Slice
A Hip Hop You Don't Stop: Pizza And The Explosion Of Rap
"Rapper's Delight" lyrics
"Rapper's Delight" video
"Rapper's Delight" Wikipedia entry
A good Sugarhill history
Slice Loves Cool J: An LL Cool J video features scenes shot in a pizzeria.
Buy The Best of the Sugarhill Gang, featuring "Rapper's Delight"
The Sugar Hill Records Story, CD box set from Rhino Records
The role that pizza played in the advent of hip-hop is one such case.
Growing up in the Bronx in the Seventies, Henry "Big Bank Hank" Jackson saw rap as something you did to get a party started or impress a fine girl.You were good if you had a reputation on your street.
You were a star if you were famous for more than one block.
But all that changed for Jackson [at right in photograph above and in front at left] when he moved from the Bronx to Englewood to work at Crispy Crust pizza. There he met Joey Robinson Jr., who walked into the shop one day 25 years ago and asked him to audition for his mother, Sylvia, who was starting a rap group. Rap turns 30 this year.
Jackson quickly cleared out the shop and jumped into Robinson's car, making up a rap on the spot. He was soon joined by Guy "Master Gee" O'Brien from nearby Teaneck and Mike "Wonder Mike" Wright of Englewood. They were all in their late teens and early 20s. Sylvia Robinson was impressed and dubbed the group the "Sugar Hill Gang" after her new record label, which took its name from a famous Harlem neighborhood.
The trio went to Robinson's studio and in 17 minutes recorded a 15-minute song called "Rapper's Delight," which sampled the beats of the disco song "Good Times" by the group Chic. It cost the Robinsons about $750 to produce the whole tune.
The song would go on to become the world's first hip-hop hit single.
Though hip-hop and rap had been around well before the Sugarhill Gang hit the scene, it was "Rapper's Delight" that really put the genre on the map. Were it not for Crispy Crust Pizza in Englewood, who knows how much longer we would have waited for hip-hop to become the phenomenon that it is. And while the Sugarhill Gang does have its detractors, there are numerous references to their 1979 classic in rap today. You can't listen to New York City's Hot 97 for more than a couple hours without hearing "Hotel," by Cassidy (featuring R. Kelly), which slightly twists the original lyric into "I be stayin in a ho-tel, not the mo-tel or the Holiday Inn (Say whaaa?!)." And would Chingy ever have named his song "Holidae In" were it not for Sugarhill? "A hip hop, ya don't stop"? We have "Rapper's Delight" to thank (or blame) for that long-sinced-tired phrase, too. And, every time you hear a big-ass car referred to as an "O.J.": "...drive off in a def O.J."
Even if you don't like hip-hop, you still might be (painfully) familiar with the Gang's work as channeled through perhaps two of the worst moments in movie history: Ellen Dow (left) sings it as the "Rappin' Granny" in Adam Sandler's The Wedding Singer, as does a rapping kangaroo, in Jerry Bruckheimer's craptacular Kangaroo Jack (which, inexplicably, has a straight-to-DVD animated sequel that was recently released). And, as if that's not enough, "Rapper's Delight" also inspired 2002's "The Ketchup Song", which is based on the opening lines of the old-school joint.
Despite these bad apples, the song remains irresistibly catchy and is responsible for a line that haunts me to this day: "I don't mean to brag/ I don't mean to boast/ but we like hot butter on our breakfast toast."
I never thought a preference for hot butter on toast was something to crow about, but I guess that's what separates me from the genius of the Sugarhill Gang.
NorthJersey.com link via Coolfer