To the Beat ya'll

i said a hip hop the hippie the hippie 
to the hip hip hop, a you dont stop 
the rock it to the bang bang boogie say up jumped the boogie 
to the rhythm of the boogiedy, the beat  
now what you hear is not a test--i'm rappin to the beat 
and me, the groove, and my friends are gonna try to move your feet .


Everyone of us is familiar with this verse.I know as soon as you read it you smiled, and started singing the song "Rapper Delight"!! What you may not have known, was the woman who brought us this song Sylvia Robinson passed away this week. She was as important to bringing Hip Hop to the mainstream through her legendary label Sugarhill Records in the late 70's and early 80's, as Puff Daddy would be in the 90's. “Rapper’s Delight” is generally considered hip-hop’s first recorded single. I for one do not remember if I heard "Rapper's Delight" or  "King Tim III" by the Fatback Band first .It really doesn't matter because Rapper's Delight introduced the emerging art form to the world. The record sold more than 14 million copies . “She was the first person to tap hip-hop culture and fix it on a record,” “She made rapping a viable commercial endeavor and created the rap business.” Dan Charnas, author of “The Big Payback: The History of the Business of Hip-Hop said in an interview.


Mrs. Robinson told Vanity Fair in a 2005 profile, that  she attended a party at an uptown Manhattan club, Harlem World in 1979 .There, she watched in awe as a rhyming DJ hyped the crowd up. He would say something every now and then like ‘Throw your hands in the air,’ and they’d do it, “If he’d said, ‘Jump in the river,’ they’d have done it.” Mrs. Robinson said she sensed the music’s selling potential. “A spirit said to me, ‘Put a concept like that on a record and it will be the biggest thing you ever had. So following that spirits advice , She signed three rappers to her Englewood-based label, Sugar Hill Records, named after an area in Harlem, and dubbed the trio the Sugarhill Gang. Big Bank Hank, Wonder Mike and Master Gee would be catalysts for a musical revolution. She would later sign Grandmaster Flash and The Furious Five, Sequence and a host of other groups. Sugarhill Records would succumb to unscrupulous business practices, shady deals and not paying artists their fare share of royalties . You know, the usual in the industry . This blog today is not about what brought down  Sugarhill, it's to celebrate a Hip Hop pioneer and the genre she helped unleash on the world. Sylvia Robinson was just as important to Hip Hop history as Kool Herc, Flash or Afrika Bambaataa. So I salute Sylvia Robinson, while standing in my B-Boy stance, with some classics from a classic label.











she even introduced us to Angie Stone