AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |
Back to Blog
Radi oband tuner image9/26/2023 ![]() ![]() “Everybody that made it after Sylvia Robinson learned from her,” Stone says. The iconic label, with its instantly recognizable powder-blue candy-striped logo, will be forever credited with introducing rap to the masses. A decade later, she was voted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, joining Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, which became the first rap group inducted into the Rock Hall in 2007. In 2011, Sylvia Robinson died at age 76 of congestive heart failure. After 26 gold records, the Robinsons folded Sugar Hill in 1986. Def Jam Records, with its growing all-star roster that included LL Cool J, the Beastie Boys and Public Enemy, essentially made the New Jersey label obsolete. ![]() ![]() A combination of a doomed distribution deal with a struggling MCA Records and an evolving hip-hop landscape led by the harder beats-and-rhymes swagger of Run-D.M.C. But momentum quickly cratered.ĭisillusioned artists, however, were the least of the Robinsons’ worries. Rob’s artists, which included gold-selling “Funk You Up” trio the Sequence, were now opening arena gigs for R&B and funk stars the O’Jays, Parliament-Funkadelic and Rick James. and overseas, the first such rap package tour. The Sugar Hill Revue went on the road in the U.S. By 1982, the label’s roster included early rap giants like Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, the Treacherous Three, the Funky 4 + 1 and Spoonie Gee. ![]() 1981’s groundbreaking “ The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel” was the first record to feature the scratching and mixing routines that were a hallmark of ’70s hip-hop park jams. Sugar Hill Records was on top, and the label now had street cred. It was another strike against the authenticity of the Sugarhill Gang.īut it didn’t matter. It turned out that he had “borrowed” the lyric book of hip-hop pioneer Grandmaster Caz, a member of the hip-hop outfit the Cold Crush Brothers, whom Hank had been managing. Unknown to Robinson, Big Bank Hank, who was discovered rapping while working at a pizza shop, didn’t write any of “Rapper’s Delight’s” most quotable verse (“Everybody go, ‘Hotel, motel, Holiday Inn’ / You see, if your girl starts acting up, then you take her friend…”). Rodgers told the trade magazine Hits that he and Edwards ended up receiving writing credits and royalties on every 12” sold worth three times the suggested retail price.īefore they formed, the three young men had never met. Sugar Hill’s chief investor, Morris Levy, intervened. The Robinsons scoffed at any talk of a deal, a byproduct of their days on the other end of brazenly shady music-industry practices. Rodgers and Edwards quickly got in touch with their lawyer. “Then I looked around and saw no DJ - he was standing right in front of me.” “When I heard ‘Rapper’s Delight,’ I thought the DJ was doing it live,” Rodgers recalled in a 2006 Vanity Fair feature on the rise and fall of Sugar Hill Records. Chic’s Nile Rodgers, who co-wrote “Good Times” with late partner and bassist Bernard Edwards, was blindsided as the recording blasted through the speakers at Midtown Manhattan disco spot Leviticus. While most mainstream music critics dismissed “Rapper’s Delight” as a novelty, the public ate it up. 36 on the pop charts, at its peak, the record moved a reported 50,000 copies per day. “Rapper’s Delight” bombarded airwaves and dance clubs across the country and eventually worldwide. “All of a sudden, something said to me, ‘Put something like that on a record, and it will be the biggest thing,’” Robinson added. She stood transfixed as the disc jockey manning the turntables delivered a call-and-response take on Chic’s monster anthem. “The DJ was playing music and talking over the music, and the kids were going crazy,” she recalled to the New Jersey Star-Ledger in 1997. Robinson came up with the idea after attending a niece’s summer birthday party at the iconic club Harlem World. “Rapper’s Delight” nicked the meaty groove and signature bass line from Chic’s disco smash “ Good Times,” which had topped the Billboard Hot 100 that August. That changed in August 1979 when Sylvia Robinson, then 43, assembled the velvety-voiced Wonder Mike, the charismatic Big Bank Hank and the infectious Master Gee into her newly christened Sugar Hill Studios in Englewood. Before “Rapper’s Delight,” it seemed ludicrous that a street genre exclusively performed live could even exist in a recorded format. That’s thanks in no small part to the savvy instincts of Robinson and her no-nonsense husband, Joe, co-founder of Sugar Hill. Today, hip-hop is the most listened to musical genre, generating billions of dollars. ![]()
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |