Before gathering the group and christening them the Sugarhill Gang — named after a wealthy neighborhood in Harlem — Robinson had recent signees to her nascent Sugarhill Records label, the funk group Positive Force, lay down a backing track. Realizing that rappers were used to laying down verses over familiar songs, she chose the riff from Chic’s “Good Times,” which had been in heavy rotation in the clubs and the airwaves that year.
There were chemistry, smooth vocals and an infectious beat, and it was laid down in a single take. Robinson recalls resisting the initial urge to trim the near-15-minute song down to a more radio-friendly length, and on Sept. 16, “Rapper’s Delight” was released.
The song soon began burning up the charts, hitting No. 4 on the Billboard Hot Soul Singles in December, and eventually peaking in January of 1980 at No. 36 on the Billboard Hot 100. It was the first time a rap song had crossed over to major mainstream success.
While the song ushered in a fervor for hip-hop, it was soon followed by other hits for Sugarhill Records, such as “The Message” by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. It also served as a cautionary tale for the legal battles, exploitation by labels and questions over credit that have long loomed over hip-hop.
Nile Rodgers, the guitarist and co-founder of Chic has both praised and criticized “Rapper’s Delight,” which sampled his song “Good Times.” In a 2007 interview from Canadian Music Week, he recalled playing a show with the Clash and Blondie when an MC named Fab 5 Freddie ran onstage and started rapping as they played.
“It felt like poets doing what they did, in the same way if I jumped onstage with Prince and started playing guitar,” Rodgers said. “These guys jumped onstage with their rhymes and their styles and their stories … when we laid down that groove, it started going crazy.”
But months later while at a club, Rodgers heard a familiar bass line and Wonder Mike’s now-iconic opening.
I said-a hip, hop, the hippie, the hippie to the hip hip hop-a you don’t stop the rock-it t to the bang-bang boogie, say up jump the boogie to the rhythm of the boogie, the beat …
“I heard the strings from my record — which was an exact sample, before they had sampling,” Rodgers said. “I certainly didn’t mind people jamming to us onstage live, but to record it and not put our names on it and make a lot of money? I think the record ended up being even bigger than ‘Good Times.’ At least it was more exciting, because it felt like a new art form.”