S ylvia Robinson, an intermittently successful performer, songwriter, producer, and label owner, has been a remarkable and recurring presence over four decades of black music.
“It was over there all along, and no one paid it any mind.” “It’s like somebody discovering the lost world of Atlantis and thinking it just got there,” says Grandmaster Caz, one of the legendary D.J.’s of hip-hop’s pre-vinyl history. In the South Bronx, the Sugarhill Gang were regarded as underqualified ambassadors for a movement fully evolved and happily autonomous. It could be said that “Rapper’s Delight” owed its success to all the wrong people using all the wrong methods. 4 on the Billboard R&B charts, it barely grazed the less inclusive pop charts of its day, peaking at just No. ( Rap music-isn’t that an oxymoron?) Though “Rapper’s Delight” sold millions of copies and went to No. And it would take a few more years before hip-hop would transform American culture: in 1979 jaded opinion-makers shrugged off the Sugarhill Gang as novelty merchants the music was generally mocked, maligned, misunderstood. “Rapper’s Delight” was thus a tardy arrival on the scene. By 1979 hip-hop had, on a local scale, already developed both a loyal audience and a star system, dating back to the mid-70s. A South Bronx music built on live performance, centered in clubs and parties, and, in the beginning, doggedly resistant to the trade winds of mainstream America. Rock creationists can debate long and hard about which records heralded the advent of rock ‘n’ roll in the 1950s recorded hip-hop began with a stark and solitary statement: “Rapper’s Delight.” Its peak sales of more than 50,000 copies per day would have been impressive under any circumstances, but there was a greater significance to this 15-minute-long monster hit: it was the first full-fledged rap record, and as such the catalyst for what would arguably become the cultural revolution of our times. This was the vocal lead-in to the Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight,” a 12-inch single that became a freakish commercial phenomenon within weeks of its release on a then unknown independent label, Sugar Hill Records. The moment this strange incantation bubbled up through urban airwaves in October 1979, the genie was out of the bottle. Hip-hop, hibbit to the hibbit to the hip-hip-hop and you don’t stop …
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