Hip + Hop = the big bang
Placed side by side, two little words changed the musical universe forever
I said a hip hop
The hippy, the hippy, to the hip hop hop, you don’t stop the rock
To the bang bang boogie, say up jumped the boogie
To the rhythm of the boogie, the beat
Twenty-five years ago, Jimmy Carter was president, a gallon of gas cost 90 cents, andWonder Mike, Big Bank Hank, and Master Gee were the kings of hip-hop.
As the opening of Sugarhill Gang’s ‘‘Rapper’s Delight,’’ those infectious, nonsensical lines might as well have been spoken by a town crier announcing to the world that popular music would never be the same. It wasn’t the first rap record—that distinction belongs to Fatback’s ‘‘King Tim III (Personality Jock),’’ released a few months earlier. Yet if ‘‘King Tim III’’ was the initial splash, 1979’s ‘‘Rapper’s Delight’’ was a tsunami, as the song ushered hip-hop out of its Bronx birthplace and introduced it to the masses. ChuckDof Public Enemy calls the song rap’s ‘‘big bang,’’ and it isn’t an overstatement.
Pat Lawrence, then a teenager working in aWashington, D.C., record shop, recalls being overwhelmed with customer demand for the song.
‘‘We couldn’t order enough of them.We literally couldn’t slap the price stickers on those 12- inches [album-sized records designed to accommodate extralengthy singles] and get them out of the back room fast enough,’’ he says. ‘‘There were days when we were selling 500 to 700 copies out of this little store. Kids, 6 or 7 years old, would come in and rap every verse. You just knew something large was going on.’’
Lawrence is now senior vice president at Hip-O Records, which on Tuesday will release ‘‘The Hip Hop Box,’’ commemorating 25 years of recorded rap. From old-school legends such as Run-D.M.C and Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five to contemporary chart toppers Dr. Dre and 50 Cent, it’s a four-CD, 53- song tribute to hip-hop—from urban novelty to multimillion dollar industry, from denounced fad to social revolution.
A defining ‘Delight’
‘‘In some ways, it’s kind of unprecedented in music history— ‘Rapper’s Delight’ coming out and having such an incredible impact out of the gate,’’ says Jim Fricke, curatorial director at the Experience Music Project, an interactive popular music museum in Seattle, and coauthor of ‘‘Yes, Yes Y’all,’’ an essential oral history of hip-hop’s first decade.
‘‘To have something seem to come from nowhere, and have what is arguably the first recording that represents that new expression, and have the commercial success ‘Rapper’s Delight’ did —I can’t think of another form of popular music that can claim anything like that,’’ he says. ‘‘I don’t think you can draw a line in 1955 or 1956 and say rock ’n’ roll started here, or in 1973 or ’75 and say punk started here. With rap, there is a dividing line you can draw in 1979 that says something new emerged here.’’
Of course, by the time ‘‘Rapper’s Delight’’ became the first rap song to make Billboard’s pop singles chart (it rose toNo. 36), the burgeoning rap scene had been a mainstay in the Bronx and Harlem for several years. Hip-hop founding fathers such as Kool DJ Herc, Grandmaster Caz, and Grandmaster Flash became local heroes at block parties, clubs, and playgrounds, molding the style and sound that would soon capture the world’s attention.
Filmmaker Charlie Ahearn, director of the classic 1982 hip-hop docudrama ‘‘Wild Style,’’ was in NewYork in the late 1970s and knew many of hip-hop’s unheralded pioneers. According to Ahearn, they never imagined the spirit and energy of rap could be captured within the confines of a single. Or, as Fricke puts it, the general feeling at the time was ‘‘How could you put a party on a record?’’
Vibe and vision
In the liner notes to ‘‘The Hip Hop Box,’’ ChuckD writes, ‘‘It’s rather inconceivable that there could be such a thing as a rap record, period, since it was regarded as a two or three-hour event. The irony with ‘Rapper’s Delight’ was not how long [the song was], but how amazingly the disc had condensed the entire vibe of it all.’’
‘‘When ‘Rapper’s Delight’ came out, people were caught off guard,’’ says Ahearn, coauthor of ‘‘Yes, Yes Y’all.’’ ‘‘People like Grandmaster Flash and Grandmaster Caz, who were creative elements of the hip-hop scene in the Bronx, didn’t see this coming at all, either because they didn’t believe you could make money from it or they didn’t have the vision to do something like that.’’
Music business veteran Sylvia Robinson had the vision. She had her own hits, ‘‘Love Is Strange’’ as half of the 1950s duo Mickey & Sylvia and, in the 1970s, the breathy ‘‘Pillow Talk’’ as a solo artist. With her husband, Joe, she also co-owned All-Platinum Records, a small label inNewJersey.
After hearing rappers inNew York’s late, great club Harlem World, Robinson put together a trio and recorded and released ‘‘Rapper’s Delight’’ on her renamed Sugar Hill Records, rap’s first important label.
‘‘I think Sylvia Robinson should be given credit for having the will and the insight in making a commercial recording of hiphop,’’ Ahearn says. ‘‘She wasn’t someone from the Bronx, she wasn’t someone who really knew the players, but I don’t think anyone should discredit her for what she did. She was the one who went into a studio and made something that obviously hit the nerve of everybody who listened to it.’’
When ‘‘Rapper’s Delight,’’ built on a chunky bass line sample from Chic’s hit ‘‘Good Times,’’ came out, it was hard not to notice—it didn’t sound like anything else. There wasn’t really a melody, but it was danceable, and its meandering story line jumped from a man trying to seduce Lois Lane to the gastronomic distress caused by a bad meal. And, at a hefty 14 minutes and 37 seconds, it was way longer than any other song on the radio.
‘‘It’s not like they slickened it up and made something pat and commercial,’’ Ahearn says. ‘‘It’s ridiculous that anyone would do that in a studio and think anyone would play it—but they did. DJs didn’t know what it was or where it came from, but they were defi- nitely swinging with it.’’
Where credit is due?
Still, the success of ‘‘Rapper’s Delight’’ was not without controversy. Some of its verses were ‘‘borrowed,’’ as Fricke put it, from NewYork rappers Raheim and Grandmaster Caz, who have been largely consigned to hip-hop’s shadows. Others were upset that some patched-together crew from NewJersey—not the Bronx or Harlem—was getting the credit for creating hip-hop. As the Sugarhill Gang began touring and appearing on TV, some rap pioneers were left behind.
‘‘They were perceived to be carpetbaggers,’’ Fricke said about the Sugarhill Gang. ‘‘One of the things that’s striking and depressing about the popular music world is that in just about every genre you go into, the pioneers don’t get paid, and there are entrepreneurs who develop the independent record labels that break the music, and those people end up making more money than the artists. It’s often the newcomers to the scene who make the money. That’s just the way it is—it doesn’t make it right, but it’s a fact of life.’’ Some still grumble about how ‘‘Rapper’s Delight’’ unfairly overshadowed everything that came before. But there’s no denying the enduring power of that song. It continues to sound fresh and is an evergreen party starter.New hiphop fans continue discovering the song, and in 1997, the Def Squad, featuring Redman, Erick Sermon, and Keith Murray made it a hit again with a cover version.
Those old enough to remember when the song was first released probably still recall every syllable, every verse, marveling at how it all began with a simple throwaway phrase—hip-hop.
‘‘I thought it was brilliant, just something new, something different,’’ says Lawrence, who executive produced ‘‘The Hip Hop Box.’’ ‘‘I’d be lying if I said I knew what was going to come from that song, with an entire new genre that’s turned out to be so much more than music. You can’t turn two feet in today’s culture and not bump into something hip-hop related. It’s everywhere.’’
Renee Graham can be reached at
graham@globe.com. 