I was eight years old when “Rapper’s Delight” made its world premiere on Philadelphia radio. It happened on 8:24 p.m. on a Thursday night, after a dinner of porgies, string beans and creamed corn. Me and my sister Donn were sneaking a listen of the local soul station while we washed dishes when an army of percussion and a syncopated Latin piano line came out of my grandma’s JVC clock radio – what appeared to be Chic’s “Good Times,” or a good duplicate of it. How was I to know that my world would come crashing down in a matter of 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 …

I said a hip, hop, the hippy to the hippy/To the hip hip-hop you don’t stop/The rock it to the bang bang a boogie say up jump the boogie/To the rhythm of the boogie the beat!

Philadelphia row house walls were thin, so I could hear the neighbors on both sides blasting this jam on their stereo. My friends starting calling, way past grandma’s weeknight deadline: “Did you just hear that!?” It was like our version of Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds. The next night, I was prepared, with a prehistoric tape recorder in hand and a black-and-white composition notebook. This song single-handedly made me the man in my fourth grade lunchroom. My boy Aantar became my agent that week, scheduling performances and negotiating written lyrics for snacks or hand-holding with girls in gym class. “Rapper’s Delight” turned this future high school band geek into a superstar for the month of October 1979.

There was nothing like growing up with the power of hip-hop. There was the summer I spent trying to match the mix to “Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel” note for note on two Fisher Price turntables. (My father, unimpressed, told me that “There ain’t a living spinning other people’s music” – little did you know, Dad, little did you know.) There were so many times when a song premiere could stop you in your tracks, then become a subject of discussion for the next four hours: The high school lunchroom when me and Black Thought heard “The Wrath of Kane” for the first time, or my first listen to “Fight The Power” – it sounded like Pharoah Sanders and Rahsaan Roland Kirk had gotten into a knife fight.

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