St. Louis invented hip-hop

Never mind the fact that, 30 years into recorded rap music, St. Louis has yet to produce a notable MC that's palatable to us boom-bap dinosaur types. St. Louis pretty much invented rap music. It says so in a story in last week's Riverfront Times about the early hip-hop scene here in the Lou.

For example, did you know that, while "Rappers Delight" was recorded by a bunch of dudes from New Jersey, the first person to play it on the radio was a guy over in East Saint?

Riverfront Times was unable to locate Sylvia Robinson to comment for this story, and her husband, Joe, died in 2000. But [East St. Louis radio DJ Jim] Gates is acknowledged in The Sugar Hill Records Story, a 66-page booklet published in 1999 along with a CD box set to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of "Rapper's Delight," and the Robinsons have credited him in several published accounts as the man who "broke" the song.

Or how about the fact that DJs here were rapping on the radio a while even before Kool Herc supposedly threw the very first hip-hop party, in the basement at 1520 Sedgwick?

Gates, the man who hired Jockenstein in 1979, says DJs on black radio stations had been rhyming over intros to songs since the early 1970s. One of his DJs, the Original Godfather, even performed entire rap sets for audiences while live on the air.

Someone needs to see if they can dig up audio of those guys rapping on the radio back in the early '70s. If they can, I don't know if New York really deserves credit for having invented rap music.

Checkit: Old School: Unearthed in a cluttered storeroom, a pair of vintage St. Louis hip-hop recordings help tell the history of rap [Riverfront Times]

And after the jump is an absolutely incredible video by early St. Louis rappers Dangerous D and Charlie Chan.