Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five
Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five were an American hip hop group formed in the South Bronx of New York City in 1978. Composed of Grandmaster Flash, Melle Mel, The Kidd Creole, Keith Cowboy, Mr. Ness/Scorpio and Rahiem, the group's use of turntablism, break-beat DJing, conscious lyricism were significant in the early development of hip hop music. Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five built their reputation performing at parties and live shows in the late 1970s and achieved local success. By the time the Sugarhill Gang's "Rapper's Delight" was released, the group realized the potential of cutting records and signed with various labels until staying with Sugar Hill Records. Under Sugar Hill Records, the group rose to prominence in the early 1980s with their first hit "Freedom", it was not until the release of "The Message" and the album of the same name that they achieved mainstream success. Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five would break up into two separate groups due to differences until a brief reunion in 1987 led to the release of the original line-up's second album On the Strength.
Afterward, they disbanded permanently. Today the group's legacy continues on as Grandmaster's Furious Five with only Melle Mel and Scorpio as remaining members; the group is regarded as among the most influential hip hop acts. Their biggest single and acknowledged masterpiece "The Message" is cited as one of the greatest hip hop songs of all time. In 2007 they were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, making them the first hip hop group to be inducted. Prior to the formation of the Furious Five, Grandmaster Flash worked with the "L Brothers" which consisted of "Mean Gene" Livingston, Claudio Livingston and Grand Wizzard Theodore. Flash recruited his friend Cowboy, Melle Mel and The Kidd Creole; the trio called themselves the Three MC's who are the first emcee group as it relates to rap as we know it today. Cowboy, through his use of a "scat routine" that the culture's early detractors used to label the music, thus the term "hip hoppers" was used by the disco set to describe the culture whittled down to hip hop.
While using this "scat routine" at a party for a friend who had just joined the U. S. Army, Cowboy began scat singing the words "hip/hop/hip/hop" in a way that mimicked the rhythmic cadence of the marching drill, he worked the "hip hop" cadence into part of his performance this evolved into the term "Hip Hop", adopted by the industry. Melle Mel and The Kidd Creole were the first rappers to call themselves "MCs"; the 3 emcees worked with Flash, who went on to bring in Mr. Rahiem. After the formation of the Furious 5, Flash worked with rapper Kurtis Blow doing parties in Queens. During the time Flash worked with Kurtis Blow, it was due to internal disputes with the emcees, so for a short time prior to the formation of the Cold Crush Brothers in 1981, DJ Charlie Chase was the Furious 5's DJ. Grandmaster Flash & The Furious 5 were the number one rap group on the streets of New York City before rap music was embraced by the music industry, set the standard for all other emcee groups who came after them.
The first single they released were "We Rap More Mellow", registered under the name "The Younger Generation". The name was decided by the producer, they were locally popular, gaining recognition for their skillful raps and deejaying, but it was not until the Sugarhill Gang's "Rapper's Delight" proved that hip hop music could reach mainstream that they began recording. In 1979 they released their first single on Enjoy Records, "Superappin'". Afterwards, they switched to Sylvia Robinson's Sugar Hill Records after an agreement that they could perform over a current DJ favorite. In 1980, the group had their Sugarhill Records debut with "Freedom", reaching #19 on the R&B chart and selling over 50,000 copies; the follow-up "Birthday Party" went on to become a hit as well. In 1981 Grandmaster Flash released "The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel"; this was a multi deck live recording of one of Grandmaster flash's routines featuring, Queen's "Another One Bites the Dust" and Chic's "Good Times".
It marked the first time that scratching & turntablism had been recorded on a record. In 1982 the group released "The Message,", produced by Clifton "Jiggs" Chase and Ed "Duke Bootee" Fletcher, the latter who wrote the song It provided a political and social commentary and went on to become a driving force behind conscious hip-hop; the song peaked at #4 in the R&B chart and #62 in the pop chart, established hip-hop's credibility in mainstream music. Other than Melle Mel, however, no members of the group appear on the record, their debut album was named The Message, it went on to become a prominent achievement in the history of hip-hop. In 1983, Grandmaster Flash, who never appeared on any of the group's studio recordings, sued Sugar Hill Records for $5 million in unpaid royalties; this resulted in the single "White Lines" being credited to "Grandmaster & Melle Mel". The song reached #47 in Billboard's Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart. Another lawsuit was filed over certain elements of the song being stolen from "Cavern" by Liquid Liquid, from which Sugar Hill Records would never recover.
The royalties dispute split the group, Melle Mel left, soon followed by Mr. Ness/Scorpio and Cowboy after "White Lin
Livin' in the Fast Lane
Livin' in the Fast Lane is the fourth studio album by the American hip hop group The Sugarhill Gang, released in 1984 on Sugar Hill Records. Samples and notes "Troy" samples "Mosquito", by West Street Mob Livin' in the Fast Lane at AllMusic Livin' in the Fast Lane at Discogs
Rapper's Delight
"Rapper's Delight" is a 1979 hip hop track by the Sugarhill Gang and produced by Sylvia Robinson. While it was not the first single to include rapping, "Rapper's Delight" is credited for introducing hip hop music to a wide audience, it was a prototype for various types of rap music, incorporating themes such as boasting, dance and sex, with the charisma and enthusiasm of James Brown. The track interpolates Chic's "Good Times", resulting in Chic’s Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards suing Sugar Hill Records for copyright infringement. "Rapper's Delight" is number 251 on the Rolling Stone magazine's list of The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time and number 2 on VH1's 100 Greatest Hip-Hop Songs. It is included in NPR's list of the 100 most important American musical works of the 20th century, it was preserved into the National Recording Registry by the Library of Congress in 2011. Songs on the National Recording Registry are "culturally or aesthetically significant."The song was recorded in one single take.
There are three versions of the original version of the song: 14:35, 6:30, 3:55. In late 1978, Debbie Harry suggested that Chic's Nile Rodgers join her and Chris Stein at a hip hop event, which at the time was a communal space taken over by teenagers with boombox stereos playing various pieces of music that performers would break dance to. Rodgers experienced this event the first time himself at a high school in the Bronx. On September 20 and 21, 1978, Blondie and Chic were playing concerts with The Clash in New York at The Palladium; when Chic started playing "Good Times", rapper Fab Five Freddy and the members of the Sugarhill Gang, jumped up on stage and started freestyling with the band. A few weeks Rodgers was on the dance floor of New York club Leviticus and heard the DJ play a song which opened with Bernard Edwards's bass line from Chic's "Good Times". Rodgers approached the DJ; the song turned out to be an early version of "Rapper's Delight", which included a scratched version of the song's string section.
Rodgers and Edwards threatened legal action over copyright, which resulted in a settlement and their being credited as co-writers. Rodgers admitted that he was upset with the song, but declared it to be "one of his favorite songs of all time" and his favorite of all the tracks that sampled Chic, he stated: "As innovative and important as'Good Times' was,'Rapper's Delight' was just as much, if not more so."A substantial portion of the early stanzas of the song's lyrics was borrowed by Jackson from Grandmaster Caz who had loaned his'book' to him—these include a namecheck for "Casanova Fly", Caz's full stage name. According to Wonder Mike, he had heard the phrase "hip-hop" from a cousin, leading to the opening line of "Hip-hop, hippie to the hippie, to the hip-hip-hop and you don't stop", whilst he described "To the bang-bang boogie, say up jump the boogie to the rhythm of the boogie, the beat" as "basically a spoken drum roll. I liked the percussive sound of the letter B"; the line "Now what you hear is not a test, I'm rappin' to the beat", was inspired by the introduction to The Outer Limits.
Before the "Good Times" background starts, the intro to the recording is an interpolation of "Here Comes That Sound Again" by British studio group Love De-Luxe, a dance hit in 1979. According to Oliver Wang, author of the 2003 Classic Material: The Hip-Hop Album Guide, recording artist and studio owner Sylvia Robinson had trouble finding anyone willing to record a rap song. Most of the rappers who performed in clubs did not want to record, as many practitioners believed the style was for live performances only, it is said. According to Master Gee, Hank auditioned for Robinson in front of the pizza parlour where he worked, whilst Gee himself auditioned in Robinson's car. A live band was used to record most of the backing track, including members of the group "Positive Force": Albert Pittman, Bernard Roland, Moncy Smith, Bryan Horton. Chip Shearin claimed during a 2010 interview. At the age of 17, he had visited a friend in New Jersey; the friend knew Robinson, who needed some musicians for various recordings, including "Rapper's Delight".
Shearin's job on the song was to play the bass for 15 minutes straight, with no mistakes. He was paid $70 but went on to perform with Sugarhill Gang in concert. Shearin described the session this way: The drummer and I were sweating bullets because that's a long time, and this was in the days before samplers and drum machines, when real humans had to play things.... Sylvia said, ` I've got these kids. Wang said: There's this idea that hip-hop has to have street credibility, yet the first big hip-hop song was an inauthentic fabrication. It's not like the guys involved were the'real' hip-hop icons of the era, like Grandmaster Flash or Lovebug Starski. So it's lightning in a bottle. Michael "Wonder Mike" Wright - Vocals Henry "Big Bank Hank" Jackson - Vocals Guy "Master Gee" O'Brien - Vocals Unknown - turntables Bernard Roland or Chip Shearin - electric bass Albert Pittman or Brian Morgan - electric guitar Moncy Smith - piano Bryan Horton - drums Sylvia Robinson - additional vocals and production Billy Jones - engineer Phil Austin
Sugarhill Gang (album)
Sugarhill Gang is the self-titled debut album by influential rap group The Sugarhill Gang. The album was produced by Sylvia Robinson; the single "Rapper's Delight" was a #36 hit on the US pop chart and a #4 hit on the R&B chart. Although "Rapper's Delight" was the only charting single, the album included the minor hit, "Rapper's Reprise"; the remainder of the LP consists several down-tempo soul tracks and a disco instrumental, as Sylvia Robinson didn't believe an album consisting of hip hop music would be commercially viable in 1980. "Here I Am" – 5:09 "Rapper's Reprise" featuring The Sequence – 7:40 "Bad News Don't Bother Me" – 6:45 "Sugarhill Groove" – 9:52 "Passion Play" – 5:10 "Rapper's Delight" – 14:37 Rappers – Big Bank Hank, Master Gee, Wonder Mike Backing Vocals, Rhythm Arrangements – Positive Force Bass – Bernard Rowland, Douglas Wimbish Chip Shearin Drums – Bryan Horton, Keith LeBlanc Guitar – Albert Pittman, Skip McDonald Brian Morgan Keyboards – Nate Edmonds, Skitch Smith Percussion – Craig Derry, Harry Reyes, John Stump Vibraphone, Backing Vocals – Sylvia Robinson Special Guest Appearance – Tito Puente Special Effects – Billy Jones, Nate Edmonds Producer, Mixed By – Billy Jones, Nate Edmonds, Sylvia Robinson The Sugarhill Gang-Sugarhill Gang at Discogs
Disco
Disco is a music genre and subculture that emerged in the 1970s from the United States' urban nightlife scene. The music, the fashion, many song lyrics and other cultural phenomena associated with disco were focused on having a good time on the dance floor of a discotheque to the loud sounds of records being played by a DJ enhanced by coloured lighting effects. Disco started as a mixture of music from venues popular with African Americans and Latino Americans, Italian Americans, LGBT people, psychedelic hippies in Philadelphia and New York City during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Disco can be seen as a reaction to both the dominance of rock music and the stigmatization of dance music by the counterculture during this period. Several dance styles were developed during the period of disco's popularity in the United States, including the Bump and the Hustle; the disco sound is typified by "four-on-the-floor" beats, syncopated basslines, string sections, electric piano and electric rhythm guitars.
Lead guitar features less in disco than in rock. Well-known disco artists include Donna Summer, Gloria Gaynor, the Bee Gees, Chic, KC and the Sunshine Band, Thelma Houston and the Village People. While performers and singers garnered public attention, record producers working behind the scenes played an important role in developing the genre. Films such as Saturday Night Fever and Thank God It's Friday contributed to disco's mainstream popularity. By the late 1970s, most major U. S. cities had thriving disco club scenes, DJs would mix dance records at clubs such as Studio 54 in New York City, a venue popular among celebrities. Discothèque-goers wore expensive and sexy fashions. There was a thriving drug subculture in the disco scene for drugs that would enhance the experience of dancing to the loud music and the flashing lights, such as cocaine and Quaaludes, the latter being so common in disco subculture that they were nicknamed "disco biscuits". Disco clubs were associated with promiscuity as a reflection of the sexual revolution of this era in popular history.
Disco was the last popular music movement driven by the baby boom generation. It began to decline in the United States during 1979-80, by 1982 it had lost nearly all popularity there. Disco Demolition Night, an anti-disco protest held in Chicago on July 12, 1979, remains the most well-known of several "backlash" incidents across the country that symbolized disco's declining fortune. Disco was a key influence in the development of electronic dance house music, it has had several revivals, such as Madonna's successful 2005 album Confessions on a Dance Floor, again in the 2010s, entering the pop charts in the US and the UK. The term "disco" is shorthand for the word discothèque, a French word for "library of phonograph records" derived from "bibliothèque"; the word "discothèque" was current in the same meaning in English in the 1950s."Discothèque" became in use in French as a term for a type of nightclubs in Paris after these had resorted to playing records during the Nazi occupation in the early 1940s.
Some clubs used it as their proper name. In 1960 it was used to describe a Parisian nightclub in an English magazine. In the summer of 1964 a short sleeveless dress called "discotheque dress" was popular in the United States for a short time; the earliest known use for the abbreviated form "disco" described this dress and has been found in the Salt Lake Tribune of 12 July 1964, but Playboy magazine used it soon after to describe Los Angeles nightclubs in September of the same year. Vince Aletti was one of the first to describe disco as a music genre, he wrote the feature article "Discoteque Rock Paaaaarty" that appeared in Rolling Stone magazine in September 1973. The music layered soaring, often-reverberated vocals doubled by horns, over a background "pad" of electric pianos and "chicken-scratch" rhythm guitars played on an electric guitar. "The'chicken scratch' sound is achieved by pressing the strings against the fretboard and quickly releasing them just enough to get a muted scratching while strumming close to the bridge."
Other backing keyboard instruments include the piano, electric organ, string synth, electromechanical keyboards such as the Fender Rhodes electric piano, Wurlitzer electric piano, Hohner Clavinet. Synthesizers are fairly common in disco in the late 1970s; the rhythm is laid down by prominent, syncopated basslines played on the bass guitar and by drummers using a drum kit, African/Latin percussion, electronic drums such as Simmons and Roland drum modules. The sound was enriched with solo lines and harmony parts played by a variety of orchestral instruments, such as harp, viola, trumpet, trombone, flugelhorn, French horn, English horn, flute, piccolo and synth strings, string section or a full string orchestra. Most disco songs have a steady four-on-the-floor beat, a quaver or semi-quaver hi-hat pattern with an open hi-hat on the off-beat, a heavy, syncopated bass line. Other Latin rhythms such as the rhumba, the samba and the cha-cha-cha are found in disco recordings, Latin polyrhythms, such as a rhumba beat layered over a merengue, are commonplace.
The quaver pattern is supported by other instruments such as the rhythm guitar and may be implied rather than explicitly present. Songs use syncopation, the accenting of unexpected beats. In general, the d
The Sugarhill Gang
The Sugarhill Gang is an American hip hop group. Their 1979 hit "Rapper's Delight" was the first rap single to become a Top 40 hit on the Billboard Hot 100; the members, all from Englewood, New Jersey, consisted of Michael "Wonder Mike" Wright, Henry "Big Bank Hank" Jackson, Guy "Master Gee" O'Brien. The three were assembled into a group by producer Sylvia Robinson, who founded Sugar Hill Records with her husband, record producer Joe Robinson; the group and the record company were named after the Sugar Hill, neighborhood. The Sugarhill Gang never had another U. S. hit, though it had multiple European hits, such as "Apache", "8th Wonder", "Rapper's Reprise", "Showdown". In 1999, the trio reunited and recorded Jump on It! A hip hop children's album. After Wonder Mike and Hendogg left Sugarhill Records in 2005, the original members of Sugarhill Gang besides Jackson have performed as the Original Sugar and as Rapper's Delight Featuring Wonder Mike and Master Gee; this is due to a string of legal cases against them regarding the use'Sugarhill Gang' as their name.
On November 11, 2014, Big Bank Hank died at the age of 58 after a long battle with cancer. In 2016, the remaining living members of the original Sugarhill Gang, including Wonder Mike and Master Gee embarked on their first world tour in over a decade under the name The Sugarhill Gang. During this, they performed as the Sugarhill Gang for the Art of Rap festival tour in 2016, at V Festival in Hylands Park and Weston Park in the UK as part of their world tour in 2016. Other places included, the Clockenflap Festival in Hong Kong on November 27, 2016, they headlined at the Depot in the Park Festival in Cardiff, United Kingdom on August 5, 2017. Coming up, in July 2019 they will play the North Nibley Festival in Gloucestershire; the discography of The Sugarhill Gang includes five studio albums, nine compilations and fifteen singles. Sugarhill Gang Greatest Hits Rapper's Delight: The Best of Sugarhill Gang Ain't Nothin' but a Party Back to the Old School 2 - Rapper's Delights Sugarhill Gang, The* Vs. Grandmaster Flash - The Greatest Hits The Greatest Hits of Sugarhill Gang The Story of Sugarhill Records Hip Hop Anniversary Europe Tour: Sugarhill Gang Live Rhythm & Rhymes: The Definitive Collection Sugarhill Gang playlist on WaveCat "I Want My Name Back" documentary on the Sugar Hill Gang, Featuring Master Gee and Wonder Mike Master Gee interview
Dance Club Songs
The Dance Club Songs chart is a weekly chart published by Billboard in the United States. It is a national survey of the songs which are the most popular in nightclubs across the country and is compiled from reports from a national sample of disc jockeys, it was launched as the Disco Action Top 30 chart on August 28, 1976, became the first chart by Billboard to document the popularity of dance music. Since its inception, several artists garnered multiple achievements. In January 2017, Billboard proclaimed Madonna as the most successful artist in the history of the chart, ranking her first in their list of the 100 top all time dance artists and Janet Jackson being the second most successful dance club artist of all-time. Katy Perry holds the record for having eighteen consecutive number-one songs. Perry's third studio album, Teenage Dream, became the first album in the history of the chart to produce at least seven number-one songs between 2010–12, a record it held until Rihanna's eighth studio album Anti produced seven chart toppers through 2016-17.
Rihanna is the only artist to have achieved five number-one songs in a calendar year. The first number-one song on the Dance Club Songs chart for the issue dated August 28, 1976, was "You Should Be Dancing" by the Bee Gees; the current number-one song on the Dance Club Songs chart for the issue dated April 13, 2019, is "The Boss 2019" by Diana Ross. Dance Club Songs has undergone several incarnations since its inception in 1974. A top-ten list of tracks that garnered the largest audience response in New York City discothèques, the chart began on October 26, 1974 under the title Disco Action; the chart went on to feature playlists from various cities around the country from week to week. Billboard continued to run regional and city-specific charts throughout 1975 and 1976 until the issue dated August 28, 1976, when a thirty-position National Disco Action Top 30 premiered; this expanded to forty positions in 1979 the chart expanded to sixty positions eighty, reached 100 positions from 1979 until 1981, when it was reduced to eighty again.
During the first half of the 1980s the chart maintained eighty slots until March 16, 1985 when the Disco charts were splintered and renamed. Two charts appeared: Hot Dance/Disco, which ranked club play, Hot Dance Music/Maxi-Singles Sales, which ranked 12-inch single sales. Only Hot Dance Club Songs still exists today. In 2003 Billboard introduced the Hot Dance Airplay chart, based on radio airplay of six dance music stations and top 40 mix shows electronically monitored by Nielsen Broadcast Data Systems; these stations are a part of the electronically monitored panel that encompasses the Hot 100. On January 26, 2013, Billboard added a new chart, Dance/Electronic Songs, which tracks the 50 most popular Dance and Electronic singles and tracks based on digital single sales, radio airplay, club play as reported on the component Dance/Electronic Digital Songs, Dance/Electronic Streaming Songs, Dance Club Songs charts. Radio airplay is not limited to that counted on the Dance/Mix Show Airplay chart.
Although the disco chart began reporting popular songs in New York City nightclubs, Billboard soon expanded coverage to feature multiple charts each week which highlighted playlists in various cities such as San Francisco, San Diego, Los Angeles, Phoenix and Houston. During this time, Billboard rival publication Record World was the first to compile a dance chart which incorporated club play on a national level. Noted Billboard statistician Joel Whitburn has since "adopted" Record Worlds chart data from the weeks between March 29, 1975 and August 21, 1976 into Billboards club play history. For the sake of continuity, Record Worlds national chart is incorporated into both Whitburn's Dance/Disco publication as well as the 1975 and 1976 number-ones lists. With the issue dated August 28, 1976, Billboard premiered its own national chart and their data is used from this date forward. For the full list of all 100 All Time Top Dance Club Artists, click here. 19th week — "Wordy Rappinghood"/"Genius of Love" by Tom Tom Club 19th week — "Walking on a Dream" by Empire of the Sun 17th week — "Losing It" by Fisher 16th week — "The Look of Love" by ABC 16th week — "Most Precious Love" by Blaze presents U.
D. A. U. F. L. Featuring Barbara Tucker 16th week — "Where Have You Been" by Rihanna 16th week — "Right Now" by Rihanna featuring David GuettaSources: Thriller by Michael Jackson "The Boss" — Diana Ross, The Braxtons, Kristine W, again Diana Ross. Enrique Iglesias, Dave Audé and Pitbull are tied with 14 number-ones on the chart, the most among male artists. Iglesias, however, is the only male vocalist to accomplish this feat, while Audé is the only producer to achieve this milestone, as his singles feature a different vocalist. Rihanna is the first artist to earn 4 number-ones on the chart in a year and is the first act to earn 5 number-ones in a year as well. Three acts have attained thirteen number-one songs: Deborah Cox, Whitney Houston, Yoko Ono. Kylie Minogue became the first act to have two songs in the top three on March 5, 2011, her song "Better than Today" was number-one while "Higher", a song by Taio Cruz on which Minogue features, was number three. On July 28, 2016, Rihanna became the secon
