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| Acknowledging it was a touch commercial... |
The Hit
Swear to God, I’ve already written a full post on The Sugarhill Gang - I certainly know the story, and not just from Hip Hop Evolution, Season 1, Episode 2 - but, these are the hazards of deleting half the things you write.
At any rate…
1979’s “Rapper’s Delight” took the world by storm when it came out and recycles through pop culture with enough regularity, even if it ain’t clockwork. Which is to say, who doesn’t know this song? As for liking it…
A stand-alone Wikipedia page gives a closer history of The Sugarhill Gang’s (borrowed) breakthrough hit - e.g.., the famous bass line came from Chic’s “Good Times” with writing credits going to co-founder Bernard Edwards, how the members of Sugarhill came on stage at a Bronx “hip hop event” and started freestyling with Fab Five Freddy when Chic started playing the that single, the fact the melody was interpolated, instead of sampled, etc. If you listen to the non-single version - something I’d done before but spaced - that opens with another interpolation from “Here Comes That Sound Again,” a single by a UK disco act called Love De-Luxe.
The lyrics are famous, the song’s origins infamous…I mean, what can I tell people in this post that they wouldn’t already know from watching Hip Hop Evolution?
Long story short, it was the first hip hop hit to crack the Billboard Top 40 (it only reached No. 36 in the U.S., but it climbed into the top 3 in several international markets), Henry “Big Bank Hank” Jackson lifted the lyrics from Grandmaster Caz (aka, Casanova Fly, aka, Curtis Fisher), and, yes, it was the Sugarhill Gang’s only major hit in the U.S. market, though, both “Apache” (pretty sure that one came from elsewhere; also, o ye gods, that fucking video, ) and “8th Wonder” (still, both better songs, for me) became solid UK hits. To sum up its origin and legacy in two quotes, respectively:
“There's this idea that hip-hop has to have street credibility, yet the first big hip-hop song was an inauthentic fabrication. It's not like the guys involved were the 'real' hip-hop icons of the era, like Grandmaster Flash or Lovebug Starski. So it's a pretty impressive fabrication, lightning in a bottle.”
- Oliver Wang, author of Classic Material: The Hip-Hop Album Guide
Next, from a 2016 post on a site called Moo Kid Music:
“Some 37 years on, the track is one of those dancefloor tracks you’re seemingly born knowing.”
Darkness and the light, basically...
The Rest of the Story
As has been noted in multiple times in multiple forums, The Sugarhill Gang recorded the breakthrough single of the hip hop genre because everyone else passed. The entire idea of recording a hip hop single came from a singer-songwriter with a solid resume turned ambitious producer/label exec named Sylvia Robinson. She built her name, first, as half of Mickey & Sylvia with “Love Is Strange” in 1957, then later with “Pillow Talk” in 1973 as a solo artist (that one was big), but, when she heard hip hop for the first time, she flat-out knew it would blow up if anyone could get it on vinyl. As noted above, her trouble came with finding talent. The heavy-hitters in the Bronx/Manhattan scenes played house/street parties, built local reputations and followings, did the whole rap-battle thing, and generally resisted the idea of putting what they did on vinyl. That set Robinson on a fishing expedition into the wilds of New Jersey.
Even allowing for the reality that Big Bank Hank stole lines from Grandmaster Caz’s rhyme book and/or act, the anecdote about his and Guy “Master Gee” O’Brien’s dueling auditions at the pizza shop sells them both a bit short. They, along with The Sugarhill Gang’s third member, Michael “Wonder Mike” Wright, had played parties before their auditions; as Master Gee told The Guardian in a 2017 quick-hit, he’d been DJ-ing for a while and had started slipping some rapping into his repertoire. That’s to say, they didn’t hit what turned out to be a lengthy recording session cold. As Wonder Mike told The Guardian in that same interview:
“At parties, guys would pass mics around for hours, so rapping for 20 minutes in a studio seemed like nothing. When we made the record we kept coming up with clever things and the producers never stopped us. The finished recording was 19 minutes long, all the rap done in one take, but we cut it to 15, making the intro shorter and cutting out some party noise.”
Because sampling hadn’t arrived yet, Sugar Hill Records had what sounds like a slap-dash in-house band (later?) called Positive Force play Chic’s bass-line and the rest of the backing music for the track. From there, they cut it down to a 5:05 playing time, put it out into the world and - viola! - hip hop had its first hit. The Sugarhill Gang toured the world they’d opened up for the genre and everyone was happy…until nothing else really clicked, other artists, including some of the originals, started to eclipse The Sugarhill Gang - for instance, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s literally ground-breaking, “The Message” came out, also put out by Sugar Hill Records/Sylvia Robinson (and they give her real credit for it), but see also “Showdown.” And things just got uglier from there.
Here, “uglier” means the lawsuits started and, according to a 2014 post to a site called Urbanology (and this is a pretty solid “where are they now”), Grandmaster Caz wasn’t the only person Big Bank Hank screwed over:
“Their label, [Sugar Hill] Records and band mate Big Bank Hank left members, Wonder Mike and Master Gee in the dust over publishing, royalties and even their trademarked names. As if that was not enough, they also started touring the group with the stolen identities of Mike and Gee.”
All that mess culminated in a 2013 documentary called I Want My Name Back and a lawsuit that saw Master Gee and Wonder Mike reclaim their stage names, under which they could tour as The Rapper’s Delight Experience. While I’m sure COVID knocked them on their asses, O’Brien and Wright continued touring into 2019 and remained friends through it all, even down to holding day jobs. It wasn’t all acrimony - e.g., they got the proverbial band back together to record a children’s album in 1999 called Jump On It! - but, with Jackson’s passing in 2014, it’s just Wonder Mike, Master Gee and Hen Dogg carrying on the Sugarhill legacy.
About the Sampler
I mostly mined three of The Sugarhill Gang’s first four albums - e.g., their eponymous debut (1980), 8th Wonder (1981) and Livin’ in the Fast Lane (1984) - but pulled the (semi-)extended version of “Rapper’s Delight” and the Furious Five’s “White Lines (Don’t Do It)” from a Sugar Hill Records compilation called Rapper’s Delight that looks like it came out in 1996 (“Showdown,” linked to above, showed up on 8th Wonder).
First things first, they laid down more than a few you wouldn’t expect, including tracks where they sing more than they rap - e.g., straight funk numbers like “On the Money,” the sultry slow-jam, “Here I Am,” and a (hard) nod to the 80s titled “I Like What You’re Doing.” The rest, however, sounds like hyper-early hip hop numbers - e.g., “Rapper’s Reprise” and “Passion Play” from their debut; “Funk Box” and “Hot Hot Summer Day” from 8th Wonder, and “Fast Lane,” “Girls,” and “Kick It Live from 9 to 5” from Livin’ in the Fast Lane.
Sullied origins aside, it’s all pretty damn listenable. A couple have already made the 2021 4th Quarter sampler and I’m confident a couple more will get in pre-culling mix. As with a lot of pop music, the main thing is taking it for what it is - i.e., music for fun and dancing. As for The Sugarhill Gang…I mean, shit, they come off as good dudes. They’d been doing enough of the work prior to their break for me to excuse everything but the straight-up thieving. And, regardless of how it came together, they kicked off an avalanche that’s still falling to this day.
Till the next one…which gets us back to disco, but also a personal favorite.
Swear to God, I’ve already written a full post on The Sugarhill Gang - I certainly know the story, and not just from Hip Hop Evolution, Season 1, Episode 2 - but, these are the hazards of deleting half the things you write.
At any rate…
1979’s “Rapper’s Delight” took the world by storm when it came out and recycles through pop culture with enough regularity, even if it ain’t clockwork. Which is to say, who doesn’t know this song? As for liking it…
A stand-alone Wikipedia page gives a closer history of The Sugarhill Gang’s (borrowed) breakthrough hit - e.g.., the famous bass line came from Chic’s “Good Times” with writing credits going to co-founder Bernard Edwards, how the members of Sugarhill came on stage at a Bronx “hip hop event” and started freestyling with Fab Five Freddy when Chic started playing the that single, the fact the melody was interpolated, instead of sampled, etc. If you listen to the non-single version - something I’d done before but spaced - that opens with another interpolation from “Here Comes That Sound Again,” a single by a UK disco act called Love De-Luxe.
The lyrics are famous, the song’s origins infamous…I mean, what can I tell people in this post that they wouldn’t already know from watching Hip Hop Evolution?
Long story short, it was the first hip hop hit to crack the Billboard Top 40 (it only reached No. 36 in the U.S., but it climbed into the top 3 in several international markets), Henry “Big Bank Hank” Jackson lifted the lyrics from Grandmaster Caz (aka, Casanova Fly, aka, Curtis Fisher), and, yes, it was the Sugarhill Gang’s only major hit in the U.S. market, though, both “Apache” (pretty sure that one came from elsewhere; also, o ye gods, that fucking video, ) and “8th Wonder” (still, both better songs, for me) became solid UK hits. To sum up its origin and legacy in two quotes, respectively:
“There's this idea that hip-hop has to have street credibility, yet the first big hip-hop song was an inauthentic fabrication. It's not like the guys involved were the 'real' hip-hop icons of the era, like Grandmaster Flash or Lovebug Starski. So it's a pretty impressive fabrication, lightning in a bottle.”
- Oliver Wang, author of Classic Material: The Hip-Hop Album Guide
Next, from a 2016 post on a site called Moo Kid Music:
“Some 37 years on, the track is one of those dancefloor tracks you’re seemingly born knowing.”
Darkness and the light, basically...
The Rest of the Story
As has been noted in multiple times in multiple forums, The Sugarhill Gang recorded the breakthrough single of the hip hop genre because everyone else passed. The entire idea of recording a hip hop single came from a singer-songwriter with a solid resume turned ambitious producer/label exec named Sylvia Robinson. She built her name, first, as half of Mickey & Sylvia with “Love Is Strange” in 1957, then later with “Pillow Talk” in 1973 as a solo artist (that one was big), but, when she heard hip hop for the first time, she flat-out knew it would blow up if anyone could get it on vinyl. As noted above, her trouble came with finding talent. The heavy-hitters in the Bronx/Manhattan scenes played house/street parties, built local reputations and followings, did the whole rap-battle thing, and generally resisted the idea of putting what they did on vinyl. That set Robinson on a fishing expedition into the wilds of New Jersey.
Even allowing for the reality that Big Bank Hank stole lines from Grandmaster Caz’s rhyme book and/or act, the anecdote about his and Guy “Master Gee” O’Brien’s dueling auditions at the pizza shop sells them both a bit short. They, along with The Sugarhill Gang’s third member, Michael “Wonder Mike” Wright, had played parties before their auditions; as Master Gee told The Guardian in a 2017 quick-hit, he’d been DJ-ing for a while and had started slipping some rapping into his repertoire. That’s to say, they didn’t hit what turned out to be a lengthy recording session cold. As Wonder Mike told The Guardian in that same interview:
“At parties, guys would pass mics around for hours, so rapping for 20 minutes in a studio seemed like nothing. When we made the record we kept coming up with clever things and the producers never stopped us. The finished recording was 19 minutes long, all the rap done in one take, but we cut it to 15, making the intro shorter and cutting out some party noise.”
Because sampling hadn’t arrived yet, Sugar Hill Records had what sounds like a slap-dash in-house band (later?) called Positive Force play Chic’s bass-line and the rest of the backing music for the track. From there, they cut it down to a 5:05 playing time, put it out into the world and - viola! - hip hop had its first hit. The Sugarhill Gang toured the world they’d opened up for the genre and everyone was happy…until nothing else really clicked, other artists, including some of the originals, started to eclipse The Sugarhill Gang - for instance, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s literally ground-breaking, “The Message” came out, also put out by Sugar Hill Records/Sylvia Robinson (and they give her real credit for it), but see also “Showdown.” And things just got uglier from there.
Here, “uglier” means the lawsuits started and, according to a 2014 post to a site called Urbanology (and this is a pretty solid “where are they now”), Grandmaster Caz wasn’t the only person Big Bank Hank screwed over:
“Their label, [Sugar Hill] Records and band mate Big Bank Hank left members, Wonder Mike and Master Gee in the dust over publishing, royalties and even their trademarked names. As if that was not enough, they also started touring the group with the stolen identities of Mike and Gee.”
All that mess culminated in a 2013 documentary called I Want My Name Back and a lawsuit that saw Master Gee and Wonder Mike reclaim their stage names, under which they could tour as The Rapper’s Delight Experience. While I’m sure COVID knocked them on their asses, O’Brien and Wright continued touring into 2019 and remained friends through it all, even down to holding day jobs. It wasn’t all acrimony - e.g., they got the proverbial band back together to record a children’s album in 1999 called Jump On It! - but, with Jackson’s passing in 2014, it’s just Wonder Mike, Master Gee and Hen Dogg carrying on the Sugarhill legacy.
About the Sampler
I mostly mined three of The Sugarhill Gang’s first four albums - e.g., their eponymous debut (1980), 8th Wonder (1981) and Livin’ in the Fast Lane (1984) - but pulled the (semi-)extended version of “Rapper’s Delight” and the Furious Five’s “White Lines (Don’t Do It)” from a Sugar Hill Records compilation called Rapper’s Delight that looks like it came out in 1996 (“Showdown,” linked to above, showed up on 8th Wonder).
First things first, they laid down more than a few you wouldn’t expect, including tracks where they sing more than they rap - e.g., straight funk numbers like “On the Money,” the sultry slow-jam, “Here I Am,” and a (hard) nod to the 80s titled “I Like What You’re Doing.” The rest, however, sounds like hyper-early hip hop numbers - e.g., “Rapper’s Reprise” and “Passion Play” from their debut; “Funk Box” and “Hot Hot Summer Day” from 8th Wonder, and “Fast Lane,” “Girls,” and “Kick It Live from 9 to 5” from Livin’ in the Fast Lane.
Sullied origins aside, it’s all pretty damn listenable. A couple have already made the 2021 4th Quarter sampler and I’m confident a couple more will get in pre-culling mix. As with a lot of pop music, the main thing is taking it for what it is - i.e., music for fun and dancing. As for The Sugarhill Gang…I mean, shit, they come off as good dudes. They’d been doing enough of the work prior to their break for me to excuse everything but the straight-up thieving. And, regardless of how it came together, they kicked off an avalanche that’s still falling to this day.
Till the next one…which gets us back to disco, but also a personal favorite.
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