A List Of Things Thrown Five Minutes Ago

COME HERE, LOVERBOY:  Sylvia Robinson did two things you'd think were difficult to include within one lifetime. In 1957, she was the Sylvia in Mickey & Sylvia who recorded the #1 hit "Love Is Strange."  More than two decades later, as NPR reports ...

In 1979, producer Sylvia Robinson heard hip-hop music at a birthday party in Harlem and had a hunch that it would be commercially successful.

She called her son, Joey Robinson Jr., and asked him to gather a group of musicians who could perform like the rappers she saw in Harlem. She then held makeshift auditions for a rap group outside a pizza parlor in Englewood, N.J.

"She put these three guys together who had never met each other before, had the backing track all ready and created a record in a matter of minutes," says Dan Charnas, a former rap industry executive who chronicles the history of hip-hop in a new book, The Big Payback.

The group that Robinson put together, Charnas says, would become the Sugarhill Gang, and the track they recorded was "Rapper's Delight," the first hip-hop single to break into the Top 40 charts.

She passed away today at the age of 75, and we've got a pair of videos below the fold.