"Rapper's Delight" is released

Why it matters

The bassline on "Rapper's Delight" is not played by Bernard Edwards of Chic. It is played by Chip Shearin, a Sugar Hill house bassist, replaying Edwards' bassline from "Good Times" for an interpolated 14 minutes straight. Sugar Hill had not licensed the sample. Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards found out about the record when they heard their own bassline coming out of a New York nightclub in October 1979 and asked the DJ what it was. They sued. Sugar Hill settled by adding Rodgers and Edwards as co-writers on the song. They have been on every royalty statement "Rapper's Delight" has ever generated since, which is many, many, many royalty statements. If you wanted to pick the date a sample-cleared, sample-litigated, royalty-share future for rap became inevitable, you could do worse than picking this one.