You’ll notice that several of the Style Maps have symbols that repeat over and over again. That’s because those are songs that have a very clear and obvious intention. The 1983 chapter is all about Run-DMC’s “Sucker M.C.’s,” the first rap song that actively aimed to be provocative, so the Style Map represents that. There are multiple timestamps for Inflammatory rapping and for Boastful rapping, as well as spots for Descriptive (“I’m light-skinned”) and Comparative (“Fly like a dove”) and Lifestyle (“Champagne, caviar, and bubble bath”) and more. The 1985 chapter is about Doug E. Fresh and Slick Rick’s “La Di Da Di,” a song that set the template for raps that were either based around telling a story or advocating primping or both, so that Style Map represents that (multiple timestamps for Name Brand rapping and for Self-Reflective rapping). The 1995 chapter is about Tupac’s “Dear Mama,” and so that Style Map looks how you’d expect it to look (multiple timestamps for Powerful rapping and for Insightful rapping and for Considerate rapping and for Introspective rapping). I suspect you’d have been able to put this together, too.
* * *
DECLARATIVE, DEADLY, THRILLING, AGGRESSIVE, CONSIDERATE, BOASTFUL, POWERFUL
* * *
A neat thing that happened while I was working on these was it became easier to watch the trends and varieties in rap unfurl themselves. There would be little to no instances of a certain style of rapping before a date, then someone would do it, and then after that it’d begin to vibrate all through the rest of rap. It was easy to see in early rap—Ice-T on “6 in the Mornin’,” Rakim on “Paid in Full,” moments like that—and that made sense because there was still so much unexplored space for rap to balloon outward into. But it also happened later, too (Tupac on “California Love,” 50 Cent on “In Da Club”), and even later after that (Kendrick Lamar on Big Sean’s “Control,” Young Thug on “Lifestyle”). I didn’t create any of the Style Maps until I’d already written all of the book, so I had a very clear image in my head of what the trajectory of rap looked like in history as it moved from 1979 to now, so I will admit that maybe there was some sort of confirmation bias involved. But maybe not. Hopefully not.
1. This sentence, incidentally, is both annoying and complicated.
2. “Rapper’s Delight” is a very long song.
3. It’s also him being a very big liar. Hank stole a considerable amount of his part in “Rapper’s Delight” from Grandmaster Caz.
WHAT THIS SONG IS ABOUT
So much stuff. It’s goddamn fifteen minutes long.
WHY IT’S IMPORTANT
While it’s not the first rap song ever, it’s the first commercially successful rap song, and it’s nearly universally recognized as the moment modern hip-hop became an official genre.
Let me start this book with a fact, because while much of the information in it from here forward will be up for debate, this will not: Establishing a “first-ever rap song” is always only ever telling a half-truth.
There’s no definitive answer. There’s no inarguable pick. It’s very likely it was “King Tim III,” a song recorded and released by a funk and disco band called the Fatback Band in 1979. This song contains the traditional cadence and feel of rap, though that’s questionable, because it assumes you’re (1) only considering officially recorded and released music, and (2) talking about the version of rap that we all know and understand and recognize. If you wanted to be really obtuse you could argue that rap traces back beyond that, back before the house and block parties of the Bronx in the early ’70s, back before Gil Scott-Heron poetry, back even before the Delta blues artists of the ’20s and before the vaudeville shows, back all the way to the nineteenth-century griots in West Africa. That seems unnecessarily complicated and planted in the most unlikable kind of semantics, but some people are unnecessarily complicated and enjoy the most unlikable kind of semantics, so that’s a conversation that occasionally happens.
So, in the interest of brevity and unilaterality, we will assume that the general account of the creation of rap given by DJ Kool Herc, regularly considered the father of hip-hop, and Afrika Bambaataa, its first revolutionary, is true. If you are not interested in the history, I recommend skipping through this section, as it is rather perfunctory and contains exactly zero jokes that reference genitals or old action movies, which I know some of you are here for.
In the ’70s, the predominant (or at least the most successful) black music was disco. But disco, very light and airy and toothless, was not an appropriate representation of the lifestyle blacks were experiencing at the time. It was too soft.1 Black living was hard. In that gap between the two, in that empty space, that’s where the beginning of rap formed, and it was DJ Kool Herc who filled it in.
Herc, a Jamaican immigrant, was a DJ, and he played parties and gatherings mostly in the South Bronx. Herc is important because he was the first to take the break of a song—the moment when the singer stopped singing and just the instruments would be playing, typically the drums—and blend it together with a similar break in another song. The “B” in the phrase “B-boy” or “B-girl” stood for “Break,” and it was used because during the break of a record was usually when the B-boys and B-girls would dance. Originally, it only lasted for a moment, but when Herc figured out how to transition from one break to the next by using two turntables, the break got extended, and he stretched it out so long that it wasn’t a break anymore; it was this continuous rhythm, this new, living thing.
Up through 1975, the style grew and grew and grew, which led to advancements. DJs, in an attempt to one-up other DJs, began incorporating rarer and rarer break beats into their mixes, then figured out scratching,2 then back spinning,3 then emceeing, where a person would talk to the crowd while the DJ played. The talking led to boasting, then the boasting led to rhyming. In the late ’70s, it picked up the name hip-hop,4 and emceeing became a more and more integral part.5
Still, through 1978, it only ever existed as a live medium. There were roughshod cassette tape recordings of parties that got passed around, but nobody was properly recording anything, and certainly nobody was properly releasing anything.
Then, in 1979, as pieces of rap began to peek out of disco musicians’ styles, the Sugarhill Gang—Wonder Mike, Big Bank Hank, and Master Gee—recorded and released “Rapper’s Delight.” It feels like that sentence needs to be written in sixty-point font, or maybe someone needs to run up and punch you in the chest as hard as they can as soon as you read it, or maybe someone can drop a nuclear bomb on your forehead, because “Rapper’s Delight” was that big of a moment.
♦
“I’ve got these kids who are going to talk real fast over it; that’s the best way I can describe it.” —Sylvia Robinson, who assembled the Sugarhill Gang, explaining what she was planning on doing with an instrumental she was putting together
That “Rapper’s Delight” would be the first rap that most of America would hear is so great and wonderful because it’s so appropriate and almost unbelievably prophetic. Through the first three verses (THERE ARE TEN VERSES) the group creates what would eventually become nearly the entire rap narrative, both directly and indirectly. A look:
First Verse: It’s delivered by Wonder Mike, and he raps, “Now, what you hear is not a test, I’m rappin’ to the beat,” and that’s super-smart, because rap had never really been played on the radio before this song, so it’s kind of a “Hey, here’s this new thing, and here’s what I’m doing” announcement. The second line is equally foretelling: “And me, the groove, and my friends are gonna try to move your feet.” To be thorough, moving people’s feet, that wasn’t the whole entire point of rap when it started, but it was a large share of it, and still is today. So over those first two lines, Wonder Mike’s already expressed the kind of defiance that rap has always possessed and also established the argument for its existence, at least as far as he was concerned.
After that, he introduces himself (“See, I am Wonder Mike and I’d like to say hello . . .”), then indirec
tly asserts that rap is for everyone (“To the black, to the white, the red and the brown, the purple and yellow”). Rap lingo and abstractions follow (“But first, I gotta bang bang the boogie to the boogie”), and lastly, an introduction of the next person (“And next on the mic is my man Hank”). And that’s all stuff—saying who you are, attaching yourself to listeners by encouraging them to listen to you, creating vernacular, cosigning your friends—that is important and necessary in rap. The second verse does the same thing, except this time it begins to mold an early ideology.
Second Verse: There are a handful of criticisms of “Rapper’s Delight,” one of them being that Big Bank Hank wholesale lifted lyrics from a rapper named Grandmaster Caz. The story Caz tells is that Hank asked him to help him write his verse, and Caz offered him a notebook full of stuff he’d written out already, and Hank grabbed the pieces he wanted and used them verbatim. The very first line of Hank’s verse confirmed Caz’s accusations, because Hank raps, “I’m the C-A-S-A-N, the O-V-A, and the rest is F-L-Y,” and earlier in his career Caz had briefly gone by the name Casanova Fly, and that seems like a very large coincidence. Rhyme thievery in rap is a part of rap’s history, too.
Another criticism here is that the Sugarhill Gang wasn’t authentic, and really, it’s not an untrue thing. The group, three guys from New Jersey, was piecemealed together by a woman named Sylvia Robinson, who was running Sugar Hill Records, a then-flailing record label. She had been exposed to rap almost by accident and decided she wanted to record a rap record. She found the guys she wanted, had them record it, and there you go. When the song popped, the guys who had been nurturing rap up from a pup were very confounded and even more offended. When Melle Mel, one of the first rappers and song-writers, was asked the temperature of the grassroots musicians when it was three outsiders who’d become the genre’s first breakout stars, he said, “Every traditional rapper was fucking mortified. What the fuck are they doing with our art form? It’s like they ax-murdered the shit. We didn’t think that was credible.” Credibility has always been a part of rap, too.6
Beyond the criticisms: Hank then goes through a series of brags,7 establishes rap’s relationship with money8 and women,9 then alley-oops it up to Master Gee, who delivers the third verse, which is basic enough, save for his curious implication that height is indicative of rapping ability (“Now, I'm not as tall as the rest of the gang / But I rap to the beat just the same”). After that is where it kind of starts to wander into the ridiculous, which somehow makes it even more iconic.
Rapper’s Delight
“Now what you hear is not a test, I’m rapping to the beat” (0:43)
“You see I got more clothes than Muhammad Ali” (1:31)
“The beat don’t stop until the break of dawn” (2:26)
“But we like hot butter on a breakfast toast” (4:26)
“Rest a little while so you don’t get weak” (5:19)
“The women fight for my delight” (5:32)
“But I can bust you out with my super sperm” (6:45)
“If your girl starts actin’ up, then you take her friend” (7:17)
“Like Dracula without his fangs . . .“(9:14)
“Now there’s a time to laugh, and a time to cry” (11:10)
“I didn’t even bite and not a goddamn word” (11:42)
“Like Farrah Fawcett without her face . . .” (12:43)
Observational, Boastful, Thrilling, Insightful, Considerate, Confrontational, Comparative
Fourth Through Tenth Verses: Wonder Mike expresses love of country, then transitions into an explanation of the way the group prefers their breakfast toast (with hot butter, FYI). Later he says he knows a man named Hank who “has more rhymes than a serious bank,” and I guess really I just want to know what bank that is because that’s a bank I need to be involved with.
Big Bank Hank follows behind Mike, calling himself “Imp the Dimp,” and at first I was like, “What the fuck is an Imp the Dimp?” but then he continues his story and says he was walking home one day and a reporter asked him some questions and he responded by rapping some rhymes that were so devastating she fell in love with him and then I was like, “Oh, that’s an Imp the Dimp.” More: Turns out, the reporter was Lois Lane, and so she has to call Superman to break up with him. Hank says not very nice things about Superman’s clothes and also about Superman’s penis, and I think still to this day it’s the only reference to a superhero’s genitals in all of rap.
Mike spends a sizable portion of the eighth verse telling a story about going to a friend’s house for dinner and being served food that possessed a bizarre ability to decompose at an accelerated pace. In the ninth verse, Big Bank Hank talks all about how nobody should ever steal his rhymes, and I figure Grandmaster Caz’s eyes aren’t even halfway through with the eye roll he started when he heard that. In verse ten, Master Gee talks about: Johnny Carson; Big Bank Hank’s semen; Perry Mason; Farrah Fawcett, if she didn’t have a face; rapping for freaks when he was only four years old; having to pick up sticks for money when he was six (the freaks were not altogether impressed with his rapping, I suppose); how he died at seven and performed in heaven; and he reinforces the Sugarhill Gang’s advocacy for dairy products.
♦
“Rapper’s Delight” has big accolades: Rolling Stone placed it at number 251 on their list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time and number two on their list of the 50 Greatest Hip-Hop Songs of All Time. It was number two on VH1’s list of the 100 Greatest Hip-Hop Songs,10 and is usually somewhere close to that same position on any other list of the greatest rap songs. The Library of Congress preserved it in the National Recording Registry.
It was the first true rap song, which is to say it was recorded by a group that billed itself as a rap group and sold as a song that presented itself as a rap song rather than a song that had some elements of rap in it. It coined the term “rapper.” It turned Sugar Hill Records into the premier record label for rappers. It sold more than two million copies.
In short: It changed everything forever.
REBUTTAL: “RHYMIN’ AND RAPPIN’” PAULETTE AND TANYA WINLEY
“Rapper’s Delight” is undoubtedly a cute, fun, cheeky piece of early hip-hop history, but the most important song of 1979 was actually made by two sisters, Tanya “Sweet Tee” and Paulette Winley, whose single “Rhymin’ and Rappin’” proved both prescient and influential. Backed by the Harlem Underground Band—house band for their dad Paul Winley’s Winley Records—the teens recite braggadocio rhymes over a propulsive, soulful groove that is far less disco fever than uptown park jam. Absent the polished, commercial sheen of other popular early rap recordings, “Rhymin’ and Rappin’” says more about hip-hop’s break beat–driven origins than it does the pop charts. The Winley sisters were undoubtedly the First Ladies of hip-hop.
—PAUL CANTOR
1. “It was something that seemed very far away from what a ghetto kid on the street could realistically hope to attain or be a part of. That whole idea of the flashy, gaudy, the costume, all that stuff was something hip-hop reacted against.” —Fab Five Freddy
2. Mixing a record as it played.
3. Playing the same record on both turntables so you could jump back and forth and repeat moments in the song.
4. There are contrasting stories about how it picked up the name, but the general premise for all of them is that phrases like “hippity-hop” were often used to describe the music, and eventually that just got shortened to “hip-hop,” and thank goodness for that, because can you even imagine someone saying, “And here’s the new hippity-hop song from DMX . . .”?
5. Hip-hop as a culture is most often identified as having four parts: DJing, break dancing, graffiti art, and rapping.
6. A third criticism came from Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards, from the group Chic, which made the song “Good Times” that “Rapper’s Delight” borrowed heavily from. “Rapper’s Delight” was also the first rap song to illegally use a sample.
7
. The best is that he brags about having “a color TV so I can see the Knicks play basketball.”
8. “Hear me talking ’bout checkbooks, credit cards, more money than a sucker could ever spend / But I wouldn’t give a sucker or a bum from the Rucker not a dime ’til I made it again.”
9. “You see, if your girl starts actin' up, then you take her friend.”
10. Rolling Stone had Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s “The Message” at number one (see this page). VH1 had Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” in their number-one spot (see this page).
WHAT THIS SONG IS ABOUT
Different types of breaks, and also even different types of brakes.
WHY IT’S IMPORTANT
“The Breaks” did several big things, and those will all be discussed on the following pages, but the biggest thing was that it helped take rap from the freewheel rambling that it was and gave it structure by instituting a chorus.
In 1997, an R&B group from the midwestern United States got famous for singing a song about getting erections while slow dancing with girls, and that would maybe seem like a weird way to start an essay about Kurtis Blow, and it probably is, but it’s not the wrong way, at least not in this particular setting.
The group was a mostly unlikable trio called Next, and the song was a mostly unlikable track called “Too Close.” One way to talk about “Too Close” is to go over all of the lyrics, but an easier way to talk about it is to just say that its first line is “I wonder if she could tell I’m hard right now. Hmmm,” and things don’t get any better from there. Now, I will concede that describing the group and the song as “mostly unlikable” is a personal preference. By quantitative measurements, it was actually quite liked; it was number one on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart in 1998 for four weeks straight and helped the album it was on eventually go double platinum. Still, I have to assume Minnesotans find it disappointing that the second most popular thing tied to their state is a song about predatory boners.1
The Rap Year Book: The Most Important Rap Song from Every Year Since 1979, Discussed, Debated, and Deconstructed Page 2