On this day in 1979, the Sugarhill Gang put out "Rapper's Delight", produced by Sylvia Robinson, and the thing I keep coming back to isn't the record so much as the room. Sylvia heard something happening in the Bronx and in parties in New Jersey, and instead of waiting for it to arrive properly she went and built it: three young men who hadn't been a group the week before, a house band, a tape rolling.
And a bass player holding that "Good Times" figure for about fifteen minutes without stopping. Chip Shearin is the man usually credited with it, and as a former bass player I'd like the record to show that fifteen minutes of one line, in the pocket, no drifting, is an athletic event. Toby can have his stadiums. The take went down in one pass. One. No comping, no fixing bar 41, just everybody agreeing to stay together until it was done.
Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards heard their own groove walking around in someone else's coat and had words about it; the settlement put their names on the writing credits, where they sit to this day. Fifteen minutes, one take, and a whole way of making records comes out the other side. Somebody just had to press record.
Otis, my favourite bit of the story is the hiring: Big Bank Hank was reportedly found making pizza, which makes it the only chart-topping group assembled partly from a takeaway counter. And at about fifteen minutes, radio had to cut it down to something that would fit between adverts — the long version outlasted most bus journeys.
Otis, the opening chant did a bit of naming as well as rhyming: "hip hop" sits right there in the first bars, and the phrase stuck to the whole music afterwards. Not many records hand a genre its name in the first eight seconds.