Pour Some Sugar On Me

If you’re gonna be a one hit wonder, you might as well invent the dominant form of music for the ensuing decades. Released in 1979, The Sugarhill Gang’s ‘Rapper’s Delight’ was the first ever hip-hop single to go gold, putting the the group on American Bandstand and Soul Train long before even Grandmaster Flash and Run DMC. They talk about the long strange ride.

A classic party record featuring an MC relay team rapping over a backing track that sampled Chic’s ‘Good Times’, ‘Rappers Delight’ was the gateway tune between old school spoken-word/funk hybrids like Gil Scott Heron, The Last Poets, Parliament-Funkadelic and the Fatback Band, and the full bells and whistles air-raid siren attack of Afrika Bambaataa, Public Enemy and the Beastie Boys.
29 years after the fact, the Englewood, NJ crew are still very much alive and kicking. When we catch up with Master Gee, Wonder Mike and Hendogg on a hot August afternoon, they’re chomping at the bit to return to Ireland. So what can an audience expect from a Sugarhill Gang show in 2009?
Master Gee: “From top to bottom, from beginning to end, a non-stop get-down, man. We do a little bit of everything. We tell stories, we play music, we play instruments, we play our classics, we play new music, it’s a full experience.”
To this day, Master Gee can still remember the shock of the new when the Sugarhill Gang played their first shows on this side of the Atlantic almost three decades ago.
“I remember playing in Amsterdam in Holland, our first time coming to Europe,” he recalls. “I was a young kid so I’d never left the country, and the first time I performed live in stage, the people just kinda stared at us. Before that here in the States, I was used to people screamin’ and hollerin’. The way people stared at us in Amsterdam kinda threw me off, but later on I found out people had heard the records but had never seen it done live. So it was kind of a crazy experience to be the first person to ever perform a rap song in front of an audience that never had a concept of what it was like.”
While we’re speaking with a master, what’s the holy grail secret of the art of MC-ing?
“The secret is to be a fan too. If you experience the music as much as the people that listen to the music, then it’s no problem to entertain, and then you give of yourself. Music is organic, so if you give of yourself, you get it back in return.
“This music came out of people’s basements, dancehalls,” he continues. “Wonder Mike was my rival, we used to battle in our neighbourhood. Mike and I, we were rappin’ the northern New Jersey area, we were involved in MC groups and did parties in the neighbourhood, so we knew each other, but we were rivals.”
Wonder Mike: “Back then it wasn’t established or fancy, no theatres or opera houses, it could have been an officer’s military club, could’ve been in the park, at a barbershop opening, any damn place.”
Did they have any idea that hip-hop could become such a huge industry?
Master Gee: “You gotta understand, during that time nobody was aspiring to be a rap star ‘cos there was no such thing. We were the first rap stars, then everybody aspired to be like us. The reason Grandmaster Flash came to Sugar Hill Records was because we were successful. They felt they should’ve been the first and they should get the shot that we got. If we hadn’t been successful, Flash and them never would have came to New Jersey, they would’ve stayed in the Bronx.”
Of course the impact of hip-hop went far beyond the music and into the realms of full-on cultural phenomenon. Who could forget magazine pictures of George Clinton circa ‘Atomic Dog’, or Afrika Banbaataa, or the subway graffiti art, the body-popping, the wedge haircuts. Hip-hop style in the early 80s was the definition of futurism.
Wonder Mike: “We tried to keep it GQ. We wore suits and shoes, we never wore sneakers or warm-up suits. It’s not looking down on a style, our style was just different. Sometimes people say, ‘Your skills are equated with your knowledge of the history of rap.’ I don’t have to know none of that shit! I just heard my cousin doin’ some rhymes and I started making up some!”
Hendogg: “It was the beginning of a new culture man, a culture was being born. Wonder Mike was the first one to ever utter the words ‘hip-hop’ on a record. And just think if he had a nickel for every time somebody said those words.”