Rapper's Delight: Inside the Song That Ignited Hip Hop

Join Steve for the incredible inside story behind the song that launched hip hop on its course towards world domination. It's a tale tainted by scandal: accusations of organized crime, plagiarism and betrayal. And it's told by the artists who lived it: early South Bronx innovator Grandmaster Caz and The Sugarhill Gang's Wonder Mike and Master Gee.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Speed of Sound is a production of I Heart Radio.
As the seventies drew to a close, a record called
Rappers Delight arrived on the scene and in the process

(00:22):
introduced the world to a new kind of music, hip hop. Mmm.
But the song that changed modern music is steeped in controversy.
The Sugar Hill Gang, the group behind the hit, didn't
pioneer the genre that they, for a time became the
face of, and their songs success is tainted by accusations

(00:44):
of organized crime, plagiarism, and betrayal. On today's episode, the
incredible inside story behind the song that launched hip hop
on its course toward world domination. I'm Steve Greenberg and
this is Speed of Sound. So it's October. I was

(01:13):
driving in my car and Washington, d C. Going to
meet somebody for dinner. I'm listening to the radio and
I think I'm hearing the song good Times by Chic,
which was very big at the time. But all of
a sudden, this guy starts talking over the record. You
don't stop the record to the bad man say now,

(01:36):
I'm fascinated by this, and the song just keeps going
just like that. This guy just keeps talking and the
song is nearly fifteen minutes long. Finally I get to
my destination, but I don't get out of my car.
I just sit there listening to this record. Let the
person I'm supposed to meet waite because I'm afraid that
I might never hear this record again, and I desperately

(01:59):
want to know what it is. Is this even a
real record, or is it somebody at the radio station
just talking over good times. When it finally ends, the
radio DJ says, this is a new record called Rappers Delight,
and it's by a group called the sugar Hill Gang.
I get out of my car and I go to dinner.

(02:20):
It turns out I needn't have worried about never hearing
that song again, because all over the Northeast people were
having a similar experience. Upon hearing this record on the radio.
Stations were flooded with phone calls asking what the record was,
with people requesting to hear it again and again. Stations
were playing this fifteen minute record to three times in

(02:40):
a row. They were promising they'd played again every hour
just to get the phones to stop ringing. Rappers Delight
was an instant smash, But as much as radio audiences
were just as exhilarated as I was to hear this
fresh new sound, there was grumbling and even bitterness up
in the Bronx because, as it happened, this fresh new

(03:00):
sound wasn't quite so new during the previous few years,
a very vibrant scene and flourishing in the Bronx. But
the music they made up in the Bronx had never
been released on a record. It was all performed live
at parties held at people's houses or in community centers

(03:21):
or in local parks, where the mobile DJs powered their
sound systems by plugging into lamp posts. And those South
Bronx parties where modern DJing and rapping were invented were
called hip hops. Curtis Brown, also known as Grandmaster CAZ,
was one of the early innovators on the South Bronx
music scene. He's also one of the rap pioneers featured

(03:42):
in McLemore's two thousand and sixteen hit Downtown. Here's how
he recalls the early days. When we talk about things,
we tend to talk about the big, you know, the
big things. But I mean hip hop started for me
and in a building, like in an apartment house with
one little turntable and a stack of forty five, okay,

(04:03):
and we were doing house parties, the traditional house parties
like from the fifties where they pay at the door
twenty five cents or whatever come in. It was that
kind of situation, okay, except the music that we gravitated
to is the formative music of hip hop, those old
folks soul and break beats, even some disco, but just

(04:24):
the part that we danced to, and that's that's kind
of what formed the foundation of the music of hip hop.
Those house parties, basically, any party where we could come together,
dance the way we want to dress, the way we
want to interact with each other, the way we want
to became the foundation for hip hop. And remember Kaz Name,

(04:44):
He's gonna play a big and controversial role in the
success of Rappers Delight. The South Bronx scene even had
its own dance style called breakdancing and its own visual
signature in the form of graffiti. The hip hop scene
in the Bronx had its own st ours, and they
were real innovators who had pioneered the music. Introduced a

(05:04):
slew of important innovations, and none of those people were
the sugar Hill Gang. No, that scene was dominated by
people like DJ Cool Herk, a Jamaican born DJ who
had the loudest mobile sound system in the Bronx and
who achieved local fame by experimenting with the use of
two copies of the same record on two turntables to
extend the break or instrumental section, resulting in what was

(05:28):
known as a breakbeat. Herk had this extraordinary ability to
identify particularly interesting breaks, and the records he spotlighted are
among the rhythmic cornerstones of hip hop to this day,
for instance, the great break in Jimmy Caster's It's Just Begun.
And then there was Grand Wizard Theodore, who was the

(05:51):
first to introduce what became known as scratching, manipulating records
on the turntable to create a brand new percussive sound.
There and there was Grand Master Flash who perfected the

(06:12):
art of scratching and who also perfected cutting between sections
of the same record on two turntables to keep the
beat going from minutes at a time without losing the rhythm,
which was a big improvement over DJ cool herk style.
Because Herk wasn't concerned in the least with keeping a
smooth beat going as he switched from record to record.

(06:41):
While HERK was mainly influenced by Jamaican DJ's, Flash was
heavily influenced by DJ's from the New York disco scene,
who by seventy four were executing really seamless blends between records.
Flashes technique was helped a lot by the introduction of
twelve inch singles in which had wider grooves, making it

(07:02):
a lot easier to perfect the art of scratching and
cutting back and forth between two turntables. And then there
were Bronx mcs like DJ Hollywood. The Furious Five were
the cold Crushed Brothers, people who had mastered the art
of rapping along with those breakbeats to send a party
crowd into a frenzy. Except back then they didn't call
it rapping. They called it MC And all those people

(07:25):
when they heard Rappers Delight on the radio, they were annoyed.
None of them even knew who the sugar Hill Gang
were and how did they make a record and get
it on the radio. So who were these guys who
had beaten everybody else to the punch? Well, at the
core of the sugar Hill Gang was Henry Lee Jackson,
known professionally as Big Bank Hank. He grew up in

(07:45):
the Bronx, where he worked the doors at a Bronx
hip hop nightclub called the Sparkle. There he met an
MC named Grand Master Kaz, the same Grand Master Cas
we heard from before, and he became the manager of
Kaz's first group, the Mighty four s mcs. Here's Grandmaster
Kaz again. Well, actually I meant Hank at He was
a doorman at a club called the Sparkle in the Bronx.

(08:07):
Hank was always at the door, so we gained the report.
We started chilling being cool. He lived in the Bronx
and we just got cool. And Grandmaster Flash had management
Black Door Productions. The Funky Four had a management. So
I'm thinking, for me to to advance in this thing,
I'm gonna a manager situation that will help book me

(08:28):
shows and stuff like that. So I approached Hank and
I was like, oh, hey, you know you into hip
hop already being here at the club, and he agreed
to help manage the group. We were a known, you
know act. We were on our way up. We were rising,
but we lacked a good sound system. So Hank to
kind a loan from his parents two thousand bucks. You know,

(08:48):
we fortified our sound system, and uh we started doing
parties and jams. Now the mighty four smcs weren't making
much money doing hip hop parties, and Hank Knee did
to start repaying that loan. So Hey got a job
in a pizza shop in New Jersey, someone that he knew,
a friend of the family or whatever. He got a

(09:09):
job in a pizza shop in New Jersey, Crispy Crust Pizza,
and used to take a little boom box to work
with him. Of course, me being a DJ and one
of the first to you know, record and making some
of the first mixtapes, I used to give Hanks of
these tapes, you know, just to rock with, take the
work whatever. And Hank would be in a pizza shop
with the little boom box playing all the hip hop

(09:29):
beats and all you know, the live hip hop shows.
So people coming in and out of the pizza shop
automatically assume, Hey, this guy must be one of the
hip hop dudes. He's a rapper. Hank's path would soon
cross with two other guys from New Jersey who would
eventually round out the Sugar Hill Gang. Michael Wright, known
as Wonder Mike and Guy O'Brien, who also goes by

(09:50):
the unforgettable name of the man they call the Master G.
I'll let them pick up the story from here. Here's
Master G. I come from a musical background. To my
dad was of like a frustrated musician. We had a
studio in our basement teena, New Jersey. So I was
always around music, and I played drums and uh farted
around with a few different instruments. So from my childhood,

(10:11):
I was always into music, listening to a lot of
jazz and that kind of thing, and then of course
the funk scene because it was all seventies and we
had a little band, and then you know, I got
introduced to DJ and from an upper classman uh, and
I thought it would be a cool idea if I
did a little DJ thing myself, because then that started
becoming popular around our area and uh Hackensack te Neck

(10:35):
in Englewood area. So I was DJN and UH I
was going to school trying to, you know, figure out
what my next move was gonna be. Eleventh grade transmisioning
into the twelfth grade. I was just a kid man,
you know, a kid in the suburbs of you know,
Northern New Jersey, trying to figure out what I was
gonna do with my life, and you know, trying to
make two dollars and DJ and just doing my thing.

(10:56):
That's what I was doing at that time. Wonder Mike
was also building a name and following as a local
DJ at the time, introducing northern New Jersey audiences to
an entirely new sound. Master g picks up the story.
Mike and I were rivals, so we had our old
Lou hip hop scene. We were rapping. We are legitimate rappers.
Mike and I are legitimate rappers. We wrote on raps.

(11:19):
I was spinning records, cutting them out. I did all
of that. But because it was in New Jersey and
the Anglewood, Hacket Sack, and Teena area, there was the
Lou area. So we had our own Lou hip hop scene.
And New York literally is like a fifteen minute ride
from where we were at. So we got it, but
we got it kind of like second hand. At the
same time, a New Jersey music legend was also discovering

(11:41):
the sound of hip hop. By the late nineteen seventies,
Sylvia Robinson was already one of the most successful female
executives in the music business. Along with her husband Joe Robinson,
she owned All Platinum Records, a major R and B
indie label headquartered in Englewood. She had also experienced major
success as an artist, songwriter, and producer As Little Sylvia,

(12:06):
she recorded for Savoy Records in the early fifties a
Little Boy, You're going to Be Sorry, and then in
nineteen fifty six she had a major hit with Love
Is Strange as one half of the duo Mickey and Sylvia,

(12:28):
along with jazz guitarist Mickey Baker. Love Is Strange actually
had a spoken word interlude in the middle, perhaps a
precursor of things to come. Yes, are you calling your
love a boy? Call me a boy? Boy, I say.

(12:54):
In ninety eight, Sylvia and Joe Robinson launched their first label,
Stang Records, and Sylvia wrote and produced the label's biggest hit,
Love on a Two Way Street By the Moments. That
record went on to be memorably sampled by Jay Z

(13:17):
and Empire State of Mind. Sylvia even had a massive
hit as a solo artist in three with a hyper
sexual pillow Talk. But Sylvia Robinson was no mere sex kid.

(13:44):
She was a tough businesswoman. She and her husband Joe
navigated the rough and tumble world of record pressing, distribution,
and promotions with the backing of their silent partner at
the label, the notorious Morris Levy. Morris Levy was a
flamboyant music executive who, at the height of his influence,
had an interest in about ninety music companies, including labels,

(14:06):
publishing companies, pressing plants, and a chain of record stores.
He also had ties to the Genevese crime family, and
towards the end of his life he was sentenced to
ten years in prison on multiple counts of extortion. But
with Morris le beyond their side, the Robbinsons knew that
if they sold records, they'd get paid now. In the
summer of nineteen seventy nine, Sylvia's son Joe Jr. Through

(14:29):
his mom a surprise party at the Harlem World Disco
in New York City, and at that part he was
a DJ named love Bug Star Sky who was spinning
records and rapping to the beat. Hi had a plate.

(14:52):
Sylvia was really impressed, and she got the idea of
making a rap record with love Bug star Ski. But
love Bug turned her down, saying he was making too
much money performing live to take time out of his
schedule to make a record. Besides, he didn't see any
potential in making a record of himself rapping over somebody
else's record. So Sylvia and her son approached a couple

(15:13):
of other big rappers on the scene, but they also
said no to making a record. Finally, Sylvia decided she'd
make a record with someone still undiscovered. She turned to
her son Joe to connect her with some local talent.
Here's wonder Mike again. They were on Palasan Avenue around
ten o'clock at night and it was Ms Robinson and

(15:34):
her son Joey and his friend Warren in the car.
Warren said, I knew a guy in a pizza shop
across the street. He pulled a U turn, pulling front
of the pizza shop, asked hate to come out and
flat and had an apron on with the flower sauce
meat and uh. And he jumped in this car and

(15:55):
started rhyming over this track and uh. They said, yeah,
that sounds good it now, Master g guy happened to
be on the street. I was walking down Palasaide Avenue
with a friend of mine and there was a ninety
eight pulled up in front of that Pizza Paula. My
friend actually noticed that Sylvia got rest her soul and

(16:15):
Joey Robinson got rest his soul. They were sitting in
the front seat. My friend knew them. He stopped to
speak to them. Joey says, my mom is looking for
people who can rap. Well, Mark knew that I could wrap,
and guys friends says, well, he's good. But my man,
he had mastered the g IS fishes and guy got
in the car and they started rhyming. Master g picks

(16:36):
up the action from the Pizza Paula. We all went
to Sylvia's mansion up an angle with cliffs, and Hank
came with us. So we're in a library because again
she said that she was looking for one person. So
again we thought I thought I was in competition with Hank.
And Mike came along because he was a part of
the DJ that suggested to do the good Times. So

(17:00):
he's he's in the library. I'm in the library. Hanks
in the library. We're all sitting there and I'm going
back and forth with Hank. Now Hank is rappid. Now
he's saying the same rap over and over and over again,
and I'm saying to myself, why is he using the
same rap? You know? And I'm I'm in my head,
I'm coming up with rhymes and freestyling and thinking about

(17:22):
things to say, and he keeps saying the same rhyme
over and over and over and over and over again,
and I'm like, why is he using the same lyrics?
Hanking guy going back and forth from like eleven o'clock
at night the two am, and she said, why, I
don't know who to choose? Everybodybody come back another day
and we're trying this again. I said, ms Rob, I

(17:43):
can wrap two and she said, okay, really hear what
you got. And I started incorporating everything that was in
that room, because we're in her library, her dog, the books,
what we were doing, what we were trying to do.
The record was going to be big. And the first
thing that came out was him hit it He really
be hit And she said, wow, okay, hell Hank you

(18:04):
coming with hotel motel And then he said a few lines.
Guys sent a few lines, and she said, I can't
decide between you. I'll tell you what I'm gonna make
you a group Freeze my favorite number. I'll make you
guys your group. That was Friday night. She said, come
down to the studio Monday and we'll make her record.

(18:24):
But while Mike and Guy headed home to work on
honing their rhymes, Hank wasn't exactly up front with the
source of his material. Here's Grandmaster Kaz. Instead of him
telling them, no, no, I don't rap, but I manage
a rapper, I manage casting over fly, he just got
into the back of the car whatever they were playing
a beat, he recited the rhymes that were on the

(18:46):
tapes on the boom box. Those were my rhymes, he decided,
the rhymes he was most familiar with. Those are my rhymes,
the rabs that he hears me say all the time.
So that's actually how the whole thing came about. And
when he came to me, he was like, Yo, these
people want me to make a record. I mean, I
can imagine in nineteen seventy nine somebody saying that they're

(19:09):
gonna make a rap record and you've been doing this
for six years already. It was ridiculous. It was like, Oh,
you're gonna make a record. I cool, you know what
I mean? Because I didn't believe in it, and I
never understood the dynamic. I didn't know how serious it was,
and I didn't know how far it would eventually go.
Within a couple of days, Hank, Wonder Mike, and Master

(19:30):
G all found themselves in a recording studio in Englewood
making a record under the direction of Sylvia Robinson. Master
G was just seventeen years old, Wonder Mike was twenty two,
and Hank he was the eldest member at all of
twenty three. Prior to bringing the sugar Hill Gang into
the studio to record, Sylvia had her house musicians record

(19:52):
the backing track of Chics hit disco record good Times,
the biggest song of that summer. This was in the
days before sampling, and so she just got the band
to recreate the sheet track as precisely as possible. All
the rappers in the Bronx were wrapping over existing records

(20:12):
at their shows, so Sylvia wanted to recreate that authentic
hip hop experience on record. Once in the studio, the
sugar Hill Gang recorded the whole fifteen minute record in
one take. Well almost here's Wonder Mike. They were in
there laying the music down it only took eight hours,
which seemed like forever for us. So me and hang

(20:32):
with to the movies. And when we came back, they're
wrapping up the music. And he set up three mics,
no boots, three mics next to each other, about six
ft apart. And Uh, it was decided that I would
go first because the type of voice I had, And Uh,
I wrote the intro. I don't know, because I didn't
want to just jump into it because people didn't know

(20:54):
what this music was. So I got the idea from
the show Outer Limits. There is nothing long with your
television set. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We
are controlling transmission. What do you hear? It's not a
set where you're doing I'm rapping to the beat me
neither groom them or friends. We're gonna try to move

(21:15):
you see who is? I am one of mine? And
I like to say hello. And I included every race
I could pick lyrically into the rhyme to the black,
to the white, red and brown. I don't know where
purple came from. I bet I never liked that word
in there, and yellow so and then I passed it
off the hank and uh, it's a fifteen minute record.

(21:38):
We laid down the vocals in seventeen minutes. When we
stopped one time after my first rind, when I said,
come on, Hank, sing that song and he was just
staring at me. Yeah, what do you do? And it's
like a thrownout and you know you passed the night.
That pause was because Big Bank Hank was used to
managing rappers, not rapping. But at the time, neither Wonder

(22:02):
Mike nor Master G knew that or had any idea
that Hank wasn't wrapping his own material. We didn't know
that the rhymes that he was saying, Grandmaster kas room,
here's Master G. Then we get to the studio. Now
he's in the studio, he's saying the same raps that
he said at the library that night. So I'm like, okay, whatever,

(22:23):
Maybe you know he maybe he doesn't have a lot
of stuff. The big, big, big thing was you never
let us. You're not supposed to bite. You're not supposed
to bite another MC's round. That was a cardinal sent
We didn't know that he was biting. Wonder Mike does acknowledge, however,
that Big Bank Hank was not without talent. The Hank
may not have been a writer, but he had a

(22:43):
great voice, one of the best voices in the hip hop.
Had a lot of power, a lot of character. He
was soon in high pitched, which was kind of misleading
because it was so powerful. Of course, when the record
came out, Grandmaster Kas was blindsided. Every rhyme that he
said on Rappers life was mine. Now, Hank said some

(23:05):
phrases that weren't mine. Okay, hold tell bold, Tell what
you're gonna do today, Gonna get a fly girl on,
get some spak, drive off in the death O that
was like Keith Cowboy from The Furious Five. That was
one of those crowd participation rhymes, one of them, you know,
rock with the crowd round. He used to say. Um.

(23:26):
Later on, at some point he said, I'm pimpty dimp
the ladies, pimp the women fight for my dinner. That's
a rhyme that he got from raheem from Grandmaster Flash
and the Furious Five. Who got it from it was
a black pointation movie. I don't remember the exact movie,

(23:46):
but one of the guys was, you know, like this
slick talking character, like an indolor mite fashion and he
had some rhyme that when I'm empty dimp, the women's pimp,
the women fight for me. And he had this whole
long narrative that Rahim took part of that and made
his own. And then Hank took that and made that

(24:07):
part of his every verse. He said, from I'm the
C A, S and the O V A and the rest,
he just spelled out my name. So Hank was so
much not an MC. He didn't even know enough. Don't
say the guy name changed the letters around so it
spells your name. And if you just got to change
the next thing so it rhymes with Hank or k

(24:28):
do it? You know what I mean? And then uh,
I'm the grand master with the three m c s.
And that's totally obvious. I'm the grand master with three
m c s. Okay. And the most ironic of all
of the raps that he said was the one about
you know, from the time I was only six years old,
I never forget what I was told. It was the

(24:50):
best advice I ever had came from a wise and
did old dad. And he went into this narrative about
how his dad sat down and told him these lessons,
and it goes all right, from the time time, I
was only six years old. And then when he sums
it up, he goes, so from sixty six to this
very day, you would have to have been six years
old in nine that's me. I was six years up.

(25:13):
And then I said, never let it mc steal a
rhynd irony on irony and that little story in Rappers
Delight about Superman that was also one of Kaz's rhymes
from a couple of years earlier. In fact, that was
one of the most famous rhymes in all of Bronze
hip hop culture up to that point. It must have
been to as a by the way, they even what's

(25:34):
your name? By the names lay that you could beat
my more name, showing they can. Once the recording of
Rappers Delight was completed, Sylvia quickly got it ready to
bring it to market. She decided to release it on
a new imprint, sugar Hill Records, named after a neighborhood
in Harlem that historically was home to artists and musicians,

(25:56):
and she named her new group the sugar Hill Gang.
Coming up next, Rappers Delight storms the charts and changes
the music game forever. Whatever the true origin of the rhymes,
there was no denying that Rappers Delight was one great

(26:18):
record for the uninitiated listening on the radio. Rappers Delight
sounded like the sugar Hill Gang were performing the vocal
equivalent of graffiti over kes good Times. It was the
glossy world of disco meeting its harsher street cousin. Upon
its release in September of ninety nine, the twelve inch
single of Rappers Delight became an immediate smash, selling seventy

(26:41):
five thousand copies a day and peaking at number four
on the R and B chart, number thirty six on
the Hot one hundred two. It would have been a
much bigger hit on the Hot one hundred, but a
lot of pop stations shied away from playing it because
late nineteen seventy nine was the beginning of a major
anti disco backlash at radio, and a bunch of guys
apping over good Times one of the biggest disco hits

(27:03):
of the year was seen as potentially alienating for audiences
who wanted to move on from disco. But even the
relative lack of pop radio exposure didn't keep Rappers Delight
from becoming the biggest selling twelve inch single of all
time and immediately changing the lives of the guys in
the group, especially then seventeen year old master g Let

(27:24):
me tell you how mind blowing it was. Okay, I
went from trying to figure out how to get a date,
how to try to, you know, manage what I was
gonna do, how to get a car. I went from
that to literally a movie like. From one day I'm
trying to figure out how to get a date, the
next day, I'm running in my own neighborhood away from

(27:46):
girls that I you know, we had the biggest crushes on.
You know, it was crazy. I couldn't I couldn't leave
an arena. We had a decoy that used to run
out of the backstage door, and all the girls would
run after that, and then they would shuttle me into
the car to get out of it. That's what it
was like. I get pulled off the stage. I got
my clothes to it, all my hair pulled. It was crazy.

(28:09):
Here's wonder Mike four. I saw a hard days to
night in a movie theater, looking at these guys bad four,
singing catchy songs and girls losing their minds. Here I
am for two other guys, and the exact same thing
is happening. They got so excited, they got so strong
they were that they tackled Hank. Hank is six two

(28:37):
three oh five, and they tackled him like like they
were running a lot a bunch of running. Now we've
repeated before on Speed of Sound, the old music biz saying,
where there's a hit, there's a writ. And of course
the inevitable lawsuit was filed by Sheik, who hadn't received
any writing credit or royalties on the track, and out

(28:59):
of ward settlement gave Sheke's Nile Rogers and Bernard Edwards
co writing credit. The Mighty four Semcs were not so
lucky on the other hand, lacking the knowledge of copyright
law and the legal muscle that Sheik's team possessed, Grandmaster
has never saw a dime. Of course, he didn't press
his claim too hard, aware as he was of Sugar

(29:20):
Hills affiliation with the Mob. But still the song was
a game changer, single handedly jump starting the hip hop
record business, and literally the first line of the song
is as if announcing to everybody the start of a
new era. But as I mentioned earlier, there were a
lot of people wrapping live over breakbeats before the sugar
Hill Gang. In fact, the sugar Hill Gang weren't even

(29:43):
the first people to make a rap record. Rappers Delight
was actually beaten to the marketplace by a few months
by this record Alright, y'all, here we go yourself, King Tim,
the third personality John by the veteran funk band Fat

(30:04):
Back Band, started its life as the B side of
a song called You're My Candy Sweet. It was just
an afterthought somebody to fill the other side of the
seven inch single with the part of King Tim was
voiced by vocalist Tim Washington, a friend of the band
who was not a professional MC. The record did okay,
getting up to number twenty six on the R and
B chart, but the backing track was standard Fat Back Band,

(30:27):
and Tim just rapped on the verses while the band
sang the chorus. Therefore, King Tim the Third didn't present
his revolutionary the way Rappers Delight did. Now. While King
Tim the Third was the first record featuring rapping in
a purely hip hop context, there was a long tradition
in American black music of vocalists performing in a style
that can now be seen as the precursor of rapping.

(30:50):
For instance, in a group called the jubile Aires released
a popular record called Preacher and the Bear. I still
real about that Preacher and the bed gather on boys,
the daunt to miss, none of the chefs still ricks
the golden leg. And there was a major tradition of
R and B radio dj speaking in rhythm on the air,

(31:11):
like station w o V, New York's Jocko Henderson Mighty
Loud and Duck in the back Golf and down in
Memphis Rufus Thomas was doing his own rapping on w
d I A aha, she cried as she raised a

(31:33):
wooden leg, and thence side pick pus a tad Win
the New York State Wine. I repeat, pick pus it
tad Win. In n A veteran African American comedian named
pig Meat Markham had a top ten hit with a
record called Here Comes the Judge, with sections that sound
fairly similar to the rap sounds that came out of

(31:54):
the Bronx in the nineteen seventies. Yeah, yeah, he's the
cool off swing. It's just about ready to do that thing.
I don't want feels, I don't want the lines, well, oh,
I don't want And a few records appear in the
early seventies that would have a major influence on the
early Bronx rappers, like radio talk show hosts Gary Bird's

(32:16):
poem set to music, every Brother and a Brother, which
became very well known to listeners of his program on
New York soul station w w r L. It's time
for us to face the truth and level with each other.
It's time for us to face the fact. Brother Brother

(32:38):
seventy three Lightning Rod from the politically charged poetry collective
The Last Poets recorded Hustler's Convention, an album that was
performed entirely as a spoken word piece over funky grooves,
in which over the years has gone down as a
major influence on hip hop culture. Twice a few others
does roll, but their games was cold. The only due

(33:02):
the sing video was now was his turn. Starting in
n the scene really began to come together in the
South Bronx, an area of New York City that was
particularly afflicted with poverty and urban blight. Shells have burned
out buildings were an increasingly common sight, as landlords actually

(33:22):
set fire to their own property to claim insurance money.
So a street party featuring a DJ with two turntables
and a microphone was a very affordable form of entertainment
for South Bronx teenagers, with rival gang members sometimes showing
up and turning their energy to wrap battles instead of
street battles. There was a lot of competition at the

(33:42):
core of early hip hop at every level, rap battles,
competition between break dancers, graffiti artists trying to outdo each other,
and with the exception of the graffiti which could be
seen on every subway car in the city, it was
all out of sight from the rest of New York. Eventually,
nightclubs opened the hated to the South Bronx hip hop scene,
notably Disco Fever, where the cover charge was as low

(34:05):
as a dollar and where DJs like Grandmaster Flash and
African Bombada packed the house every night. So when Rappers
Delight hit in V nine, there was no shortage of
DJs and mcs in the South Bronx anxious to make
records of their own to get in on the action,
and there was no shortage of veteran indie record executives

(34:26):
anxious to put those records out. One of the first
of those executives to get into hip hop was Bobby Robinson,
No relation to Sylvia or Joe Robinson, owner of the
legendary Harlem record shop Bobby Robinson's Records on a Street.
He'd been producing hit since the nineteen fifties big records
like Kansas City by Wilbert Harrison, Kenneth Cannada, Kennathny. He

(34:58):
was turned on to Wrap by his nephew, Spooney G,
who had already in those very first weeks after the
arrival of Rappers Delight, made a record on a small
label called Spoon and Rap. Soon, Spooney G would be
recording for his uncle's label in Joy Records, along with
The Treacherous Three featuring the great Speed Rapper Cool mod

(35:21):
the Fight They're Gonna Beat the Soil, Ready to Eat
Well Off The Spoony suggested to his uncle that he
signed up the very top group on the Bronx scene,
Grandmaster Flash in the Furious Five Now as soon as
they had heard Rappers Delight. In October, the members of

(35:44):
the Furious Five, Grandmaster Flash, Mellie mel Kid, Creole Raheim,
Mr Nes and Keith Cowboy recorded a quickie single called
We Wrap More Mellow on a tiny label called Brass
Records under the name the Younger General Nation. We got
because I'm not so well, we got missed the next
because I rocked the Bear, Rocky Old Ladies Dream Cowboy

(36:11):
to keep. But by November they signed to Bobby Robinson's
Enjoy label and recorded super Rapping, a record which contained
a lot of the same rhymes that could be found
on We Wrap More Mellow, But Super Rapping also contained
a few verses that would later find their way into
hip hop history. Find the wags up Man, Don't you

(36:34):
found it too? Because don't God? Then don't go to
the second phase figure for more on that later. Enjoy
Records also quickly released a record by the Funky Four
plus one More, a collective notable for including among its
members one of the very first female mcs Sharrock Shar

(36:55):
rob Don't stop, Just turn on your mind when you're
ready to rock on the town Boo. The Funky Four
plus one More record was almost immediately joined in the
marketplace by an all female rap record, this one by
the duo of Tanya and Paul Atte Windley, who were

(37:16):
the daughters of Paul Windley, who's Harlem based Windley Records
label quickly entered the race to find the next hit
rap record, Anybody Bucking the Mic set, Sweet Tea and
all that it was listened to them and this Hey
Mike to make you hop like Sylvia Robinson and Bobby Robinson.

(37:38):
Paul Windley was yet another R and B industry veteran
whose kids were telling him about hip hop and who
fortunately possessed the skills to take that information and turn
it into a lucrative business. Windley managed to sign several
of the top hip hop stars from the South Bronx,
including the pioneering DJ Africa Bombada, whose glory days were
still a few years in the future. But it was

(38:00):
Sugar Hill Records itself who were the next to score
a big R and B rap hit. The label's very
next release after Rappers Delight, was by an all female
trio of m c's who came from South Carolina. No
Less called the sequence, featuring a teenage Angie Stone under
the name Angie b. Their song Funk You Up when

(38:20):
top twenty on the R and B chart at the
turn of the New Day. What It's Like I Got
Him and the Milky Way Stopped Feeling like a Millionaire's
bass blind guy with the Silver Lady. Everybody calls me
rock because I'm a black stop, and by the end
of nineteen seventy nine, the first rap record appeared on

(38:42):
a major record label, Go to make You go to
Rock Chock, Talking through your Neighborhood's gonna gonna take it
to the understood. My rapping was Robert Ford was a
thirty year old reporter for Billboard magazine who dreamed of
making some real money someday. He'd been told by a
colleague that you could always make money by putting out

(39:05):
a Christmas record because they sell every year and they
never grow old, and so that's what he set out
to do. In the summer of nineteen nine, before Rappers
Delight was even released, Ford decided his Christmas song should
be a rap song, and he and a fellow Billboard
reporter named J. B. Moore wrote Christmas Wrapping. They approached

(39:25):
a couple of the top rappers on the scene, like
DJ Hollywood and Eddie Chiba, but like Sylvia Robinson, they
were turned down by the big stars of hip hop
who didn't think rapping on a record would sell. Then,
at a chance encounter with a young hip hop party
promoter in Queens named Russell Simmons, Ford mentioned his plan
to make a rap Christmas record. Simmons wheels immediately began

(39:48):
to turn and he managed to get forward to come
see a performance by his client, Curtis blow Ford and
more to Curtis blow into the studio in September, and
like Sylvia Robinson, they decided to make the backing tracks
sound like good Times by Chic, which was still the
most popular song in New York. By the time they
were ready to shop the record to labels, Rappers Delight

(40:09):
was already on the radio and turning into a phenomenon.
And yet they were turned down by two dozen record
labels who figured Rappers Delight was a novelty and that
there wasn't room in the marketplace for two of those
rap records. Finally, an A and R man from Mercury
Records London office heard the track and convinced his American
counterparts to sign it. As soon as it was released,

(40:31):
the record was a smash. This was in part because
the producers put an instrumental version of the song on
the B side of the twelve inch vinyl, which gave
fans the opportunity to rap along at home and maybe
even create their own raps Christmas Rapping was the first
massive rap d after Rappers Delight, and it launched the
careers of both Curtis Blow and Russell Simmons, and the

(40:52):
God started to participated. Actually, we were all in the
moods that we had a little. But in spite of
these two massive hits and nearly one other rap releases
in the fall of nineteen seventy nine, people still didn't
take rap seriously. Billboard reported in February of nineteen eighty

(41:16):
that most people in the music industry viewed rap as
quote a passing novelty that will go the way of
all fads. It would be up to sugar Hill Records
to put that skepticism to rest by ramping up production
and releasing a stream of top notch rap records. But
to do that they needed top notch talent, so in
short order they lured Grandmaster Flash in The Furious Five

(41:38):
and The Funky four plus one More away from Enjoy Records,
where those acts had disagreements with the label over royalty payments.
Pretty soon they even got Bobby Robbinson's nephew, Spooney G
to defect. These additions to the roster were necessary since
the sugar Hill Gang's next two singles were flops, and
it looked like they might be one hit wonders. Bringing

(41:59):
Flash to a Gray Hill proved to be the key
move in building a dominant label. Between Grandmaster Flash's turntable
skills and the Furious Fives rhymes, they'd always been considered
the hip hop act to bet on for commercial success.
The group started paying dividends immediately upon their arrival at
sugar Hill with their first hit Freedom. Like most of

(42:19):
the early rap singles, Freedom was based on the rhythm
track of a pre existing record, in this case the
song Get Up and Dance by the group Freedom, but

(42:40):
instead of having the track played just like the original
record as they did on previous records, Flash got the
sugar Hill house band to approach it like Flashwood if
he was spinning the record at a live hip hop
ship what top Top, complete with call and response from

(43:05):
the crowd and horn stabs that sounded like they would
if Flash was backspinning the record and repeating the same
horn stab over and over again. It was an unusual
approach getting a live band to imitate the sound of
a DJ spinning recordings made by a live band, but
it made for one very cool record. The house band

(43:37):
at sugar Hill was actually the label's secret weapon. The
core musicians in this band had been playing on hits
for Sylvia's labels since the beginning of the seventies, and
they were really tight. Guitarist Skip Alexander, bassist Doug Wimbush,
and drummer Keith LeBlanc had actually cut a couple of
instrumental albums for All Platinum prior to the hip hop

(43:57):
era under the name Would Brass and Deal. When sugar
Hill launched, they were joined by percussionist Ed Fletcher, who
went by the name Duke Boutique and engineered jigs Chase.
Together they were the last great label house band before
labels turned to synthesizers. They were the hip hop equivalent
of Book or T and the MG's at Stacks or

(44:19):
Motown's Funk Brothers, And because sugar Hill was the first
label to focus on making rap records, these musicians were
literally the first hip hop musical ensemble, the first ones
tasked with the challenge of making records made to sound
just like a DJ playing other records. With the post
disco backlash against black dance music in full sway on

(44:42):
pop radio in the early eighties, sugar Hill's output was
foreign to most white audiences. For the Robinson's, catering exclusively
to the black community was more or less business as usual,
but for the artists it was more than just frustrating.
Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five were actually driven from
the stage under a barrage of plastic cups when they

(45:03):
opened for The Clash at Bond's Nightclub in New York.
In the rock audience just didn't know who they were
and didn't know their music. If white listeners heard any
rap music at all during this period, it was likely
to be Blondie's Rapture, which came out at the end
of nineteen eighty. Blondie's record may not have been authentic
hip hop, but it was a heartfelt tribute which had

(45:24):
the good sense to name check Grandmaster Flash and popular
Bronx MC Fab five, Freddie And When Blondie's frontwoman Deborah

(45:45):
Harry hosted Saturday Night Live, she brought along where her
the Funky Four plus one More, who performed their incredible
party single That's the Joint. This appearance actually marked the
first time a rap act had ever appeared on network television.
In the US. Wow, the next group are among the
best street rappers in the country. Please welcome my friends
from the Bronx. The Funky four plus one more. That's

(46:08):
the Joint represented yet another musical triumph by the sugar
Hill House Band. It featured DJ styled drum breaks played live,
and they flipped the beat in a way that sounded
like a DJ cutting from the turntable to turntable. We're
gonta food to the world that we're gonna pizza everybody.
We know the real thing we got to go at

(46:31):
the tracks core is the recreation of yet another disco song,
Rescue Me by the group. A taste of Honey only
with a much tougher feel, and that live DJ party

(46:52):
feel is what finally brought the sugar Hill Gang back
to the charts more than a year after Rappers Delight
first with the ex Brent Eighth Wonder, which used the
musical track of the disco song Daisy Lady by the
group's Seventh Wonder as its core. Your hands Ever Bundy,
I never buddy jumps, crap your hands, I'm like girls,

(47:12):
cut your heads, I'm like dives. Cup your hands. Well,
if you feel a no One right and you think
you're awesome though, let me and then The Sugar Hill
Gang tackled one of the holiest growls in all of
hip hop when they recorded Apache, built around what was
Cool Hirk's signature break, which came from the incredible Bongo
Bands record Apache, which was itself a cover of a

(47:46):
British surf guitar instrumentally, once again, the sound of a
party in the background gave the listener of the feel
of being at a hip hop performance, except with the
live band imitating the sound of the DJ spinning and
cutting records. But Apache was the last hit the Sugar

(48:15):
Hill Gang ever had, and the group quickly slid into
irrelevance as the label's attention turned to Grandmaster Flash, who
was emerging as hip hop's first superstar. Coming up Grandmaster
Flash Cruise much more than I'm Flash in the Pan.

(48:39):
The record that cemented Grandmaster Flash his reputation as the
greatest hip hop DJ of them all was The Adventures
of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel. He say
one for the Trouble two ft time, Come on Girls, Daddy.

(49:00):
It was a truly radical racord. It was the first
time anyone had tried to capture an actual d J
performance on a record, rather than having a band recreate
the vibe. On this record, Flash exposed the whole world
to the DJ's art of cutting and scratching, mixing back
and forth between short passages from numerous records, creating a

(49:21):
whole new kind of recorded music. Flashed it together pieces
like The Cheeks, Good Times Queens, Another One Bites the Dust,
whose baseline was copped from Good Times, the Incredible Bongo Bands,

(49:44):
Bongo Rocks, The Trouble, two Foot of Time, Bondie's Rapture,
and numerous hits from the sugar Hill label, plus a
spoken word snippet from a children's record. It took Flash
seven than hours of spinning records on three turntables to
get the record right. He insisted on doing it all

(50:07):
in one continuous take and refused to punch in after
a mistake or use any overdubs. That meant one mistake
and he had to start all over again. The end
result is a tour to forest performance by a true
master of his craft. What Flash accomplished on this record
was to demonstrate that hip hop was more than just

(50:29):
people rhyming over disco beats. As writer David Tup noted
at the time well other releases translated, hip Hop Adventures
was as close as any record would come to being
hip hop. But hip hop was about to change in
radical ways with the release on an upstart label called
Tommy Boy of a record by one of the original

(50:51):
pioneers of hip hop who decided to embark in a
whole new direction. Africa Bombarda was a big fan of
the German electronic music group draft Work, whose song trans
Europe Express had already changed the course of disco music
a few years earlier, Europe Extra Bombada and his producer

(51:20):
Arthur Baker decided to create an electro version of a
hip hop track using trans Europe Express as its core,
and then have the rappers in Bombarda's crew improvised the rhymes, which,
due to the song's rhythm, necessitated rapping off time with
the vocals being distorted in the mix. This record truly

(51:40):
sounded like nothing that had ever come before, and it
was an instant smashed with hip hop fans in New York.
It came out of nowhere and was so unusual and
original it just dominated the scene. The soul son so

(52:04):
I remember d Jaying a twenty four hour dance marathon
at a New York City high school in the spring
of eight two for a charity fundraiser, just as Planet
Rock came out. I'd never heard of this record, but
this one girl brought it to the dance and asked
if i'd play it. Well, twenty four hours is a
long time to be playing records, so of course I
gave it a spin. The kids on the dance floor

(52:26):
went nuts the second and came on, but to be honest,
it took me a little bit to catch onto it,
so you really got sold it. The first time I
played it, I was afraid that I'd blown out one

(52:47):
of the speakers because I couldn't imagine the record was
supposed to sound that way. But the girl assured me that, yep,
this is what it's supposed to sound like. And I
played that record every hour for the whole length of
the dance marathon, and it filled the floor every single time.
After about the third or fourth time I played it,
I was in love with it. At the end of

(53:07):
the twenty four hours, I got on the mic and announced,
I have time for one more song. What record do
you want to hear? And Everybody shouted in Unison Planet Rock.
Planet Rock was a game changer. For one it instantly
made the live bands that played on hip hop records obsolete.
The first sugar Hill artist to rise to the challenge

(53:29):
laid down by Planet Rock were Grandmaster Flash and the
Furious Five. Mellie mel who was the star rapper in
the Furious Five, went into the studio with Duke Bouti
and Jigs Chase from the sugar Hill House Band, and
together they created a record that would once and for
all prove that rap was more than a novelty. The
song they created, the Message, offered an intensely frank view

(53:51):
of inner city life, expressing economic helplessness, complete with references
to abuse of policing, petty crime, unemployment with the imprisoned.
I tried to get away, but I couldn't get far
because the middle with the touch possessed my cough pushed me.
Cos I'm close to the edge, try again not to lose.

(54:14):
In the song's final verse, Meliemail recycled his verse from
the Furious Five first record, super Rapping on Enjoy Records,
which tells the story of one man slide into criminality, prison,
and ultimately death. A child is good with no state
of mind, blind to the ways of man. Kind of
got a smiling on you with these record ends with

(54:35):
the sound of a policeman hassling and arresting the Furious
Five on the street. Flash a game. Musically, the Message
was slower than other hip hop records. It was dark,

(54:56):
It was all menacing, icy electro keyboards and ominous beats.
It was another one of those records that just sounded
like nothing that came before. The immediate effect of the
Message was to change the focus of hip hop from
the DJ to the m C and to give new
prominence to the lyrics. Although credited to Grandmaster Flash and

(55:16):
the Furious Five, the song was all about Duke Bouti
and Mellie Mel's lyrical performance, and with synthesizers and drum
machines beginning to replace live bands and turntables, the song's
success made Duke Bouti and Mellie Mail believe they didn't
need to share the spotlight with Flash any longer. A
few months later, when Message Too came out, it was

(55:37):
credited simply to Mellie Mel and Duke Bouti. The next year,
the anti drug song White Lines was confusingly credited to
Grand Master and Mellie Mel in an attempt to fool
the public into thinking that Flash was somehow involved, but
he wasn't. This record was pure Mellie Mel, who by
this point he had become the most respected rapper in

(55:59):
the game. Lyrically, White Lines took its cue from First
Lady Nancy Reagan's just Say No to Drugs initiative Say
No to Drugs and Say Yes to Life. It was
a blunt warning against the perils of free based cocaine use,
but it was also an indictment of double standards in
sentencing on the part of the judicial system. Musically, White

(56:20):
Lines was pretty much a note for note recreation of
the song Cavern by the new wave band Liquid Liquid,
with mail Email rhyming over the track. But there was
one other significant thing about White Lines. It had a

(56:41):
sun chorus, a first for a sugar Hill record, but
something that would become extremely common in hip hop over
the next few years in Dreams of Passion. By the

(57:02):
mid eighties, the growing irrelevance of live bands and hip
hop took away sugar Hills secret weapon, and the label
started to lose its edge. Younger music executives, with their
ear to the streets, started scooping up the best new
talent like run DMC or Doug E Fresh, while sugar
Hill mostly clung to its older stars, and those stars

(57:22):
started to seem uncool when stacked up against the new breed.
Competition from new indie rap labels became even more intense
when the major labels jumped into the fray. Grandmaster Flash,
upset once again about unpaid royalties, left sugar Hill for
Electra Records, where his output had minimal impact. Sugar Hill
Records began to seem out of touch. L L cool J,

(57:45):
for instance, submitted demos to the label nine times and
never even received a reply, and in a famous gaff,
the label rejected a music video for White Lines made
on spec by a young Spike Lee year us before
he directed his first feature film and starring an unknown
Lawrence Fishburn. You can check that video out on YouTube.

(58:07):
It's worth seeing sugar Hill slid into irrelevance, just as
hip hop's potential for crossover success began to become realized
by run DMC. We're in the pop top ten with
Walk This Way and sugar Hill after entering a disastrous
distribution deal with m c A Records stopped releasing new product.

(58:31):
The Labels catalog was sold to Rhino Records, and the
Rhino employee in charge of moving the master tapes out
of sugar Hills Englewood Headquarters remembers a car pulling up
behind the tractor trailer holding the tapes, blocking the truck
just as it was about to pull out of the driveway.
Some rough characters got out of the car and went
into the sugar Hill offices to meet with the Robinson's.

(58:54):
After completing their business, they left and allowed the truck
with the tapes to pull out of the driveway. In
the end, the mob got their piece. Speaking of trucks,
around that same time, I had the opportunity to make
a record where we wanted to feature a member of
the sugar Hill Gang in order to evoke an early
hip hop party vibe. We tried to track down Big

(59:15):
Bank Hank, who was driving a truck for the Englewood
Sanitation Department. We called the department and they told us
they'd radio Hank on the truck and tell him to
call us. Sure enough, a few minutes later, Hank pulled
the truck over to the side of the road and
called us from a pay phone. He showed up at
the studio and recorded a few lines in his very
familiar style. Did No Friction get something? He chatted with

(59:46):
us for a while, sharing that he was happy to
have had the experience of recording and traveling the world
with the sugar Hill Gang, even though he never saw
most of the money he believed was due to him
Big Bank. Hank died of cancer in two thousand and fourteen,
and Grandmaster Has the guy who actually wrote the words
Hank rapped on Rappers Delight, Well, he never got the

(01:00:07):
closure he'd hoped for. Hank and I never made peace.
I'm the civil one. I'm the one who never went
and attacked, who never went over to sugar Hill Records
and demanding anything, the one who held back my people.
And I was like, yo, let's go. You know, I
quelled all that, you know what I mean. I'm the
one who took the high road. Okay. But Hank never

(01:00:28):
conceded anything whatever. If you see him in any interview
that he's ever done about the subject, he kind of
tries to brush it off, like, well, you know, we
kind of collaborated. We we collaborated on nothing. Everything that
came out of his mouth was something that came out
of my head and from my pen. There was no collaboration.

(01:00:48):
So Hank and I never got Kumbayan or nothing like that.
I saw Hank once at a Katona Park jam. The
sugar Hill Gang was performing in Krotona park. I still
hadn't seen Anking years and he you know, he's fumbling
with his words. He still can't talk to me. After
all these years, he still can't, you know, speak to me.

(01:01:08):
I just took the opportunity to take a photo with
him because I had my photographer to him. I was said, yo, hay,
let's get this pick man, and we took a picture.
And that's the only picture that there is, the only
photo of he and I together. So we never resolved anything.
Hank never called and said listen, man, I'm sorry about
this and that I didn't notice, and nothing, none of that.

(01:01:30):
Nothing As a footnote, I attended Hank's funeral. I drove
out by myself and to Hank's funeral, and uh, you
know the pamphlet they make up of you, you know
what I mean, and they give out to people of
the memorial. Okay, there's pictures of Hank and pictures of
sugar Hill Gang and different people. At the back of

(01:01:51):
the of the memorial. The picture of me and him,
the picture that I had gotten my photographer to take
a few years ago, was in the back of the
memorial with my face blurred out. Okay, But even if
Kaz didn't get recognition, royalties, or writing credit for Rappers Delight,
he still sees the song as a big part of

(01:02:13):
his legacy. Historically, I placed it as the record that
introduced the world to hip hop and rap music. To
me personally, I've been conflicted, of course, but I feel
like I'm lucky that I'm a part of something that
has had that impact. So, even though it didn't go
the way it should have gone, I'm glad to be
attached to it. You have to say what I'm saying,

(01:02:34):
I'm glad to be able to say some of the
first words that came out of a rapper's mouth came
out of my mind. The song also has a very
personal meaning for the sugar Hill Gangs. Master g Rapper's
Delight is my passport. It's my life tuition, it is
my experience, it's my my future, it's my family's future.

(01:03:00):
It is the thing that, no matter what, will be mine.
I am the first of my kind, period, point blank.
I'm the first rap star. I am the first rap
recording artist. I am the first platinum selling rap recording artist.
And because of that song, It's mine and nobody got

(01:03:21):
taken away from me. Wonder Mike believes the record speaks
for itself in terms of hip hop. A Fern brandit
number one. We ended up with what I think and
most of the world things. Is the number one hip
hop record in terms of historical significance. Maybe not in
terms of artistic content, but historical yeah, significance. Number one. Baby,

(01:03:47):
the gigantic, massive juggernaut of a hit that with ussure
and a new genre of music and had not existed before.
Sylvia Robinson, the mastermind behind Appers Delight and the success
of sugar Hill Records, also deserves a more significant place
in music history. Here's master g She is one of

(01:04:09):
the most creative, the most talented, the most insightful producers,
recording artists, singers that I've average think you gotta think
about it, Rabbits Alight, Eighth, Wonder, Apache, Freedom, Message, White Lines,
That's those are all songs that she produced. She was amazing,
but when it came to creating, she doesn't get the

(01:04:31):
credit that she deserves. Barry Gordy and motown look at
what he's at, look at his name. Sylvia did the
same thing Barry Gordy did. She did the same thing.
She picked the artists, she helped write the songs, she
helped produce the songs. She had the label. I mean,
so why doesn't she get the same thing, because the
only difference is she was a woman. Sylvia Robinson passed

(01:04:53):
away at the age of seventy six and two thousand
and eleven, but her legacy definitely lives on. In fact,
it's assumed that Sylvia was the inspiration for Rogg p
Henson's character Cookie Lion on the hit TV series Empire.
The Names and that wraps up our episode on the

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record that introduced hip hop to the world. On our
next episode of Speed of Sound, we'll look at the
dance that kicked off the nineteen sixties in more ways
than one and in the process, ignited a social revolution

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as we tell the incredible story of the Twist. If
you want to take a deeper dive into the artists
and songs you just heard. Check out our curated playlist
at the speed of Sound page on the I heart
app Until next Time. You can find me on Twitter

(01:06:02):
at Stevie g Pro. Speed of Sound is executive produced
by Lauren Bright, Pacheco, Noel Brown and me. Taylor Shacogne
is our supervising producer, editor and sound design. Additional sound
designed by Tristan McNeil. I'm Steve Greenberg. Until next time.
Keep listening from music. The movie Speed of Sound is

(01:06:25):
a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for
my heart Radio, check out the I heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.