Sugarhill Gang — Sugarhill Gang

The first hip hop album follows in the wake of the first rap hit, "Rapper's Delight" (props to Grandmaster Caz for the lyrics), both signed by Sugarhill Gang. The project consists of simple lyrics rarely delivered in rapping and mainly singing on ballad or light funky rhythms: it has too many useless and exhausting disco music and R&B fillers — "Rapper's Reprise" is quite decent, always too long, in its light funky — ending up being overall inconsistent: ironically, "Rapper's Delight" is reduced from the original quarter of an hour to less than five minutes, ending up being the shortest cut of the disc.

The former soul singer Sylvia Robinson's label, founded in Englewood, New Jersey with her husband, Joey Robinson, is in financial trouble when she goes looking for someone who could make an album that featured part of the music and the sounds of what she had attended at a birthday party, where a guy improvised into the microphone during the instrumental parts of disco and funk songs. The guy was Lovebug Starski. Thanks to the acquaintances of her son, Joey Robinson Jr., Sylvia Robinson tries to make an agreement with Curtis Fisher aka Grandmaster Caz, who already had a few singles under his belt and often performed in the same neighborhood as the Robinsons, however, after meeting the manager, Fisher refuses the offer, as the Robinsons have a reputation for being scammers and not paying their artists. Joey Robinson Jr. falls back on a guy who works in a pizzeria and spends his day and night rapping, but he doesn't even know what he does exactly, he usually plays tapes of his favorite group, the Cold Crush Brothers of Grandmaster Caz, and try to recite a few words over the rhythm, often without success.

This salesman, Henry Jackson aka Big Bank Hank, finds himself fighting for his place as an artist on the All Platinum Records label along with two other candidates, Guy O'Brien (Master Gee) and Michael Wright (Wonder Mike). Sylvia Robinson decides to hire all three and start a group, the Sugar Hill Gang, which will be supported in the studio by live music from one of the few bands that is still under contract with the Robinson label, Positive Force. The Robinsons manage to finance their new label, Sugar Hill Records, with five thousand dollars coming from Morris Levy, founder of Roulette Records, who had decided to help All Platinum when it was in dire financial straits, and in return is asking for a big part of the profits for every artist signed by All Platinum, including the Sugar Hill Gang, this trio of characters who eventually find themselves together in the studio. In the same period, at the end of 1978, Deborah Harry of Blondie goes to attend one of the rap concerts together with Chris Stein and Nile Rodgers of Chic, who in the summer of 1979 produced its latest hit, "Good Times", extracted from Risqueé album.

The song is used in the first track made by the Sugar Hill Gang, interpolated together with a sample of "Here Comes the Sound Again", a successful disco music cut by the British group Love De-Luxe of the same period (1979) and used as a vibrant intro, chaotic and festive for this song. Then the interpolation of Chic's "Good Times" emerges, still debating whether Sylvia Robinson used the original cut or if, much more unlikely, she made her group Positive Force play it (who probably played it for twenty minutes, but with results not quite up to expectations), with that fantastic bass line of the genius Bernard Edwards, Chic's bassist, then Wonder Mike suddenly comes out of nowhere with the intro that made history:

"I said a hip-hop, the hippie the hippie

To the hip, hip hop you don't stop

Rock it to the bang bang boogie

Say up jump the boogie to the rhythm of the boogie, the beat"

Ten verses follow in almost fifteen minutes, most of the lyrics are mainly braggadocio and the delivery is frivolous and light-hearted, devoid of social criticism, conscious or political and with sexual traits, however, it's quite clean for a rap song and maintains its own commercial disco-music nature. Big Bank Hank's lyrics were written by Grandmaster Caz, who lent him his rhyming book. When Big Bank Hank finds himself having to audition for the Robinsons, he borrows the rhyming book from Grandmaster Caz and Big Bank doesn't change a single comma, plays many parts effortlessly and pretends the lyrics are written by himself, when the boy can neither interpret the lyrics nor write them. In return, he has to help the Cold Crush Brothers get on the Robinson label.

Big Bank brings Caz the record with Rapper’s Delight, but Fisher falls asleep the first time he listens, as the cut was too long. However, on the second listen, he understood what had happened. It's a song recorded in a take, in one take, and it's one of the most incredible one takes in history: it goes down in history as the first hip-hop single, although it's actually the second released commercially after "King Tim III" by Fatband Gap, and with a length of almost 15 minutes it's still one of the longest hip-hop singles in history. It also becomes the first rap song to be certified gold by the RIAA with over half a million physical copies sold. First rap song to end up in Billboard Hot 100, at the end of 1979. It was first in Canada, before making havoc in Europe with the seven-inch version, charting in the UK (#3), Germany (#3) and France (#2) and reaching the top of the rankings of Spain and of the Netherlands.

In "Rapper's Reprise (Jam-Jam)", kind of sequel of "Rapper's Delight", the Sugar Hill label group The Sequence is officialiy credited as featuring, so, it's the first artist featured ever in a hip-hop album.

«Classic album» for historical reasons, but I don't recommend it to fans of the genre.

Rating: 6/10.