Freeze (a.k.a. “Chucky Chuck”), Master Dee (“what it be?”), and AJ Les (“at your request”) along with DJ Jazzy Jay to make a record based on Gwen McRae’s club smash “Funky Sensation,” which had been released on Atlantic Records that same year. He challenged MCs Master Ice (“twice as nice”), Mr. But when he connected with Tom Silverman, who founded the Tommy Boy label in 1981-an imprint that would go on to bring talents like De La Soul, Queen Latifah, and Naughty by Nature to the world-Bam decided to take a group of MCs from the South Bronx’s Soundview Houses into the studio. Throwing block parties and park jams was the top priority, and making records was definitely a secondary pursuit. Legendary DJs Red Alert, Afrika Islam, and Jazzy Jay were all early Zulu Nation members. After winning an essay contest that sent him on a trip to Africa, Bam formed the Universal Zulu Nation, giving youth from the Bronx a chance to channel their energy and creativity into more positive pursuits like DJing, rapping, an graffiti writing, as opposed to gang warfare. By the time he had already lived many lives, from record collector and DJ to member of the Black Spades street gang. Kevin Donovan, a.k.a. Afrika Bambaataa, was just 24 years old by the time this record-the first release listing him as an artist-hit the streets of New York City on Tommy Boy Records. Honorable Mentions: Treacherous Three “Feel the Heartbeat,” Funky Four Plus One “That's the Joint,” T-Ski Valley “Catch the Beat” “I don't understand why they love it so much.” Well, that’s the breaks. “It doesn't make sense to old guys like me,” said the show’s mackadocious host. You couldn't find a club in America during the summer of 1980 that would not play this song around 12, 1 o'clock in the morning.” But when he performed the tune on Soul Train, Don Cornelius was not feeling it. “We just wanted to make a kick-ass record, and that's exactly what we did. “There was no real marketing for the song, no plan,” Kurtis Blow recalled. “The Breaks” became the first rap song in history (and only the second 12-inch single in history) to sell half a million copies and earn a certified gold plaque from the RIAA. The rolling bass line on the track was played by Tom “T-Bone” Wolk, who was hired by Hall & Oates as a result of the song’s success. “When we danced during the breaks of a song, that was our time to go off-to do our best moves.” The lyrics break down other meanings of the word: “Brakes on a bus, brakes on a car, breaks to make you a superstar.” The song was also one of the first rap tunes to talk about the IRS, 35 years before Kendrick Lamar released “Wesley’s Theory.” “I wanted to do a tribute song with many breaks so that the breakers could get down and do their thing,” Blow explained later. Few listeners outside Harlem or the Bronx understood that the song was inspired by and dedicated to B-Boys (and if you don't know that the b stands for “break,” as in “breakdancing,” just keep it moving). He soon put out this 12-inch single, and thankfully the first rap song ever to be released on a major label also happened to be dope. DJ Kool Kurt, got his big break when he signed a deal with Mercury Records in 1979. Honorable Mentions: Treacherous Three f/ Spoonie Gee “New Rap Language” Here we present the Best Rap Song, Every Year Since 1979. Megastars, they rise and fall, but their biggest, genre-defining hits are (hopefully) timeless. Note that the best rap songs of 1979, 1989, 1999, and 2009 sound nearly nothing like one another. From the post-disco flex of the Sugarhill Gang, Soulsonic Force, and the Furious Five through the big-bang, rock-rap explosion of Run-DMC and LL Cool J and onward through a quarter century of continued evolution, regional rivalry, mass-market expansion, and post-Napster contraction-hip-hop’s core sounds, techniques, and audience have evolved with each passing year. This year, we’ve debated the past all the way back to 1979, the year of hip-hop’s commercial birth, as we did for our Best Rapper Alive list. Since we’ve only been publishing online content since 2007, however, these debates only go back so far. Like “In da Club” in 2003, for instance, when 50 Cent and G-Unit had a yearlong chokehold on the culture. It’s the song that you can’t escape and, in any case, wouldn’t want to. It’s whatever song has most blatantly dominated the radio playlists and radicalized the dance floor in a given year. While the overall discussion of these mid-year and year-end rankings is contentious, rap’s so-called Song of the Year is, usually, pretty obvious. At least twice each year at Complex-once in June, and again in December-we huddle in a conference room and yell at each other about the year’s very best songs.
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