The weight of responsibility must hang heavily on The Sugarhill Gang. Their 1979 track ‘Rapper’s Delight’ went down in history as the first comercially sucsessful hip hop track. Catchy, upbeat and downright infectious, this is no surprise. Who hasn’t gleefully bopped along to the words “Ho-tel, Mo- tel, Holiday Inn”, or pretended to be Wonder Mike, ‘hipping’, ‘hopping’ and ‘boogieing’ to the beat?
The group’s later career, however, seems to have been somewhat less illustrious. With a smattering of minor European hits in the 1980s, the group fizzled out by 1985. Perhaps fame took its toll and stifled the creativity of this one hit wonder? We’ll probably never know.
In 1999, the group clearly got bored sitting on their piles of royalties and reunited, not to record the next great hip hop track, but to create an album of children’s songs called Jump on It!. Riveting.
The world isn’t ready to stop loving The Sugarhill Gang just yet: check out the cassette-boy style newsreader parody on YouTube — it’s perfect essay crisis material.
