Now, this is my kind of old school rap! I almost placed this in my disco category, because I feel it to be more of a dance mix. But, I said what the hell, technically it is of the rap genre technically. I tell you, the deeper you get in to music culture, the harder it becomes to categorize certain music. If I was working for a record company, or a retail music manager, I would not want to be tasked with the responsibility of figuring out what category goes with which artist. It’s really difficult especially when it came to rap of this era, because many of our biggest rap acts were using disco samples. So having said that, it was hard for me to see certain songs as actually rap. Then again, rap was still commercially new in the seventies, we were still trying to figure it out. Rappers were just happy to get finally noticed and acknowledged.
So, the song called “Catch The Beat,” by T-Sky Valley (aka Tyrone Cox) as a huge hit when I was growing up. According to sources I’ve looked up, the song came out in 1982. For some reason it felt older than that. But then again, maybe that’s because I associated him with the end of the “Sugar Hill Gang” era. I can’t find any chart numbers, but what I can tell you, it was a HUGE hit in the Black community. He is indeed on of the forgotten great rappers, a time before rap music went south. The song received only 20.4k Shazams, and forget YouTube, I don’t even think he reached 1k on there. A little fun fact, Tyrone used to play guitar in high school, and after he graduated, he worked for reggae producers at Clocktower Records.