The Story Behind the First Rap Song
Throw your hands up in the air and party hardy like you just don't care...
Did you ever see the 1998 Adam Sandler comedy The Wedding Singer?
One storyline in the film has Sandler teaching music to an octogenarian, who surprises everyone later in the film when she performs the 1979 rap song Rapper’s Delight.
Many people (across generations) recognize Rapper’s Delight, and it is often credited as the first rap song (or, the first one to be played on the radio).
In fact, the Sugarhill Gang’s hit was the first hip-hop single to become a Top 40 chart hit - 43 years ago this week.
But what’s the story behind Rapper’s Delight?
I was curious…
The story begins in the late 1970s, when record producer and singer Sylvia Robinson had a problem.
Her record company, All Platinum, was in financial difficulties.
But in the summer of 1979, the company was thrown a lifeline.
One evening, Sylvia was visiting Harlem World, a New York City nightclub. For the first time, she saw a DJ talking, mixing beats and rhymes, and noticed how the crowd was responding.
“All of a sudden, a voice said to me, ‘If you put a concept like that on wax, you'll be out of all that trouble you're in’,” Sylvia said.
As Sylvia heard people perform over existing R&B records in the club, she decided to recreate that formula on a new track.
She hired 17-year-old Chip Shearin to play a bass line for 15 minutes, and sampled (or rather, interpolated) Chic’s song Good Times.*
Chip was paid $70, and asked Sylvia what she was going to do with the track.
“I've got these kids who are going to talk real fast over it,” she said.
The ‘kids’ Sylvia brought into the studio were known as Big Bank Hank, Wonder Mike and Master Gee. She named them The Sugarhill Gang, after the Harlem neighborhood near her childhood home.
And that track where they ‘talked really fast’ over the bass became Rapper’s Delight.
Rapper’s Delight was soon selling 50,000 copies a day, and became a top 40 hit in the US, and reached No. 3 in the UK.
It was the first rap single to sell more than one million copies.
Rapper’s Delight is considered a watershed in popular culture, the song that introduced rap into the wider pop-music landscape, and made Sylvia a leading figure in the rapid proliferation of hip-hop music worldwide.
Sylvia Robinson died in 2011, and a biopic of her life story has been in the works since 2014.
*Chic’s Nile Rogers and Bernard Edwards later sued Sugar Hill Records for copyright infringement. They settled out of court, and were named co-writers of Rapper’s Delight.
Here’s the original video for Rapper’s Delight (worth checking out for the fashion alone).
BONUS FACT: Dirty Dancing fans may remember Sylvia’s hit Love is Strange from the scene in the film with Johnny and Baby dancing.
Yeah, she’s that Sylvia.
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