Rapper’s Delight

RAPPER’S DELIGHT
 
 
“Rapper’s Delight”  is a 1979 hip hop track by the Sugarhill Gang and produced by Sylvia Robinson.  While it was not the first single to include rapping, “Rapper’s Delight” is credited for introducing hip hop music to a wide audience.  It was a prototype for various types of rap music, incorporating themes such as boasting, dance, honesty and sex, with the charisma and enthusiasm of James Brown.  The song was recorded in a single take.  “Rapper’s Delight” is number 251 on the Rolling Stone magazine’s list of The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time and number 2 on VH1’s 100 Greatest Hip-Hop Songs.  It is also included in NPR’s list of the 100 most important American musical works of the 20th century.  It was preserved into the National Recording Registry by the Library of Congress in 2011.  (More from Wikipedia)
 
 
 
 
The generally acknowledged original rap song is “Rapper’s Delight” (1979) by the Sugarhill Gang.  (Both Sugar Hill Records and the Sugarhill Gang are named after the Sugar Hill section of Harlem – by the way, Harlem is adapted from the Dutch place-name Haarlem).  As noted in Wikipedia:  “Bill Adler, an independent consultant, once said, ‘There was hardly ever a moment when rap music was underground; one of the very first so-called rap records [Rapper’s Delight], was a monster hit.’"
 
The Blondie frontwoman comes up again in this story of the genesis of Rapper’s Delight that is taken from Wikipedia:  “In late 1978Debbie Harry suggested that Chic’s Nile Rodgers join her and Chris Stein at a hip hop event, which at the time was a communal space taken over by teenagers with boombox stereos playing various pieces of music that performers would break dance to.  Rodgers experienced hip hop event the first time himself at a high school in the Bronx.  On September 20, 1979, and September 21, 1979Blondie and Chic were playing concerts with the Clash in New York at The Palladium.  When Chic started playing Good Timesrapper Fab 5 Freddy and the members of the Sugarhill Gang (‘Big Bank Hank’ JacksonMike Wright, and ‘Master Gee’ O’Brien), jumped up on stage and started freestyling with the band.
 
“A few weeks later Rodgers was on the dance floor of New York club Leviticus and heard the DJ play a song which opened with Bernard Edwards’s bass line from Chic’s ‘Good Times’.  Rodgers approached the DJ who said he was playing a record he had just bought that day in Harlem.  The song turned out to be an early version of ‘Rapper’s Delight’, which also included a scratched version of the song’s string section.  Rodgers and Edwards immediately threatened legal action over copyright, which resulted in a settlement and their being credited as co-writers.  Rodgers admitted that he was originally upset with the song, but later declared it to be ‘one of his favorite songs of all time’ and his favorite of all the tracks that sampled (or in this instance interpolatedChic.  He also stated:  ‘As innovative and important as “Good Times” was, Rapper’s Delight was just as much, if not more so.’  ‘Rapper’s Delight’ is said to be the song that popularized rap music and put it into the mainstream.’”
 
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The origin of the term “hip hop” is interesting; again from Wikipedia:  “Keith ‘Cowboy’ Wiggins, a member of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five has been credited with coining the term in 1978 while teasing a friend who had just joined the US Army by scat singing the words ‘hip/hop/hip/hop’ in a way that mimicked the rhythmic cadence of marching soldiers.  Cowboy later worked the ‘hip hop’ cadence into his stage performance. . . .  The song ‘Rapper’s Delight’, by the Sugarhill Gang, released in 1979, begins with the line, ‘I said a hip, hop the hippie the hippie to the hip hip hop, a you don’t stop’.”
 
(September 2016)
 
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Items:    Rapper’s Delight 
 
Last edited: March 22, 2021