Feb. 22, 1989. DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince win the first rap Grammy for best rap performance for the single "Parents Just Don't Understand."
- 1991. Marion "Suge" Knight forms Death Row records in Los Angeles, and Sean "Puffy" Combs forms Bad Boy Entertainment in New York; both will become focal points for the emerging East Coast-West Coast rap rivalry.
- Feb. 24, 1993. Arrested Development becomes the first hip-hop act to win a Grammy for best new artist.
- April 29, 1994. Queen Latifah, right, becomes the first female to have a gold album, "Black Reign."
- Nov. 30, 1994. Tupac Shakur is shot five times in the lobby of Quad Recording Studio in Mahattan, where Sean "Puffy" Combs and The Notorious B.I.G. were recording.
- April 1995. While imprisoned at Riker's Island for sexual assault, Tupac grants Vibe magazine a jailhouse interview in which he blames Puffy and Biggie for the Quad studio shooting. This is seen as the first salvo in the East Coast-West Coast rap feud.
- March 26, 1995. Eazy-E dies of AIDS.
- Sept. 13, 1996. Tupac Shakur, who was shot Sept. 6 on the busy Las Vegas Strip after an altercation in the lobby with a reputed gang member, dies. Some will see this as a deadly escalation of the East Coast-West Coast rivalry. The case remains unsolved.
- March 9, 1997. The Notorious B.I.G., who is in Los Angeles to work on Puffy's solo album, is shot dead after attending the Soul Train Awards. The case remains unsolved.
- Feb. 24. 1999. Lauryn Hill receives a record-setting 10 Grammy nominations and wins five awards for her solo debut, "The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill."
- May 2000. Eminem's "The Marshall Mathers LP" becomes the fastest-selling rap album of all time, moving 1.75 million units in one week.
- Feb. 21, 2001. Eminem performs at the Grammys with Elton John, attempting to defuse protests claiming his lyrics are homophobic and misogynistic.
- Oct. 30, 2002. Jam Master Jay of Run-D.M.C. is shot and killed. The case remains unsolved.
- March 23, 2003. Eminem's "Lose Yourself" becomes the first hip-hop song to win an Oscar.
- Nov. 25, 2003. Jay-Z retires with a farewell concert at Madison Square Garden.
- 2004. Hip-hop celebrates its 30th year, and "Rapper's Delight" turns 25.
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