The Sugarhill Gang - Rapper's Delight (Lyrics)

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Artist/Group: The Sugarhill Gang
Album: Sugarhill Gang
Released: 1980
Label: Sugarhill Records

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"Rapper's Delight" is a 1979 hip hop track by the Sugarhill Gang, produced by Sylvia Robinson. Although it was shortly preceded by the Fatback Band's "King Tim III (Personality Jock)", "Rapper's Delight" is credited for introducing hip-hop music to a wide audience, reaching the top 40 in the United States, as well as the top three in the United Kingdom and number one in Canada. It was a prototype for various types of rap music. The track interpolates Chic's "Good Times", resulting in Chic's Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards threatening to sue Sugar Hill Records for copyright infringement; a settlement was reached that gave the two songwriting credits. The track was recorded in a single take. There are five mixes of the song.

"Rapper's Delight" was ranked at number 251 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the "500 Greatest Songs of All Time" in 2010, and number 2 on VH1's "100 Greatest Hip-Hop Songs". It is also included on NPR's list of the 100 most important American musical works of the 20th century. It was preserved in the National Recording Registry by the Library of Congress in 2011 for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

In 2014, the record was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame.

In late 1978, Debbie Harry suggested that Chic's Nile Rodgers join her and Chris Stein at a hip-hop event, which at the time was a communal space taken over by teenagers with boombox stereos playing various pieces of music that performers would break dance to. Rodgers experienced this event the first time himself at a high school in the Bronx. On September 20 and 21, 1979, Blondie and Chic were playing concerts with the Clash in New York at the Palladium. When Chic started playing "Good Times", rapper Fab Five Freddy and the members of the Sugarhill Gang ("Big Bank Hank" Jackson, "Wonder Mike" Wright, and "Master Gee" O'Brien), jumped up on stage and started freestyling with the band. A few weeks later, Rodgers was on the dance floor of New York club Leviticus and heard the DJ play a song which opened with Bernard Edwards's bass line from Chic's "Good Times". Rodgers approached the DJ who said he was playing a record he had just bought that day in Harlem. The song turned out to be an early version of "Rapper's Delight", which also included a scratched version of the song's string section. Rodgers and Edwards immediately threatened legal action over copyright, which resulted in a settlement and their being credited as co-writers. Rodgers admitted that he was originally upset with the song, but later declared it to be "one of his favorite songs of all time" and his favorite of all the tracks that sampled (or in this instance interpolated) Chic. He also stated: "As innovative and important as 'Good Times' was, 'Rapper's Delight' was just as much, if not more so."

A substantial portion of the early stanzas of the song's lyrics was borrowed by Jackson from Grandmaster Caz (Curtis Brown) who had loaned his 'book' to him—these include a namecheck for "Casanova Fly", which was Caz's full stage name. According to Wonder Mike, he had heard the phrase "hip-hop" from a cousin, leading to the opening line of "Hip-hop, hippie to the hippie, to the hip-hip-hop and you don't stop", whilst he described "To the bang-bang boogie, say up jump the boogie to the rhythm of the boogie, the beat" as "basically a spoken drum roll. I liked the percussive sound of the letter B". The line "Now what you hear is not a test, I'm rappin' to the beat", was inspired by the introduction to The Outer Limits ("There is nothing wrong with your television set. Do not attempt to adjust the picture").

Before the "Good Times" background starts, the intro to the recording is an interpolation of "Here Comes That Sound Again" by British studio group Love De-Luxe, a disco hit in 1979.

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