BILL ADLER
Bill Adler is an American music journalist and critic who specializes in hip-hop. Since the early 1980s he has promoted hip-hop in a variety of capacities, including as a publicist, biographer, record label executive, documentary filmmaker, museum consultant, art gallerist and curator, and archivist. He may be best known for his tenure as director of publicity at Def Jam Recordings (1984–1990), the period of his career to which the critic Robert Christgau was referring when he described Adler as a “legendary publicist”. (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.’"
(September 2016)
