And it goes on, on and on: The song that sparked the hip-hop industry turns 40

The Big Bang of hip-hop occurred 40 years ago Monday.

"Rapper's Delight," released by Englewood's Sugar Hill Records, came out on Sept. 16, 1979. And so the cosmos began.

"It was a very huge song," said Leland Robinson, the only surviving son of Sylvia Robinson, the late Englewood entrepreneur (she died in 2011) who was the pioneer rap mogul — the "Suge" Knight or Russell Simmons of her day.

It was on her label that the single widely considered the "first" hip-hop record changed the landscape of music forever.

"Nobody else knew it was going to be big," Robinson said. "But she knew it was going to be big."

There was — to be very clear — rap before "Rapper's Delight."

But it existed in a whole other dimension from mainstream America — in the same way the known universe, according to some physicists, may have come from another, earlier one.

Rap had been around from at least the early 1970s — heard in block parties in the Bronx and Queens, thanks to pioneers like DJ Kool Herc and Afrika Bambaataa. And it can trace its roots back even further  — to Jamaican "toasting" and to other, older African-American performance traditions. Some have tagged pre-Sugar Hill records by Gil Scott-Heron, King Tim III, and The Last Poets as rap.

But such things weren't on the radio, or in the record bins. They weren't on anyone's commercial radar.

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Everything changed when "Rapper's Delight" by the Sugarhill Gang burst onto Billboard's Hot 100 in November 1979, and sold a million copies in less than a month. That was the genesis moment — and the whole hip-hop universe has been expanding outward ever since.

"Rapper's Delight" is among the 100 most important musical works of the 20th century, according to NPR, and is one of the "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" records preserved in the National Recording Registry of the Library of Congress.

Today it remains a dancy, delicious, braggadocious earful: with the late "Big Bank Hank" (Henry Jackson), "Wonder Mike," (Michael Wright) and "Master Gee" (Guy O'Brien Sr.) — all Englewood kids — trading boasts like "my name is known all over the world, By all the foxy ladies and the pretty girls" and "I'm gonna rock the mic 'til you can't resist, Everybody I say, it goes like this." 

Naming rights

Not to mention the line that gave a name to the genre: " hip-hop, and you don't stop." It's Wonder Mike  who should get the credit, O'Brien says, for naming what was, as of 2017, the world's most popular genre of music, according to Nielsen SoundScan.  At least, Mike was the first to say the words "hip-hop" on record. The phrase had been his trademark, O'Brien said.

"When somebody calls you, somebody passes the mike, you do like an entry, a warm-up," O'Brien said. "For example, with me, I'll say 'On and on and on, on and on.' I'm using that to set up what I'm going to say. 'Hip-Hop, you don't stop' — that was [Mike's] entry. He used to do that at parties."

And yet, "Rapper's Delight" remains controversial. Big Bank Hank, who died in 2014, was accused of stealing some lines from a Bronx hip-hopper, Grandmaster Caz of Cold Crush Brothers. The bass line was lifted from Chic's "Good Times," which made it legally problematic —  Chic writers Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards were given co-writing credit on later pressings.

More troublesome was the suggestion that "Rapper's Delight" was, as the old-schoolers say, wack — that it was a pre-fab job, rushed into existence by Robinson, to cash in on a craze she had stumbled on in a club in New York, using kids she had discovered in a suburban neighborhood. By this reckoning, "Rapper's Delight" is to hip-hop what Bill Haley & His Comets' "Rock Around the Clock" was to rock — the first big commercial hit of the genre, but not "authentic," not real.

O'Brien begs to differ. Big Bank Hank, he points out, actually was living in the Bronx at the time (he worked at an Englewood pizza parlor during the day) so he had a genuine connection to the streets where rap was born. Moreover, there was a hip-hop scene in Bergen County, he says. It wasn't all created out of whole cloth by Sylvia Robinson.

"There was a microcosm of a hip-hop scene, if you will, in Englewood, Hackensack and Teaneck," said O'Brien, who now lives in Washington D.C. "There was a little rap thing going on, but it was small because it was New Jersey."

He himself discovered hip-hop as a teen-age DJ, working parties in Bergen County. Specifically, at a party in Hackensack, where he was living. "I heard this guy doing poetry over music at a party," he said. "I went over to him and I asked him, 'What was that you were doing on top of the music?' And he said, 'That's rapping. That's what they're doing over in New York.' "

That was likely around 1977, he says. It inspired Gee to become a rapper himself — one more tool in his toolkit, as he worked the party circuit. But it primed him for his big break, in 1979 — just a couple of months after his family had moved to Englewood, and he began attending Dwight Morrow High School as a 17-year-old.

Many meetings

That's when his story intersects with that of Sylvia Robinson.

Born in Harlem's Sugar Hill neighborhood, Robinson had a number of R&B hits as a performer and a writer — originally billed in the 1950s as "Little Sylvia" — and later reinvented herself as a producer and music executive.

Sometime after moving to New Jersey in 1966, she and her husband Joe opened a studio at 96 West Street in Englewood. In 1979, it became the headquarters of Sugar Hill Records,the world's first hip-hop label (funding apparently came from Morris Levy, the notorious owner of Roulette Records, who was the inspiration for the Hesh Rabkin mobster character on "The Sopranos.") 

Robinson, so the story goes, had been at a birthday party at Harlem World, an upper Manhattan club, and heard a performer named Kevin Smith, a.k.a. Lovebug Starski, doing a strange new kind of performance. "She was like, 'Is this being recorded, is this being done on a record?' " O'Brien said. "At the time, rap wasn't really being done."

So Robinson began looking around her own neighborhood for a rap star she could sign. An Englewood rap crew, Sound on Sound, seemed like a good bet, but the rapper that had impressed her on tape turned her down. That was when Robinson's late son, Joseph "Joey" Robinson Jr., chimed in. "Joey said, 'There's this guy in the pizza parlor, Hank, the big guy from the Bronx — he raps,'" O'Brien said. "So they went over there."

A plaque on the wall of Crispy Crust Pizza on Englewood's Palisade Avenue — it's still there — commemorates it as the spot where Sugarhill Gang was "born."

"He went in there and said my mom wants to hear you rap, she's outside in the car," O'Brien said.

Hustling Hank into the car to hear him perform, Robinson and her son Joey happened to drive down Palisade Avenue, where he hailed a friend, Mark Green — who was walking with a friend of his: O'Brien. They told Green of their plan to sign a rapper. Green said  that O'Brien was the one they should hear. So Robinson told O'Brien to get in the car, too.

That night, they all wound up at Robinson's plush Englewood digs on Lydecker Street. Everyone assumed, up to that point, that Robinson was looking for one rapper — a single guy she could turn into a star. It was to be, in effect, a competition. At the mansion was another guy, Wonder Mike — another Sound on Sound alumnus —  who was at the time homeless.

"Mike never said a word," O'Brien recalled. "The whole night we were in the library auditioning — I thought — for one position. So at the end of the night, Mike said, 'Miss Robinson, I know you heard me on the tape, but I had a cold that day, could you listen to me now?' This was one o'clock in the morning. She said, 'Fine, whatever.' And she let him go, and he just ripped. He started rocking and rapping, the whole nine yards. And at that point she said, 'You know what, three is my favorite number. I'm gonna put the three of you together.' "

"Rapper's Delight," O'Brien points out, is not a rap battle. It's a party record. Each of the guys, in turn, introduces himself with his own flava of swagger.  "It's a showcase," O'Brien said. "We were presenting ourselves to the world."

And the world responded. As the record picked up steam, the unknown kids from Englewood were interviewed by TV stations, and sent on tour with Parliament Funkadelic. Locally, in Englewood, they were superstars.

"I'd be in a car at a stoplight, and a girl would see me and start screaming," O'Brien said. "Anything you've seen about any recording artist in the history of music, period, we experienced all of that. Screaming, girls tearing clothes off, all of that. We were stars. We had all the trappings."

Whatever haters say, Englewood — not Compton, not the South Bronx — can still take pride as the town where rap broke the surface. And North Jersey is still a magnet for the hip-hop community: P. Diddy, Wyclef Jean, Russell Simmons, Rev. Run, Lil' Kim, Ja Rule, Fetty Wap, and Navarro Gray ("Love and HipHop") are just some of our stars.

Birth of the cool

"Were there folks who were rapping first? Absolutely," said James "Jimmy" Erwin, a lifelong Englewood resident who remembers the excitement of those early days when "Rapper's Delight"  was all over the radio. "But the rap community, the hip-hop community, will always pay Sylvia Robinson and Sugar Hill records their respect for introducing it to the masses. This was the first commercially successful hip-hop record."

If some "legitimate" rappers looked at "Rapper's Delight" with a skeptical eye, they weren't too proud to beat a path to Robinson's door after the record exploded.

"No one had a clue what was going to happen, once this thing blew up," Leland Robinson said. "It was uncharted territory. There were no blueprints… [Sylvia Robinson]  just went and grabbed everybody who had a name out there." 

One of them, Joseph Saddler, a.k.a. Grandmaster Flash from the South Bronx, introduced what came to be called "knowledge rapping" in socially-conscious records like "The Message" and "White Lines" —  paving the way for Public Enemy, N.W.A., and everything hip-hop was to become.

These days, the surviving members of Sugarhill Gang still perform all over the world. They have children, in the music business, who also perform. Sugar Hill studios was destroyed by an electrical fire in 2002, but the story of the label — and of the pioneering woman who founded it — has been re-introduced to the public through a Bravo series, "First Family of Hip Hop." A biopic about Robinson's life has been optioned by Warner Bros.

Meanwhile, O'Brien is always hearing traces of "Rapper's Delight" in current recordings.

"I've heard elements of it from LL Cool J, Jay-Z, Drake — I hear elements of us in everybody," O'Brien said. "People take certain lines from our songs. The list goes on and on."

On and on and on, on and on — as you might say.

"Well, there you go," O'Brien said.

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