Keith LeBlanc (1954–2024), Grandmaster Flash, Nine Inch Nails drummer

Keith LeBlanc was a drummer whose work can be heard on early hip-hop records by The Sugarhill Gang and Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, as well as on tracks by such artists as Nine Inch Nails and R.E.M.

Sylvia Robinson, the Mother of Hip-Hop

 is remembered today by hip-hop fans as a pioneer of the genre. How did the R&B singer-songwriter once known for her duo Mickey & Sylvia become the "mother of hip-hop?" As the story goes, Sylvia Robinson was out at a club in Harlem one night in 1979. The record label she and her husband owned, Sugar Hill Records, was struggling — they were hoping they could avoid bankruptcy. And they were always open to new sounds that might revitalize the music scene — and their business. Robinson heard the DJ talking rhythmically over the music, and the crowd loved it. She had never heard it before, though it was a common enough sound in the inner city. For a couple of years, MCs like Grandmaster Flash and Kurtis Blow had been putting on live shows that intertwined DJing and rapping in a stream-of-consciousness groove that could last for hours. These raps were becoming a fixture of the club scene, but they hadn't yet been committed to vinyl. Robinson decided it was time to bring this music out of the clubs and onto the radio. Within days, she had assembled a group of amateur rappers — none of whom had met each other before — into the Sugarhill Gang. She brought them into her studio, recorded their raps over a disco beat in a single 15-minute take, and history's first rap record was born.