That’s right, we’re kicking this off with two songs instead of one album. The reason I chose these is simple: they are the first ever hip-hop recordings, from the distant days of 1979. By that time rap had already been around for a good 5 to 6 years, but it was exclusively performed live in block parties and such, and none of the few amateur recordings from that time have survived to this day as far as I know. Even though Rapper’s Delight is commonly believed to be the first proper hip-hop record in history, that honor actually belongs to King Tim III (Personality Jock), which was released a few months prior, inside Fatback Band’s album Fatback XII. According to Wikipedia, some of the band members were toying with the idea of recording a hip-hop track for their next album so one of them hit up a guy he knew who was reportedly decent at rapping, got him in the booth, told him to start freestyling and the rest is history.
King Tim III is pretty much exactly what you would expect from an old-school¹ rap song. The instrumental is basically a by-the-book funky disco song, with a four-on-the-floor beat, groovy basslines, horn section and funky little percussion solos; it’s just that there happen to be some proper rap verses in there in between catchy choruses and hooks. And speaking of rapping, I gotta say it’s better than I expected. This guy’s flow, while admittedly basic and somewhat dated, is impeccably performed; never goes out of time, doesn’t really have any of those rushed little parts where the MC sounds like he’s struggling to make a line fit into a bar; and, most of all, is groovy as hell.
Lyrics-wise it’s nothing too special: as expected, there’s not really a story being told or a serious central theme, it instead consists mostly of either high-energy party incentives like “You just clap your hands then you stomp your feet/ ’Cause you’re listenin’ to the sound of the sure shot beat” or braggadocious gloating such as “I’m hotter than tea, I’m sweeter than honey/ I’m not doin’ it for the money/ I’m sugarcoated, double dunked/ Chocolate MC Man”, with the pleasant surprise of a few primitive multisyllabic rhymes sprinkled in here and there (pretty much all of the rhyming at that time was done in the very basic A-A-B-B structure, and multisyllabics wouldn’t become a common thing until like 1985). All in all a fairly pleasant listen and a nice specimen of both funky disco and early hip-hop.
Now then, onto the second song of the night: the celebrated, infamously long Rapper’s Delight, by the Sugarhill Gang. There is an abridged version that is “only” 7 minutes long, but I went for the OG 15 minute mix because I am not a fucking coward. Now, I have jammed this one before, and let me tell you, this is a damn iconic instrumental if I’ve ever seen one. The beat is a basic four-on-the-floor, as you would expect, complete with those quintessential orchestral disco stabs, groovy guitar strumming and piano chopping, plus one of the thickest, nastiest, funkiest bass lines known to man. The rapping opens with Wonder Mike’s celebrated “I said a hip-hop, the hippie, the hippie […] to the rhythm of the boogie, the beat” chorus, which has been sampled, referenced and interpolated many, many, many times in the over 40 years it has been since this song was released. Like King Tim III this song was recorded freestyle in one continuous go, and it shows: there’s more than one section where the MCs sound somewhat unsure of what to do, sometimes leaving half a bar empty in the middle of a verse, sometimes rushing a line so it’ll fit inside a measure, the verse sizes are not consistent at all, some being the bare minimum 8 bars long, some over 40, etc. And then there’s also the lyrics. Good lord, there are some rough lines on this one lol basically at least once per verse you’ll come across some mildly to deeply embarrassing shit such as Big Bank Hank’s² “So after school I take a dip in the pool which is really on the wall/ I got a color TV so I can see the Knicks play basketball” and “He can’t satisfy you with his little worm/ But I can bust you out with my super sperm”. Lmfao.
That said, there’s no denying that these guys have some pretty good chemistry with each other. Regardless of occasional goofiness, they keep the great energy flowing all throughout the tiresome, repetitive 15 minutes of this song, even if you can decidedly hear how tired both the band and the MCs are after like 6 minutes in or so; surely the mark of tried-and-tested live performers. Still, overall this is not really exceptional in any way except for a part around 9 minutes in where Wonder Mike randomly decides to go in a hilarious nonsensical rant about how much it sucks when you go have lunch at a friend’s house and their mom’s cooking sucks so much that it makes you want to flee lmao.
But, as it just so happens, this is also one of the most iconic, recognizable, influential and important songs of the last century. Oh well.
¹ I’ll be using the term old-school referring to the type of rap from its first decade, which is roughly from 73 to 82. The following decade came to be known as the Golden Era.
² I feel it’s important to note that most of Hank’s rhymes were not actually his. He lifted them from his friend Grandmaster Caz’s rhyme notebook without permission or due credits; this plagiarism wasn’t discovered until over a year later.
