When Slyvia Robinson passed away last week the hip-hop interwebs were awash in obituaries to the "Mother of Hip-Hop". These tributes were deserved and correct, without Robinson there might not literally be hip-hop as we known it, but the truth of her life and relationship to rap is far more complicated. As any serious student of hip-hop history knows she was also one of hip-hop's worst enemies.
Just take "Rappers Delight", the song that proved that hip-hop had commercial appeal and the song that catapulted Robinson into the annals of hip-hop. Once a hit singer in her own right, by 1979 the label she and her husband Joe Robinson had founded, All Platinum, was on the verge of death, buried in debt and lawsuits. By sheer coincidence Robinson heard a then brand new style of music (hip-hop) at a club and saw one last chance to save her label.
The next day she grabbed her son and one of his friends, along with some random guy they found at a pizza shop who insisted he could rap (literally), formed The Sugarhill Gang and stepped into the studio. When they began rhyming over a break from Chic's "Good Times", using a rhymebook they borrowed from Grandmaster Caz, the Sugarhill Gang had been in official existence for all of an hour, but that didn't stop them from turning out an indisputably classic track.
Despite all odds, "Rappers Delight" was a smash crossover hit; the reason Caz let Sugarhill borrow his rhymebook was because he was sure no one would actually buy the record. With "Rappers Delight" slowly but surely spreading from New York City to L.A. to the globe, Robinson had become overnight a hip-hop pioneer, and it's first shady label exec.
Unfortunately, and unsurprisingly, this Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyge dichotomy continued thought the existence of All Platinum/Sugar Hill Records. The same shady practices that initially mired them in debt and lawsuits continued as they refused to pay Chic for the "Good Times" sample clearance, refused to pay the Sugarhill Gang any money beyond the bare bones advance they initially received (despite the track's success) and, without exaggeration, were eventually sued by the majority of acts they ever worked with for unpaid royalties, leading to the eventual dissolution of the label in 1986.
In fairness, nearly every artist, in every genre, was being paid a pittance of what they earned for the labels at the time, and while Sylvia and Joe Robinson may have been even more willing to take advantage of musicians than their average peer, they were far from anomalies. But, despite the behind-the-scenes dramas and court room battles Joe and Sylvia Robinson also continued to turn out the music that would continue to define hip-hop and give birth to the culture as a worldwide force, most notably including Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five' s "The Message".
Those that are mourning Slyvia Robinson's passing with unflinching adoration aren't mourning an actual person, they're mourning a symbol and a history that they probably don't actually know very much about. Robinson wasn't a title - "The Mother of Hip-Hop - she was an actual person, and like any actual person she was capable of both greatness and shameful acts, kindness and deceit. Only by fully acknowledging the complexities of her life, and her contributions to hip-hop, can we both truly pay our respects and gain a real understanding of the origins of a culture we all love.
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