EARLY RAP IN THE UK TOP 40

There’s a vital point at the top of this list: Rapture is often credited – inc by folk like Fab Five Freddy, who is of course mentioned on it – with bringing rap to a wider audience. But it followed two big ‘proper’ early hip hop hits. What’s interesting, I guess, is how long the old school/novelty years lasted.

Regarding IS THIS REPEATABLE? it should be noted that due to sampling restrictions at the time the Sugarhill house band had to play the “Good Times” riff over and over again for fifteen minutes on the full-length “Rappers’ Delight”; since they went on to become Tackhead/Mark Stewart’s Maffia they are thus the missing link between Terry Riley and Massive Attack.

Also NO ONE in Britain had heard of Flash when DH namechecked him in “Rapture” since IPen’s page-long NME rave review of “Wheels Of Steel” appeared a full month after “Rapture” was a hit so that was beyond cool (WOS/Message dichotomy being the popist/rockist divide, i.e. WE MUST TAKE IT SERIOUSLY ERGO END OF FUN).

Debbie’s rap is the musical equivalent of watching Steve McQueen try to jump that fence on his motorbike: Always seems like she’s going to nail it at the start, but seems like she loses her nerve and descends into anything that rhymes nonsense.

Was the radio edit kind to Debbie? I don’t remember hearing the really stoopid bits at the time.

Nice research. I’m genuinely shocked at how few hits there were (and how many were novelties) before ’84. This really bears out London Lee and Andy Pandy’s thoughts on how chart return shops weren’t doing the job in the early 80s – if rap was so Top 40 unfriendly, how come novelty rap sold so well?

And being pedantic… Break Machine’s Street Dance is a great early electro hit an’ all but it doesn’t have any rapping on it.

I’ve been listening to lots of podcasts/watching random bits of YouTube/etc about late ’80s and early ’90s hip-hop. And thus hearing lots of stories about Latin Quarter*, the Manhattan club that was the big hip-hop nightspot in the late ’80s.

And one recurring element of these stories is Melle Mel, who was – as someone put it ‘both the Statler and the Waldorf’ of the Latin Quarter. This is the age of Public Enemy, BDP, Eric B & Rakim – the music had leapt forward dramatically since the heyday of the Furious Five. And in the crowd were the kids who would make up the next wave: A Tribe Called Quest, 3rd Bass etc. And there, every night, still in the leather and studs, was Melle Mel, telling everybody that this wasn’t how to do hip-hop and scowling as the kids went nuts to Stetsasonic and challenging the upstarts to battles.

And how old was this Ancient Mariner? In 1987, Melle Mel was 26. He’s actually younger than Chuck D and Flavor Flav, but unlike them, wasn’t able to seem like a contemporary of teenagers like LL Cool J and Rakim…

*Or Latin Quarters, as everyone who went there during its hip-hop years seems to call it. The club originally dated back to the 1940s.