25 Years of Rappers Delight
SWEET HIP-HOP ORIGINALS
Lee Hildebrand, San Francisco Chronicle
Sunday, August 29, 2004
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When Michael Wright spat out the nonsense lines “hip hop, the hip it, the hipa diba hip hip hop, you don’t stop” at an Englewood, N.J., recording session in August 1979, the 21-year-old rapper had no idea he’d be touching off — let alone naming — a musical revolution. A quarter-century later, that revolution shows no sign of abating.
Wright’s husky baritone voice, enunciating clearly over an instrumental groove borrowed from the disco smash “Good Times” by Chic, introduced the world to rap — as hip-hop music was originally known. Those ear-grabbing sounds came at the beginning of “Rapper’s Delight” by the Sugarhill Gang, a trio of rappers thrown together by veteran record producer Sylvia Robinson.
It wasn’t the first rap record — the Fatback Band’s obscure “King Tim III (Personality Jock),” released a few weeks earlier, holds that distinction — but it was the first to have huge impact. The 15-minute song was issued by Sugarhill Records as a 12-inch single in September 1979 and entered Billboard’s R&B chart the following month, eventually rising to No. 4 and selling more than 3 million copies. Many pop stations in the United States refused to play it, saying it was “too black,” though the record placed in the top 10 in Canada, Mexico, Sweden, Holland, Germany and Belgium.
“We ushered in a whole new era of music,” boasts Wright, 46. “There’s a lot of debates about who started rock ‘n’ roll — Was it Bill Haley? Chuck Berry? — but there is no debate when it comes to rap music. It was Sugarhill Gang, and it was my voice first.”
Known professionally as “Wonder Mike,” Wright does not claim that the Sugarhill Gang invented hip-hop, a distinction that belongs to Kool Herc and other largely forgotten DJs who began developing the style several years earlier at parties in the Bronx. He does, however, balk at the widely held belief that he and the other two original Sugarhill Gang members — “Big Bank Hank” Jackson and Guy “Master G” O’Brien — lifted lines used in “Rapper’s Delight” from other rappers.
“That’s been going around for years,” Wright says of the plagiarism charge. “It sounds good and makes interesting copy, but no. I know where I was and everything I wrote. ‘Rapper’s Delight’ was totally improvised, except for the intro. I had already said that in a DJ group called Sound on Sound that I used to be in before Sugarhill. Certain letters and combinations of letters make for good percussive sound vocally to go on top of music. I thought it was pretty cool.”
Robinson, who’d scored her first hit in 1957 with “Love Is Strange” as half of the singing-guitar playing duo Mickey and Sylvia, came up with the idea of making a rap record after hearing a DJ named Lovebug Starski rapping over a record at a birthday party in Harlem. She recruited her then 17-year- old son, Joey, to help her find the rappers who became the Sugarhill Gang. Joey, in turn, asked his friend Warren Moore for help.
The Robinsons and Moore began cruising Englewood in search of talent, stopping first at Crispy Crust Pizza, where they recruited Jackson. “He closed the pizza parlor down and kicked everybody out and jumped in my car and started rapping,” recalls Joey Robinson, 41. Joey replaced original Sugarhill Gang member O’Brien in 1989 and now also manages the group. His mother is semiretired, but still oversees the licensing of songs from the Sugarhill Records catalog, which includes other early hip-hop groups such as the Sequence and Grand Master Flash and the Furious Five.
“Rapper’s Delight” cost $750 to record, according to Joey. Wright says it took him, Jackson and O’Brien 17 minutes to dub their spoken lines over an instrumental track that had been recorded by the studio band Positive Force. Wright had little idea that the record would create a sensation.
“I thought it would be big in the tri-state area, New York, New Jersey and Connecticut,” he says. “But two months after it was released, we were touring Europe.”
Sylvia Robinson and the three group members shared writers’ credit on the original label, but Chic leaders Bernard Edwards and Nile Rodgers, from whose “Good Times” the instrumental parts were copied, contested the copyright. “We worked it out,” Wright says. Reissues of “Rapper’s Delight” list Edwards and Rodgers as the song’s only composers.
The Sugarhill Gang had several moderate R&B hits after “Rapper’s Delight, ” including “Eighth Wonder” and “Apache,” but none came close to the mega-hit status of the group’s debut. The original trio disbanded in 1984.
“You have to be current with any music that younger people admire, especially with hip-hop,” Wright says. “When gangsta rap started coming out, we didn’t want to call women bitches and say we’re going to shoot someone, so rather than be outdated, we decided just not to go that way. We’re not a violent rap group.”
Wright operated a home remodeling business before rejoining the trio in 1994. “We’ve been on the road ever since,” he says.
Sadly, however, the group that put hip-hop on the map is today little more than an oldies act. The Sugarhill Gang hasn’t made a record in five years. And plans to capitalize on the 25th anniversary of “Rapper’s Delight” are not set.
“We want to have a big party in New York near the end of the year,” Wright says. “We’re still getting it together.”
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THE SUGARHILL GANG appears as part of the third annual Old School Funk Fest Reunion at noon today at the Chronicle Pavilion, 2000 Kirker Pass Road, Concord. $37.50-$61. Call (415) 421-8497 or go to www.chroniclepavilion.com.
