{"id":225659,"date":"2026-04-03T10:00:25","date_gmt":"2026-04-03T08:00:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blackouthiphop.com\/blog\/?p=225659"},"modified":"2026-04-05T21:34:21","modified_gmt":"2026-04-05T19:34:21","slug":"the-ultimate-revelation-about-rappers-delight-rap-and-hip-hop","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blackouthiphop.com\/blog\/the-ultimate-revelation-about-rappers-delight-rap-and-hip-hop\/","title":{"rendered":"The Ultimate Revelation About Rapper’s Delight, Rap And Hip-Hop"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\nAuthor: Lou Benny<\/a><\/p>\n

(source: goodrap.substack.com<\/a>)<\/p>\n

What if I tell you that \u201cRapper\u2019s Delight\u201d is, while being arguably\u00a0the greatest swindle<\/em>\u00a0of the music industry, also the most important Rap song ever? The song that cryptically pointed to the concept of \u201cRap\u201d\u2014and its tradition since at least the end of the 1960s\u2014while promoting it into the name of the whole musical and poetic genre that will become the most widely recognized part of Hip-Hop, years before the culture was even named. Bear with me for the next 1000+ words of this take and if you don\u2019t know you will know.<\/p>\n

Back in 2006, while reading\u00a0Jeff Chang<\/a><\/span>\u2019s seminal book\u00a0Can\u2019t Stop Won\u2019t Stop<\/em>\u2014a year before I translated it to Serbian with my friend Zoran\u2014I encountered for the first time the controversial genealogy of \u201cRapper\u2019s Delight\u201d. Throughout the years of reading and listening to the interviews of the greats from that era, I learned the more detailed account of the hustle that gave birth to the song. Sylvia and Joe Robinson\u2019s entrepreneurship, borrowing of Chic\u2019s \u201cGood Times\u201d groove, Big Bank Hank borrowing rhymes from Grandmaster Caz, Coke La Rock… the whole shebang. (Check out\u00a0Ben Westhoff<\/a><\/span>\u00a0piece on \u201cRapper\u2019s Delight\u201d\u00a0here<\/a>)<\/p>\n

In 2021, while writing my book\u00a0Good Rap: How I Explained and Completed Hardcore Rap<\/em>, I focused on the question: \u201cWhat is a true hard core of Rap, an unchangeable trait or property that gives it its identity?\u201d Looking for the answer as a Hip-Hop head that I am, it seemed promising to try and pinpoint when and how the concept of \u201cRap\u201d came in play in the historical timeline of Hip-Hop we take for granted.<\/p>\n

Checking the old tapes from the NYC recorded at the parties and jams in the 1970s as well as the lyrics from that period preserved in the book\u00a0The Anthology of Rap<\/em>\u00a0(Concrete Books & Records<\/a><\/span>), didn\u2019t amount to much. Back then the people who rhymed to the beat didn\u2019t call it \u201cRap\u201d or \u201crapping\u201d, nor did they refer to themselves as \u201crappers\u201d. Based on my research, the first recording that did contain those words was \u201cRapper\u2019s Delight\u201d.<\/p>\n

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A simple question set everything off: \u201cHow \u2018Rapper\u2019s Delight\u2019 got its name?\u201d With Big Bank Hank and Sylvia Robinson being unfortunately long gone by that time, I felt I had no one to ask because, from what I knew about the whole operation, I believed one of them was in charge of the naming. However, the song itself and its lyrics were still available, so I dived in.<\/p>\n

Using search option, I found that in the original, long version of the song, throughout its ~370 bars, words \u201cRap\u201d, \u201crapping\u201d and \u201crapper\u201d appear a total of seven times. None of it, though, was significant enough to spark a breakthrough or push me in a new direction.<\/p>\n

The first of the three appearances of the word \u201cdelight\u201d miraculously did all of that and much more. It\u2019s in the rhyme \u201cWell, I\u2019m Imp the Dimp, the ladies\u2019 pimp \/ the women fight for my delight\u201d and it literally turned out to be the rabbit hole I fell into in order to discover the true history of Rap.<\/p>\n

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The first clue that led me to this d\u0336i\u0336s\u0336c\u0336o\u0336v\u0336e\u0336r\u0336y\u0336 revelation was the information Rahiem of the Furious Five conveyed to Shawn Setaro in\u00a0an interview<\/a>\u00a0back in 2013 which I found in the Genius annotation to the said rhyme. He said that it was the rhyme that made him famous in the Bronx in the 1970s but, unlike Big Bank Hank who took it from his live performances, he borrowed it from\u00a0a book<\/em>, and it was none other than\u00a0Die Nigger Die!\u00a0<\/em>(1969), the political autobiography of the great H. Rap Brown. Allegedly, when H. Rap Brown was serving time in the 1970s (in Attica?), he heard from his fellow inmate, Rahiem\u2019s brother, the story of the guys who were rhyming to the beat in the Bronx at the time. He sent the signed copy of his book to Rahiem, via his brother, and wrote him to \u201cget inspired\u201d.<\/p>\n

And there, at the second chapter of his book, H. Rap Brown tells a story about his childhood in Louisiana in the 1950s. He delves into the everyday lives of the poverty-stricken Black kids and writes about battling verbal games of Dozens and Signifying he and his friends used to play. But, \u201cbefore you can signify you got to be able to rap\u201d he intriguingly wrote there, and then went on to present \u201crap\u201d rhymes that he used to spit at those lyrical throwdowns, the rhymes that eventually earned him his nickname \u201cRap\u201d.<\/p>\n

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In those 40 or so lines he is just\u00a0bragging and boasting<\/em>\u00a0without verbally attacking anyone until he ends it with a personal jab at his opponent which suggests that the Dozens or Signifying battle is incoming. The same thing that Big Bank Hank\u2014with Wonder Mike and Master Gee to a lesser extent\u2014did throughout \u201cRapper\u2019s Delight\u201d while adding a few party rhymes and even a few battling rhymes about \u201csucker MCs\u201d or jabs at the Superman and his unsatisfyingly \u201clittle worm\u201d (pause). All of it shed a new light on the title of \u201cRapper\u2019s Delight\u201d with questions like who is that cocky\u00a0rapper<\/em>\u00a0in the title\u2014the ladies\u2019 pimp<\/em>\u2014for whose\u00a0delight<\/em>\u00a0(pause) women are fighting. I\u2019m not saying that H. Rap Brown inspired and laid the foundation for Rap as we know it from 1979 onwards, you are saying that.<\/p>\n

So, that\u2019s how I formed my main thesis that bragging and boasting or\u2014written in Hip-Hop terms\u2014pure represent without battling elements<\/em>\u00a0is the essence, the hard core of Rap. That\u2019s the reason why I claim that \u201cBattle Rap\u201d is a self-contradictory concept, that the ultimate goal in Rap is not being \u201cbetter\u201d or \u201cthe best\u201d, but the absolute good (god), hence\u00a0Good Rap<\/em>. That\u2019s where my elaborate idea of the difference between a rapper and a Hip-Hop emcee comes from, saving The Sugarhill Gang and other rappers from being downplayed by their peers as nothing more than \u201cfake MCs\u201d (as seen in\u00a0JayQuan<\/a><\/span>\u2019s\u00a0interview<\/a>\u00a0with Kid Creole). That is as well the birthplace of my claim that \u201crapping\u201d\u2014as the name for the vocal technique of rhythmical syncopation of a string of spoken rhymes with the underlying beat\u2014comes from \u201cRap\u201d, i.e. bragging and boasting, which was the subject matter of the first rhymes syncopated to the beat, implying that a person rapping is not necessarily spitting Rap, and so on.<\/p>\n

I thoroughly wrote about all of that in my book\u00a0Good Rap<\/em>\u00a0which is currently still available only in Serbian, but I will present the different facets of my interpretation of Rap and Hip-Hop here in a series of posts. There is also the whole story about pimps and other African American hustlers from the \u201860s and \u201870s that provide circumstantial but strong evidence for my interpretation and for their role in shaping Rap tradition which is, funny enough, winked at in H. Rap Brown\u2019s \u201cthe ladies\u2019 pimp\u201d self-reference.<\/p>\n

Moreover, as I later found out, there are respected people from Hip-Hop community who also emphasized the importance of H. Rap Brown and his rhymes in the context of Rap\u2019s naming. The great Hip-Hop historian\u00a0Dave ‘Davey D’ Cook<\/a><\/span>\u00a0said the same thing or at least hinted at it in his article\u00a0\u201cAn Historical Definition Of The Term Rap\u201d<\/a>. He went into detail there about H. Rap Brown\u2019s rhyme used in \u201cRapper\u2019s Delight\u201d, mentioned that it even appeared in the classic African American movie\u00a0Five on the Black Hand Side<\/em>\u00a0(1973), and wrote about the examples of Dozens and Signifying rhymes H. Rap Brown presented in the book\u00a0Die Nigger Die!<\/em>\u00a0(1969).<\/p>\n

The great KRS-One himself also cites all of those H. Rap Brown\u2019s bragging and boasting rhymes in his book\u00a0The Gospel of Hip-Hop<\/em>\u00a0(2009), but using them as an evidence for the claim that Hip-Hop goes way back. Although I\u2019m willing to embrace his claim from a Hip-Hop head\u2019s point of view, I believe that there are more than enough arguments in favor of interpreting H. Rap Brown\u2019s rhymes as the part of the older Rap tradition which was assimilated by Hip-Hop once the culture was formed and named.<\/p>\n

To cement H. Rap Brown\u2019s status of the most influential figure at the very beginning of Rap as a musical and poetic genre, there is another song from the 1979 which was probably inspired by his \u201crap\u201d rhymes from 1950s Louisiana. It\u2019s the \u201cWack Rap\u201d by Wackie\u2019s Disco Rock Band, a somewhat mysterious track \u2018cause no one seems to know the exact date of its release. However, that song contains the lyrics: \u201c\u2019Cause I\u2019m an ass kicker, the titty licker \/ The crowd pleaser, the women teaser\u201d which are wildly similar to H. Rap Brown\u2019s: \u201cThey call me Rap, the dicker, the ass kicker \/ The cherry picker, the city slicker, the titty licker\u201d.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, a four months ago we\u2019ve lost the ultimate Rap pioneer that Mr. Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin a.k.a. H. Rap Brown was and is without a doubt. On November 23rd<\/sup>, 2025, he passed away in FMC Butner federal prison in North Carolina while serving a life sentence for the shooting of two Fulton County, Georgia, sheriff\u2019s deputies in 2000. The man who was born, raised and died in the South, inspired New Yorkers to create the musical and poetic genre that went on to take over the whole world. May he rest in peace, and may we all start digging deeper and connecting the dots to come up with the real history of this thing, not just chronicles and archives.<\/p>\n

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Author: Lou Benny (source: goodrap.substack.com) What if I tell you that \u201cRapper\u2019s Delight\u201d is, while…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"cybocfi_hide_featured_image":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-225659","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-lifestyle"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pG6fW-WHF","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blackouthiphop.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225659","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blackouthiphop.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blackouthiphop.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blackouthiphop.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/21"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blackouthiphop.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=225659"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/blackouthiphop.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225659\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":225812,"href":"https:\/\/blackouthiphop.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225659\/revisions\/225812"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blackouthiphop.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=225659"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blackouthiphop.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=225659"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blackouthiphop.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=225659"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}