Rapper's Delight

• 1. Introduction

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  "Rapper's Delight" arrived in 1979 and changed what radio was allowed to sound like. Produced by Sylvia Robinson, it was the debut single of an American hip-hop trio called the Sugarhill Gang, and it did something that almost no one in the music world expected: it made rap a chart phenomenon. The track reached the top 40 in the United States, number three in the United Kingdom, and number one in Canada. It was recorded in a single take. The musicians in the studio that day were sweating, playing continuously for 15 minutes with no room for error. The song's opening bassline was borrowed without permission from Chic's "Good Times," setting off a legal dispute that would force a reckoning with the question of who gets credit when music is built from other music. A substantial block of the lyrics, meanwhile, had been taken from a rapper who was never paid and never named on the record. And yet the Library of Congress preserved it in the National Recording Registry in 2011 for being culturally, historically, and aesthetically significant. How does a song recorded in a single session, built on borrowed material, with three MCs who auditioned outside a pizza parlor, become one of the most important American recordings of the 20th century?

• 2. A Night at the Palladium

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  On September 20 and 21, 1979, Blondie and Chic were sharing a stage with the Clash at New York's Palladium. When Chic launched into "Good Times," something unscripted happened. Rapper Fab Five Freddy and the members of the Sugarhill Gang jumped on stage and began freestyling over the live band. The three members of the Gang were Henry "Big Bank Hank" Jackson, Michael "Wonder Mike" Wright, and Guy "Master Gee" O'Brien. That spontaneous moment in a New York concert venue happened just weeks before Nile Rodgers walked onto the dance floor of a club called Leviticus and heard something alarming. A DJ was spinning a record he had bought that day in Harlem. Its opening was built on Bernard Edwards' bass line from "Good Times," and it included a scratched version of the song's string section. Rodgers approached the DJ to ask what it was. The song turned out to be an early version of "Rapper's Delight." Rodgers and Edwards immediately threatened legal action, and a settlement gave them both songwriting credits. Rodgers later described this as the first and only time he ever resisted one of his records being sampled. He had been angry at first, but he eventually called it "one of his favorite songs of all time" and the best of all the tracks that interpolated Chic. He even began rapping sections of "Rapper's Delight" when performing "Good Times" live.

• 3. How the Gang Was Found

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  Sylvia Robinson, a recording artist known for "Pillow Talk" and the owner of a recording studio, had a problem. According to Oliver Wang, author of the 2003 Classic Material: The Hip-Hop Album Guide, Robinson could not find rappers willing to make a record. Most performers who worked the clubs believed rap was strictly a live art form, not something to be captured on tape. The solution arrived, by one account, when Robinson and her son overheard Big Bank Hank rapping in a pizza parlor. By Master Gee's account, Hank auditioned for Robinson in front of the pizza parlor where he worked. Gee himself auditioned in Robinson's car. The backing track required real musicians because, as session player Chip Shearin explained in a 2010 interview, this was before samplers and drum machines existed. Shearin was 17 years old and had come to New Jersey to visit a friend who knew Robinson. She needed musicians, and his job was to play bass for 15 minutes straight without a single mistake. He was paid $70. Other musicians on the session included members of the group Positive Force: Albert Pittman, Bernard Roland, Moncy Smith, and Bryan Horton. Shearin described Sylvia Robinson explaining the plan to the band: "I've got these kids who are going to talk real fast over it; that's the best way I can describe it."

• 4. The Words and Where They Came From

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  Wonder Mike has described hearing the phrase "hip-hop" from a cousin, which led directly to the song's most famous opening line: "Hip-hop, hippie to the hippie, to the hip-hip-hop and you don't stop." He also described the line "To the bang-bang boogie, say up jump the boogie to the rhythm of the boogie, the beat" as "basically a spoken drum roll," saying he liked the percussive sound of the letter B. Another line, "Now what you hear is not a test, I'm rappin' to the beat," drew from the introduction to the television program The Outer Limits, which opened each episode with the words: "There is nothing wrong with your television set. Do not attempt to adjust the picture." But a substantial portion of the early stanzas, rapped by Big Bank Hank, came from a different source entirely. Hank had borrowed the notebook of Grandmaster Caz, whose full stage name was Casanova Fly. Those borrowed lyrics include a direct namecheck of that stage name, a tribute to a writer who received neither payment nor credit on the record. The song's intro, before the "Good Times" bassline enters, interpolates yet another track: "Here Comes That Sound Again" by Love De-Luxe, a British studio group whose disco hit that same year provided the opening moments of a record that would outlast almost everything around it.

• 5. Chart Life and Physical Formats

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  "Rapper's Delight" peaked at number 36 on the US Billboard Hot 100 in January 1980 and reached number four on the Billboard Hot Soul Singles chart in December 1979. Internationally it performed far better: number one in Canada, number one in the Netherlands, and number three in the UK. It was the first top-40 song in the United States to be available only as a 12-inch extended version. Early pressings appeared on Sugar Hill Records with a red label and black print; a 7-inch 45 rpm version was also pressed in very small quantities. Later copies carried the more common blue label in orange "roulette style" sleeves, a design that nodded to Roulette Records. Morris Levy of Roulette and a figure named Tony Riviera had invested in Sugar Hill. In Europe, the French pop label Vogue released the song in the classic 7-inch single format with a shorter version, and it was that 7-inch pressing that reached number one in the Dutch chart. In 1980, the song served as the centerpiece of the Sugarhill Gang's first album, also titled The Sugarhill Gang. A British reworking of the song with entirely rewritten lyrics was recorded for its 25th anniversary in 2004 by an ensemble that included Rodney P, Chester P, Kano, Simone, Yungun, Sway, J2K, Swiss, Baby Blue, Skibadee, Luke Skys, and MC D.

• 6. Legacy and Reach

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  Rolling Stone ranked "Rapper's Delight" at number 251 on its 2004 list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. VH1 placed it at number two on its list of the 100 Greatest Rap Songs, and Rolling Stone listed it at number two on its 100 Greatest Hip-Hop Songs of All Time. NPR included it among the 100 most important American musical works of the 20th century. In 2014, it was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow remembered hearing the song as a child in the rural South. He wrote that it sounded revolutionary, "perhaps especially when I was a child," and called it "a lightweight, joyous anthem" built from "the struggle and pain of the Black experience." He described struggle and pain as "often a kiln for creativity," and argued that much of American culture is born from the story of Black American life. The song has reached audiences through video games as well: the long single version appears in Tony Hawk's Underground 2, the full version in MLB 2K10, and it plays on one of the radio stations in Forza Horizon 4. The Sugar Hill Gang's performance on the syndicated Soap Factory Disco Show in late 1979, filmed at Palisades Park, became the official music video; a Dutch broadcasting company, AVRO, also filmed an alternate version at a hotel pool in early 1980. The chorus of the 2002 international hit "The Ketchup Song (Aserejé)" by Las Ketchup is built on a Spanish gibberish version of Wonder Mike's part in the song, proof that a track recorded in a single take in 1979 was still generating echoes more than two decades later.