TOP 40 DEBUT: January 5, 1980
PEAK POSITION: #36 (January 12, 1980)
“Rapper’s Delight” got everything wrong. The song that single-handedly introduced hip-hop to the masses didn’t come from hip-hop’s actual pioneers. It wasn’t forged in the Bronx. It had no connection to a culture seven years in the making. It ignored the innovators, undercut the creators, and swiped from everyone. Every single person involved in the making of “Rapper’s Delight”—from the head of the label all the way down to the trio of unknowns rapping stolen rhymes over a stolen groove—was an outsider.
And in the end, it didn’t matter. As the first commercially successful hip-hop single ever released, “Rapper’s Delight” became the Big Bang moment of an entire movement; forty years on, we’re still feeling the reverberations. “Rapper’s Delight” changed pop music. “Rapper’s Delight” changed pop culture. “Rapper’s Delight” got everything wrong and still made history.
The long and convoluted history behind “Rapper’s Delight” begins years earlier, with the long (and equally convoluted) history of hip-hop itself. And that story has already been told, numerous times over, in far better detail by far more talented people than yours truly. So, given that this entry only offers a seriously abridged version of rap’s creation myth, I encourage all interested parties to delve deeper: Read books. (Dan Charnas’ The Big Payback: The History of the Business of Hip-Hop is unparalleled.) Check out documentaries. (Netflix’s flawed-but-watchable Hip-Hop Evolution serves as a great entry point.) Or simply strap on your old-school headphones and listen.
Hip-hop as an art form had been flourishing long before “Rapper’s Delight” came along. But it was a movement that existed almost entirely in the moment. Rap began as a localized phenomenon: born in block parties held around South Bronx, spread mainly by word-of-mouth, and rarely, if ever, captured for posterity. Reliable sources trace hip-hop’s beginnings back to DJ Kool Herc, born Clive Campbell in Kingston, Jamaica. Herc was the first deejay to emphasize “the break,” the moment in a James Brown or Jimmy Castor record where the melody drops away to pure rhythm and backbeat. (These isolated sections, looped over and over, eventually became known as “breakbeats.”)
Every time Herc hit the break, the crowd lost its collective mind. So he figured out a way to prolong it. With a literal “two turntables and a microphone,” Herc cut back and forth between twin copies of the same record, stretching the break for minutes at a time while simultaneously hyping the crowd with shouted exhortations. He called his technique the “merry go-round.” History would eventually dub him the “Father of Hip-Hop.”
Other deejays began building on what Herc had created, turning a series of block parties into an underground culture, complete with graffiti artists and stylized dancers known as “break boys” (or, simply, “B-boys”). In the East Bronx, Afrika Bambaataa formed his own crew, the positive-minded Universal Zulu Nation, out of the remnants of a reformed street gang. Grandmaster Flash, born Joseph Saddler, perfected and popularized the technique of “scratching,” manipulating a record in real time and allowing the audience to hear the results. It’s no exaggeration to say the foundation of all hip-hop—creating new sounds from preexisting pieces of music—begins here.
In the early days of hip-hop, deejays ran the show. Rapping existed as an afterthought, a way for various nameless emcees (or “MC's”) to pump up the crowd while the man behind the turntables did his business. Herc’s initial party chants—borrowed from the Jamaican “toasting” of his homeland—soon led to MC's sharing space with DJ's, eventually coalesced into “crews” that functioned as the earliest hip-hop groups.
Herc had the Herculoids, featuring Coke La Rock, widely acknowledged as rap’s first true MC. Grandmaster Flash had the Furious Five, featuring Keith Cowboy, the man who first coined the phrase “hip-hop.” Rivaling the Five in terms of popularity were the Cold Crush Brothers, featuring Grandmaster Caz (formerly DJ Casanova Fly). These crews, and these MC's, built the foundation of “Rapper’s Delight” line by line and rhyme by rhyme, long before the Sugarhill Gang—or Sugar Hill Records itself—ever sprang into existence. And none of them received an ounce of credit.
Sylvia Robinson, co-founder of Sugar Hill Records, didn’t know the first thing about hip-hop. But she knew the music business inside and out. She’d first found success as the “Sylvia” half of the 1950’s duo Mickey & Sylvia, best known for their #1 R&B single “Love Is Strange” (which also peaked at #11 on the Hot 100 in early 1957). In 1968 (or 1967, according to some sources), she started All Platinum Records with her husband, Joe Robinson. Using a variety of subsidiary labels, the company released several R&B chart-toppers over the next decade, including the Moments’ “Love On A Two-Way Street,” Shirley & Company’s “Shame, Shame, Shame,” and the #3 pop hit “Pillow Talk,” written and recorded by Robinson herself (under the credit “Sylvia”). But All Platinum’s fortunes faded with the rise of disco; as the decade came to an end, the Robinsons were on the verge of bankruptcy. That’s when Sylvia attended a party held in a New York club called Harlem World, hosted by early hip-hop legend Lovebug Starski.
A 44-year-old businesswoman living in Englewood, New Jersey, Robinson didn’t seem like the type of person to fall under the spell of a gritty Bronx subculture. But Sylvia knew hits. And after hearing Starski rhyming over current R&B records in that Manhattan club, she knew she’d stumbled onto a formula would sell. The Robinsons already had a studio setup and a $5,000 cash influx from notorious record mogul Morris Levy. Why not start a new label to capitalize on this burgeoning trend? The next day, Sylvia asked her son, seventeen year-old Joey Robinson Jr., if he knew where to find any “rappers.”
Prior to “Rapper’s Delight,” the only way to listen to hip-hop was by experiencing it live—or buying a bootleg cassette of a previous performance. The major players of the scene actively resisted offers from local labels to capture their sound for posterity, with Grandmaster Flash even instructing his security to destroy any taping equipment found at his shows. Flash later admitted he made a “huge error” in turning down invitations to record, but he wasn’t alone in his early stance. Bambaataa, for his part, thought any commercial rap release would spell “the demise of our parties.” Even if Robinson had reached out to well-known crews and DJs before starting Sugar Hill Records (and most parties agree she didn’t), in all likelihood her overtures would’ve been rejected outright. As it turned out, she found all the talent she needed without leaving New Jersey.
Henry “Hank” Jackson wasn’t a rapper. He did manage a rap crew (the aforementioned Cold Crush Brothers), and he also bounced at several Bronx clubs where prominent hip-hop deejays performed. But Jackson wound up performing on the most famous rap single ever for one reason only: He knew Warren Moore, and Moore knew Joey Robinson Jr. And when Sylvia asked her son for assistance in recruiting an emcee, Joey’s friend Warren suggested the burly guy who worked at Englewood’s Crispy Crust Pizza and was “always rappin.’”
According to legend, the two Robinsons, along with Moore, paid a visit to Crispy Crust after the MC previously booked for their session (a lost-to-history rapper named Casper) failed to show. Jackson left his pizza duties, still covered in flour, and performed for Sylvia in the back seat of Joey’s Oldsmobile. She was impressed. Then another aspiring MC named Guy O’Brien walked over to give his own impromptu audition. As did a third hopeful named Michael Wright. Unable to choose between the three, Robinson simply decided to take them all. On a Friday afternoon outside a pizza parlor in Englewood, the Sugarhill Gang was born.
Three days later, Sylvia Robinson assembled her ad hoc trio of non-professionals inside a small suburban studio for one of the most famous one-shot performances in music history. The backing track, an instrumental interpolation of the Chic smash “Good Times,” had previously been recorded by musicians from the funk band Positive Force. The nascent members of the Sugarhill Gang had never even rehearsed together. But as Robinson let the tape roll and pointed to each MC in turn, magic happened.
The amount of time needed to record the entire fifteen-minute song? Exactly fifteen minutes—excluding the additional time needed to patch in some of Mike’s lines, of course. Midway through the first-and-only take, Hank’s boss called the studio, informing Sylvia that Jackson would be fired if he didn’t show up to work in the next half hour. Robinson didn’t stop recording. Hank kept rapping. (Thanks to an intercession from Joe Robinson, he wound up keeping his job.)
Thrilled with the results of this one-off session, Sylvia decided that “Rapper’s Delight” would be released sans editing: one 14:38 track (initially and incorrectly labeled with a timing of 15:00), available only in the 12” single format. The unknown trio would share its name with its equally unknown label, Sugar Hill Records. And each member would receive a new, more hip-hop-appropriate moniker: Michael Wright became Wonder Mike, Guy O’Brien became Master Gee, and Jackson was now dubbed Big Bank Hank.
“Rapper’s Delight” would not be the first hip-hop recording to be available commercially. Instead, that honor went to “King Tim III (Personality Jock),” a Fatback Band single released in March 1979. But “King Tim III” was only the B-side; a more conventional disco tune, “You’re My Candy Sweet,” got top billing. Even after deejays started giving more spins to the flipside of the single, “King Tim III” only got as high as #26 R&B, never even touching the Hot 100. “Rapper’s Delight” looked to be on its way to a similar marginalization—until a St. Louis station decided to give one quarter of an hour over to this newfangled “rap song.” Sugar Hill Records received an order for 5,000 units almost immediately. Within a matter of months, “Rapper’s Delight” had become a sales phenomenon. At its peak, Robinson claimed Sugar Hill was selling 50,000 copies a day.
And here’s where things get incredibly sticky. Initial pressings of “Rapper’s Delight” assigned writing credit to Robinson, Jackson, Wright, and O’Brien. There was no mention of Chic co-founders Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards, the men who initially wrote and performed “Good Times.” (“Good Times” hit #1 on August 18, 1979. It’s a hard 10.) Nor were the Sugarhill Gang the first rappers to unlock the potential of Edwards’ life-altering bassline. In the two months prior to the “Rapper’s Delight” session, Chic’s massive dance hit had already become a go-to weapon in the arsenal of every hip-hop deejay across the Five Boroughs. (Here’s an early example from DJ Hollywood and Starski, possibly doing the exact same routine Robinson heard in Harlem World.)
The only difference? Every other hip-hop musician using “Good Times” was doing so in a live setting. Before “Rapper’s Delight,” no attempt had been made to monetize a performance—or cut out the original songwriters in the process. To further muddy the waters, the Sugarhill Gang weren’t even rapping over the authentic Chic recording. Did Sylvia Robinson replicate “Good Times” from scratch as a sneaky way of bypassing copyright law? If so, it didn’t work.
Nile Rodgers first heard “Rapper’s Delight” in the Manhattan club Leviticus, just weeks after the 12” single hit stores. According to Rodgers’ own account, he assumed the deejay was simply cutting up “Good Times” with a live emcee rapping over the top—until he realized there was no MC in the club. The deejay showed him the record, complete with the unauthorized credit and a company address. Rodgers had his lawyers on the phone to Sugar Hill the next day. Robinson initially played hardball; her partner, Morris Levy, quickly got involved, along with some Mafia goons. Eventually, a new settlement was hashed out, giving writing credit to Rodgers and Edwards—and no one else. And that posed its own set of problems.
“Good Times” isn’t the only song being used without permission in “Rapper’s Delight.” The opening piano-and-bass riff interpolates from a different disco hit: “Here Comes That Sound Again,” by the British studio group Love De-Luxe. (To this day, songwriter Alan Hawkshaw receives no royalties or writing credit from Sugar Hill.) The poor kid tasked with reproducing Edwards’ seminal bass pattern for a quarter of an hour? His name was Chip Shearin, and he got $70 and no royalties either. Then again, no one in the house band appeared in the credits, so it’s only Shearin’s word to confirm he played on the recording at all. (In a very odd 2016 Facebook post, Positive Force guitarist Albert Pittman claimed Bernard Roland actually handled bass duties and Shearin is just “riding coattails.”) Finally, the single’s sole nod to true hip-hop culture came courtesy of a completely anonymous source: Who’s the DJ responsible for scratching in those string stabs from the original “Good Times”? To this day, no one knows.
Of course, this is all precursor to the most infamous bit of skulduggery associated with “Rapper’s Delight”: namely, that the bulk of the raps in the actual song belong to someone else. In fairness, ownership held a lower priority in the days before hip-hop appeared on wax, with certain rhymes passing freely from MC to MC in a B-boy-styled oral tradition. “Let’s rock and ya don’t stop” might’ve originated with Coke La Rock, or possibly even Herc himself, but eventually that phrase simply became another part of rap’s vernacular. Purists might not have judged the Sugarhill Gang near as harshly had Hank, Mike, and Master Gee—none of whom had ever rapped on a live stage before signing to Sugar Hill—simply sprinkled in a few stock party chants among their own material. (They had fourteen minutes to kill, after all.) Problem is, most, if not all, of the essential rhymes in “Rapper’s Delight” originated elsewhere.
Let’s begin at the beginning. Wonder Mike kicks off the proceedings with a now iconic salvo: “I said a hip, hop/ The hippie, the hippie/ To the hip hip-hop, and you don't stop/ The rock it to the bang bang boogie, say up jump the boogie/ To the rhythm of the boogie, the beat.” Do those words instantly crystallize the essence of early rap? Absolutely. Did Mike come up with any of it? Not a chance.
Most credit Keith Cowboy, of Flash’s Furious Five crew, for originating the “hip-hop” phrase a year previous, in a rhyme near identical to the one opening “Rapper’s Delight.” Other cite Lovebug Starski, who himself argued that the two landed on the phrase jointly while trading lines at a friend’s farewell party. In short, even the origin of the rhyme that created hip-hop (as a term) is disputed. But guess what’s not disputed? The role of Wonder Mike in all this—because he didn’t have one.
Michael Wright was a Jersey kid who’d only been rapping for a month before recording the initial bars of “Rapper’s Delight.” Like Jackson and O’Brien, he wasn’t close to the epicenter of hip-hop culture. (Hell, he wasn’t even in the same state.) Oliver Wang described it best in 2003’s Classic Material: The Hip-Hop Album Guide: “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’ icons of the era.” The Sugarhill Gang weren’t creating. They were merely compiling, parroting rhymes swiped from other MC's and claiming credit after the fact. I don’t believe Wright acted with any malice, but the second “Wonder Mike” attached his name to that immortal opening phrase, he did more than steal a few lines. He stole hip-hop’s birthright away from its rightful owners.
And yet, that’s still not the worst crime the Sugarhill Gang committed on their way to making history. The most egregious thievery of all came from Big Bank Hank, who uncorks more than a hundred lines in “Rapper’s Delight” and didn’t write a single one of them. Some, like his “hotel, motel” hook, had been bouncing around the scene for years. (Coke La Rock was the probable originator of that one.) But the bulk of Hank’s rhymes were lifted, wholesale, from the man he was supposedly managing at the time: Grandmaster Caz of the Cold Crush Brothers.
As Caz told the New York Post in 2014, Jackson first approached him in a panic, begging for assistance in advance of the looming Sugar Hill studio date. Quite reasonably, Caz didn't take the request seriously. Hank wasn't an MC; he was a doorman, a bouncer, a sometime-manager who helped the Cold Crush Brothers fund their equipment. So, in a move he regrets to this day, Grandmaster Caz loaned his entire lyric book to Jackson, assuming this whole “recording session” was mere prelude to securing a label deal for the “actual” MC's in Cold Crush. "It was his job as my manager to introduce me to Sylvia. [But] he was an opportunist and he just jumped on it for himself. Hank couldn’t rap a package. He didn’t change one word of the song—I was Casanova Fly, not him.”
Caz didn’t learn of Hank’s deception until months later, when he first heard “Rapper’s Delight” on the radio. Or, more precisely, when he heard his own rhymes coming from the guy who used to check ID’s at the clubs where Cold Crush performed. Hank doesn’t even get four words in before he gives the game away, claiming Caz’s former moniker as his own: “I'm the C-A-S-A-N, the O-V-A/ And the rest is F-L-Y.” What’s worse than having your manager steal your lines? How about him stealing your identity too?
For the scene’s originators, already suspicious of a fabricated “crew” with no ties to hip-hop culture, Hank’s bald-faced thievery confirmed their worst suspicions. “Hank was saying a rhyme that we was hearing at the parties already, and he’s saying somebody else’s rhyme,” explained legendary turntablist Grand Mixer DXT to Hip-Hop Evolution. “And so for us, that’s… a no-no, on a catastrophic level. There are people who would get beat up for saying somebody’s rhyme. So here’s a record where this guy bites and actually records it. Like that was just the worst thing ever…To hear Caz’s rhyme, and someone else is saying it on a record, and actually saying Caz’s name and everything in the rhyme, we were dumbfounded.”
For the last twenty-plus years, Grandmaster Caz has been on a mission to set the record straight about “Rapper’s Delight.” (He even recorded his own response record in 2000, “MC Delight.”) Among his other accusations: The Lois Lane and Superman story is his invention. (Considering Hank begins the bit with another “Casanova” reference, this checks out.) “Well I’m Imp the Dimp/ The ladies’ pimp/ Women fight for my delight” comes from fellow Cold Crush member Rahiem (later to join the Furious Five). And most damning of all, Hank’s immortal couplet—“And whatever you do in your lifetime/ You never let an MC steal your rhyme”—was itself stolen from Caz, a bitter example of not heeding your own advice.
Of course, none of this behind-the-scenes drama actually mattered to listeners, who turned “Rapper’s Delight” into a true global success: #1 in Canada, Spain, and the Netherlands; Top 5 in France, Norway, South Africa, England, and countless other territories. (The eventual release of a “Short Version“ running under seven minutes, plus an even shorter 7“ mix, boosted radio play immensely.) In America, most sales originated in mom-and-pop shops owned by minorities (and thus not counted by Billboard), partially explaining the single’s insanely low placement of #36 on the Hot 100. Even so, “Rapper’s Delight” was eventually certified for sales of over two million units—more than double what any Billboard #1 single sold over the same time period. (On the magazine's “Hot Soul Singles” chart, the Sugarhill Gang would peak at #4, and go all the way to #1 on the corresponding Cashbox chart.)
Grandmaster Caz never received any formal credit, or compensation, for his contributions to “Rapper’s Delight.” Neither did Herc, Starski, or the many hip-hop pioneers whose rhymes were “borrowed” (intentionally or not) by the Sugarhill Gang. Thanks to the shady accounting practices of Sugar Hill Records, Wright, O’Brien, and Jackson also found themselves shortchanged for millions in royalties; the resulting back-and-forth lawsuits cost them the rights to the “Sugarhill Gang” name for a decade. (Big Bank Hank succumbed to cancer in 2014; Master Gee and Wonder Mike began performing again as the Sugarhill Gang in 2016.)
Even the Robinsons had their own legal troubles, ceding most of their company to MCA in a protracted court battle that stretched into 1990. The family eventually retained the publishing rights to Sugar Hill’s back catalog, leading to a seven-figure deal with Rhino Records in 1995. “Rapper’s Delight” has remained in print—and generated millions in licensing deals—ever since. And thanks to a revised writing credit dating back forty years, the bulk of that money still goes to Nile Rodgers and the estate of Bernard Edwards. (Edwards died of pneumonia on April 18, 1996, just one day after his final live performance with Chic.)
Alert readers might notice I have yet to say a word about “Rapper’s Delight” as an actual song. That's intentional. Truth be told, I think any attempt to critique “Rapper’s Delight” misses the broader picture. As of 2011, this song currently resides in the National Recording Registry, alongside FDR's "Fireside Chats," Irving Berlin's "God Bless America," and the "I Have A Dream" speech by Martin Luther King, Jr. Does it matter if the flow feels outdated and the beat is kinda clunky? You might as well criticize Mount Rushmore, or the Mona Lisa, or—if we’re being less charitable—The Adventures Of Tom Sawyer. Some art carries the weight of historical importance, and that weight alone is enough to transcend disputed origins, and legal controversies, and even simple questions like, “Did we really need an entire verse devoted to your friend’s mom serving crappy food?” (Short answer: Not really, but don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.)
Heard through the prism of today’s hip-hop, “Rapper’s Delight” might as well be a million years old. As a truly authentic document of a groundbreaking cultural movement, it fails miserably. But in every other respect, “Rapper’s Delight” is timeless. In terms of sheer influence, this unassuming single from a tiny New Jersey label, released without fanfare or expectation, wound up being the most important song of the last fifty years. Eventually, the individuals who created “Rapper’s Delight” will be forgotten. The innovators they ripped off will, sadly, be forgotten too. But “I said a hip, hop/ The hippie, the hippie/ To the hip hip-hop and you don’t stop the rock it”? That's gonna outlast us all.
GRADE: 10/10
[For an even deeper dive into the fascinating history behind this song, I highly recommend this Vanity Fair piece written by Steven Daly and including interviews from all the major players.]
I WANT MY MTV: Just to further add to its historical significance, “Rapper’s Delight” is also the first hip-hop video in existence. The production values? Slightly less historic. A New Jersey disco called the Soap Factory hosted a local syndicated television series in the late ‘70s; as part of the single's promotional rollout, the Sugarhill Gang performed on the Soap Factory Disco Show in September 1979. Sugar Hill Records simply took the existing footage and packaged it as the official video for overseas markets. Watching the clip now, the sheer joy radiating off this entire performance forgives a lot of sins: I know these guys were inauthentic. I know they stole their rhymes. But forty-five seconds in, around the time Hank starts rocking his bucket hat and tiny T-shirt, I don’t care; I’m rooting for ‘em.
BONUS BITS: Here’s the famous (or infamous) sequence from the 1998 movie The Wedding Singer that unofficially turned “Rapper’s Delight” into pop culture shorthand. (Ellen Albertini Dow, known forever after as the “Rapping Grandmother,” died in 2015 at the age of 101.)
BONUS BONUS BITS: Here’s the 2004 Scrubs episode, “My Old Friend’s New Friend,” that includes cameos from a reformed Sugarhill Gang, performing their hit with slightly revised lyrics.
BONUS BONUS BONUS BITS: Here’s a Rube Goldberg-inspired Honda advertisement from 2003 that uses “Rapper’s Delight” in a pivotal moment.
BONUS BONUS BONUS BONUS BITS: Here’s disgraced NBC news anchor Brian Williams (along with Beacon Of Truth news anchor Lester Holt) “rapping” “Rapper’s Delight” in a 2014 Tonight Show bit.
BONUS BONUS BONUS BONUS BONUS BITS: And here’s the Swedish Chef also rapping “Rapper’s Delight” in the 2015 Muppets episode “Pig Out.”
BONUS BONUS BONUS BONUS BONUS BONUS BITS: Believe it or not, actual rappers have even rapped “Rapper’s Delight”! Here’s the 1997 cover from Def Squad (AKA Redman, Erick Sermon, and Keith Murray.)