Search - Sugarhill Gang :: Jump on It

Parents of the 1990s will likely recall--either dimly or clearly--the Sugarhill Gang's one megahit, "Rapper's Delight," which helped ignite the hip-hop genre and then largely disappeared. The ensemble, of course, never vanished, but they also never managed to approximate their first success. So here's a theory: the Sugarhill Gang receded only to see the music they helped establish eventually need a social upgrade, a reorienting of its focus to kids. This collection of 10 tunes revives familiar early rap rhythms and grafts them onto new lyrics that encourage children to both enjoy their games and playground activity and intensify their learning. From "ABC's" to "It's Like a Dream Sometimes," the emphasis is on a midtempo rhythm that easily accommodates the child's ear and a smooth, catching lyric that bounces from the alphabet to dinner to a game of tag. The music is decidedly more simple than much hip-hop, replacing the sometimes frenetic array of samples with a sleek, clean bass and a percussion line that really gets its fuel from the vocals. There's even "Kids' Rapper's Delight" and much more. Historians will look back at early rap as a kind of urban folklore, and here Sugarhill Gang adds the educational touch of other kid-centric folks like Ella Jenkins. --Andrew Bartlett