In August, 1979, three young guys, barely adults, stepped up to cheap microphones in a small studio in Englewood, N.J., across the Hudson River from Manhattan, and changed the course of music.
Over the rhythmic vamp of Chic’s disco hit Good Times, Michael Wright (a.k.a. Wonder Mike) rapped first.
“I said a hip, hop, the hippie the hippie/to the hip hip hop, an’ you don’t stop,” went the opening line of rap’s first major international hit, Rapper’s Delight, which took just 17 minutes to record, in a single take. While the song was key in establishing an audience for hip hop and a template for aspiring MCs, its fame ended up traumatizing the young men known as the Sugarhill Gang.
The documentary I Want My Name Back, playing Toronto’s TIFF Bell Lightbox on Thursday, traces the legacy of Rapper’s Delight, starting from the moment it exploded in New York, echoing from storefronts the length of Harlem’s main thoroughfare, 125th Street, to its central place in the genre’s history.
Rapper’s Delight sold more than 10 million copies (50,000 a day at one point, according the documentary). But after token payouts, often in the form of cars and clothes, the group saw few royalty cheques or concert earnings.
The exploitation of recording artists by managers and labels is an industry cliché; but for hip hop it’s a racially charged preoccupation. The story of Rapper’s Delight functions as a parable forall the predation that rap lyrics typically rail against.
Sugar Hill Records, the upstart Englewood label that cashed in early on hip hop, owned the recording and also claimed rights to the band’s name. Two of the three Sugarhill Gang members found themselves years later watching others perform using their name (one member, Big Bank Hank, defected to the imposter band).
Henry Jackson (Big Bank Hank) was the second to rap in the song. The trouble was, according to his former band mates, Jackson was a plagiarist, his verses lifted directly from a rap written by Bronx MC Grandmaster Caz. From the beginning, Rapper’s Delight had a certain tarnish. The outside world saw it as a novelty; the rap world questioned its authenticity.
Next on the mic came the baby-faced Guy O’Brien (Master Gee), with a smoother flow and original delivery. O’Brien, who fell into cocaine dependency after the exploitation of the band by its managers, would have his Master Gee stage name stolen by another performer after leaving the group in 1984.
O’Brien became a door-to-door salesman. He received only a small fraction of the money owed to him (reportedly only $250,000, over the long span of three decades).
Back when Rapper’s Delight was recorded and O’Brien was 17, “we were DJing, performing in people’s basements and house parties, dancehalls, things like that. Then once we started recording, that’s when everything really changed for us,” he said by phone.
According to Wright and O’Brien, the Robinson family, which owned Sugar Hill Records, added its name to the writers’ credits in order collect royalties. Still, singer Sylvia Robinson, who founded the label, did come up with the idea of having the rappers take turns on the song, thereby creating the structure.
After lawyers got involved, the writing credits were eventually given solely to Chic’s Bernard Edward and Nile Rodgers, who wrote the original Good Times. This permanently halted any royalties for Wright and O’Brien.
It’s true, the group wasn’t hip hop’s originator, a title more applicable to Bronx pioneers such as DJ Kool Herc and those who first haltingly spun disco and R&B songs, cutting the tracks with a mixer and rap overtop. The Sugarhill Gang was to hip hop what Big Joe Turner (Shake, Rattle and Roll)or perhaps Jackie Brenston (Rocket 88) was to rock, creators of songs that propelled the genre.
