![]() Robert Van Winkle was born in Dallas, the son of a music-teacher mother and an absent father. But someone had to be the first rapper with a #1 hit, and that someone turned out to be Vanilla Ice. ![]() ![]() The people involved in that culture were not overjoyed at the sight of this white kid suddenly coming along and taking his bubble-rap hit to the top of the pop charts, and that triumph had plenty of unpredictable consequences in the decades to come. By the time this white kid reached #1, rap music had already matured into its own diverse, divisive, often-brilliant musical culture, and that culture was overwhelmingly Black. It was also not a coincidence that the song in question was built on a hyper-obvious sample of a rock-radio standby. It was not a coincidence that this triumphant single came from a clueless and absurdly good-looking young white guy. Bobby Brown rapped a guest verse on Glenn Medeiros’ “ She Ain’t Worth It.” A cartoon cat rapped on Paula Abdul’s “ Opposites Attract.”įinally, in the fall of 1990, a straight-up rap song climbed the chart summit and earned itself a spot in history. The New Kids On The Block reached #1 with the quasi-rap hit “ Hangin’ Tough.” Milli Vanilli - or the studio musicians who recorded as Milli Vanilli - spent almost as much time rapping as singing. (I’ve seen people call “Rapture” the first rap chart-topper, but you’d have to be stretching definitions pretty far to call that a rap song.) In 19, various teen-pop and dance-pop stars borrowed liberally from rap. The first rap-adjacent single to reach #1 was Blondie’s “ Rapture,” way back in 1981. “Wild Thing” and “U Can’t Touch This” didn’t top the Hot 100, but rap music was quickly becoming more and more of a presence in the songs that did. Aerosmith will eventually appear in this column.) In 1986, Run-DMC became the first rap group to reach the top 10 when they teamed up with Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler and Joe Perry for a half-rapped version of the Aerosmith oldie “Walk This Way.” The Run-DMC version of “Walk This Way” peaked at #4, and it helped bring about a grand comeback for Aerosmith. In the second half of the ’80s, rap songs would break through into the top 10 here and there, but the songs that charted highest tended to be the ones that referred back to fondly-remembered older music. Rap was essentially an underground genre, and it developed a reputation for being loud and disreputable and off-putting, a fad to be mocked. Then, in 1979, the Sugarhill Gang, a trio of New Jersey kids assembled by the indie-label boss Sylvia Robinson, made “ Rapper’s Delight,” a 15-minute record in which they rapped euphoric rhymes, many of them stolen, over the groove from Chic’s disco hit “Good Times.” “Rapper’s Delight” went top-10 in a bunch of countries and peaked at #36 on the Hot 100, and rap music has been a part of pop ever since.Īfter “Rapper’s Delight,” it took 11 years for a rap single to reach the top of the Billboard Hot 100. For years, rap was just live party music, with MCs chattering over the breaks that their DJs put together. ![]() Hip-hop, as a form of music, had its semi-official beginning in 1973, when Kool Herc, the Jamaican-born teenage DJ, played records at a back-to-school party in the rec room of his Bronx apartment building, cutting between the percussive breaks of funk singles and accidentally birthing a whole genre. A rap song reached #1 on the Billboard Hot 100. In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present.
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