Was the Englewood record label a real-life version of 'Empire'? Watch video
When Sylvia Robinson heard a DJ talking over the music one night at New York's Harlem World club, it wasn't just some between-song interlude. It was the music, and the crowd went crazy. The observation proved to be especially well-timed. Robinson had been looking for a fresh approach to shake up her record label. At that point, as she told The Star-Ledger in 1997, she didn't even know it was called "rap."
Today, the Robinsons -- the "First Family of Hip Hop" -- are inextricably linked with the song that brought rap to the masses.
Not long after she got her first taste of what had long been bubbling up in the Bronx, Robinson assembled the Sugarhill Gang -- Michael "Wonder Mike" Wright, Guy "Master Gee" O'Brien, and Henry "Big Bank Hank" Jackson -- from locals the family "discovered" at an Englewood pizzeria. Four decades later, the group's 1979 song, "Rapper's Delight," still stands out as a classic, the first rap single to crack the Top 40.
Six years after Robinson, the founder of Sugar Hill Records -- who is often called the "mother of hip hop" -- died at 75, the Robinsons are stepping out into the spotlight once again in "First Family of Hip Hop," a new reality show. The series, premiering Jan. 15 on Bravo, is filmed inside the family's homes, including Sugar Hill "headquarters" in Tenafly.
After the death of his two brothers, Rhondo and Joseph Robinson Jr., in 2014 and 2015, Leland Robinson, Sylvia's son, presides over the record label, managing royalties from Sugar Hill classics, which are sampled in other songs (including Jay Z's "Empire State of Mind") and used in commercials, along with Sylvia Robinson's own hits as a singer -- the 1956 song "Strange Love" and the 1973 song "Pillow Talk" among them.
While most would associate Sugar Hill as an originator, the label is usually only associated with legacy acts. Leland, his children and the younger generation of Robinsons are trying to change that.
A reality show, he says, is just one part of that effort. Englewood's 96 West Street -- former home of Sugar Hill's studio, destroyed in a 2002 fire -- might bear Sylvia Robinson's name, but she doesn't always get her due in the history of hip-hop, Leland says.
"The reason that I think she didn't get her recognition from the Russell Simmonses and the Puff Daddys is that she was a woman," Robinson, 50, tells NJ Advance Media.
While early rappers in the New York scene that spawned the genre decried the Sugar Hill sound, which built on the riff from Chic's "Good Times," as being watered-down and the product of outright lyrical theft, Robinson's legacy doesn't end with the Sugarhill Gang and party rap. It was because of his mother, Leland says, that rapper Melle Mel decided to record the iconic, socially conscious track "The Message," officially credited to Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five.
Leland's daughter LeAnetta Robinson, 23, who also appears in the reality series, sees herself taking the baton from her grandmother as one of the family's musical women.
"Growing up, I got goosebumps every time I heard my grandmother sing," she says in the show opener.
A budding singer, she performs under the name "LeA." While in the show, the younger generation of the family argues over who would be the best label boss, Leland says he thinks she has the potential to take over the business when he's gone. The alumna of Tenafly High School, who lives with her mother, Vernetta, Leland's ex-wife, says she's in a "learning phase of life" right now, trying to create her own path, but could see that happening.
Still, LeA is far from the only heir to Sylvia's musical legacy. There's also Rhondo Robinson Jr., her cousin.
"If I had the keys to Sugar Hill, we'd be back on top in six minutes," he asserts at the top of the season premiere.
The series also shows LeA working on music in Sugar Hill's home studio with her cousin, Englewood native Shanell Jones. Better known to hip-hop fans as Lady Luck, a battle rapper who made it big when she was just a teenager, Jones has since seen her good luck evaporate.
"I started doing gangster stuff and I decided to rob my management company which wasn't smart," she says in the show's premiere. "I went to jail."
Jones, Sylvia Robinson's grand-niece, appears in "First Family of Hip Hop" alongside her girlfriend, reality TV's Somaya Reece, a veteran of VH1's "Love and Hip Hop New York" and E!'s "Famously Single."
"To be honest with you, I didn't know how much of an icon my aunt was until she passed away," Jones says.
The ties that bind Sylvia Robinson's extended family to hip-hop and itself proved compelling to Bravo; "the perfect amalgam of talent and rich musical history," wrote Shari Levine, the network's executive vice president of production, in an email.
This isn't the Robinsons' first outing with reality TV. Darnell Robinson, Leland's son and LeAnetta's brother, was once featured on MTV's "My Super Sweet 16" (and later, so was LeAnetta), which is how the family met the producers of the Bravo show.
Darnell, 25, says his inspiration for getting on TV was to push the family out from "behind the scenes," back into pop culture.
"I was like, 'Nah, I gotta get the young generation to know us again,'" he says. In a way, they do, he says, pointing to the success of the Fox series "Empire."
"It was like, 'Oh, (expletive)," he says. "They took our family story." He sees the parallels in the show's Lyon family, a hip-hop dynasty that includes three brothers. (Malcolm Spellman and Carlito Rodriguez, two "Empire" writers, have been attached to a Warner Bros. film project about the "mother of hip-hop.")
To be sure, there have been a fair amount of Robinson family dramas and legal troubles, like in 2013, when Rhondo, Joseph and Leland were sentenced to probation and home confinement after pleading guilty to failing to file tax returns for three years.
But in the drama series' tough, slick-talking Cookie Lyon, played by Taraji P. Henson, Darnell sees Sylvia. In fact, he says it was his grandmother who first encouraged him to pick up the microphone when he was 12.
"That just did something to me," he says. "Ever since then I've always wanted it."
"First Family of Hip Hop" premieres 9 p.m. Sunday, Jan. 15 on Bravo.
Amy Kuperinsky may be reached at akuperinsky@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @AmyKup or on Facebook.