Happy 30th Birthday, Hiphop!

This year marks the 30th anniversary of the release of Sugar Hill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight”, which introduced the radio stations to the music industry’s newest sound, rap, also know as hiphop. Radio stations played it until its oft-repeated catchy phrase, “I said hiphop, a hippy to the hippity hip hip hop you don’t stop to rock…” was well-ingrained into the minds of nearly everyone living in inner-city communities across America. Since then, however, hiphop has gone from being confined to black, lower-middle class neighborhoods to a sound that appeals to people of all major demographics. Created in the New York, it has spread like a virus, infecting music players around the globe with urban poetry.

Immediately following the success of  “Rapper’s Delight” many rap performers came along to cash in on the music industry’s funkiest new sound. Africa Bambatta, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five and Kurtis Blow began hitting the airwaves with rhymes of their own. Kurtis Blow’s “These Are the Breaks”, released in 1980, can still be heard at block parties in inner-cities today. Grandmaster Flash’s 1982 single, “The Message”, was also popular and well-played.

As popular as these songs were, however, none managed much success outside of predominantly black, lower-income inner-city neighborhoods. To the rest of America, it was just another inner-city fad that would disappear real soon. After Grandmaster Flash’s “The Message”, hiphop did, indeed, seem on the brink of imminent doom. Three men from Hollis, a neighborhood in Queens, NY, were about to change that.

Perhaps no one since Elvis has any act had as much influence on a type of music and changed the way people approached it as Run-DMC did with hiphop. Blending catchy, often humorous rhymes with occasional hard rock sounds, Joseph “Run” Simmons, Darryl “DMC” McDaniels and Jason “Jam Master Jay” Mizell not only rescued hiphop from an early extinction, they set in motion its rise to the global stage. Their self-titled debuted album, “Run-DMC”, became the first rap album to hit gold status (500,000 copies sold) and their second, “King of Rock”, was the first rap album to go platinum (1 million copies sold).

The huge success of “King of Rock” influenced the creation of a string of other hiphop-performing trios such as Whodini, the Fat Boys, UTFO and rap’s first all-female band, Salt-N-Pepa. Also coming along was LL Cool J, who’s “Radio” would become the first rap single to go platinum and DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince, the nickname of a then-unknown skinny little 16-year-old wise-guy named Will Smith. DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince would go on to win rap’s first Grammy.