Sylvia and Joe Robinson found Sugar Hill Records
Veteran R&B singer and producer Sylvia Robinson and her husband Joe found Sugar Hill Records in Englewood, New Jersey. The label's first release — Sugarhill Gang's 'Rapper's Delight' — would become the first rap single to crack the Billboard Top 40 and the breakthrough that proved rap had commercial viability beyond the Bronx.
Why it matters
Sylvia Robinson was already someone. She had been the Sylvia of Mickey & Sylvia ("Love Is Strange," 1957). She had a #3 solo hit with "Pillow Talk" in 1973. She ran All Platinum Records with her husband Joe through the 1970s. So when she walked into a club one night in 1979 and saw a kid named Lovebug Starski rapping over a record and the whole room going crazy for it, she did not need anybody to explain to her what she was looking at. She and Joe started Sugar Hill Records that year, in Englewood, New Jersey. They named it after the Harlem neighborhood the Robinsons had grown up around. Their first move was to assemble three rappers from local connections (one was famously discovered rapping along to a tape in the back of a New Jersey pizzeria) and call them the Sugarhill Gang. Their first release was "Rapper's Delight." It cracked the Top 40. If you want to mark the moment rap stops being a thing happening in the Bronx and starts being a thing happening, full stop, this is the label that made that switch.
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