Who was the first rap artist to appear on ‘Saturday Night Live’?
Saturday Night Live’s legacy as America’s longest-running comedy sketch show is arguably secondary to its role in introducing hundreds of new musical acts to the nation over the past 50 years.
In SNL’s early years, before the arrival of cable television and MTV, a guest spot on the 30 Rock stage was even more impactful, as it could represent an artist’s best and only chance to break through to a wider national audience with one high-stakes and, of course, completely live performance.
Showrunner Lorne Michaels and his team of music advisors were generally pretty open-minded about giving airtime to some offbeat and occasionally dangerous performers, with the infamous appearance by the punk band Fear on Halloween night, 1981, ranking as a particularly bold, if instantly regretted, booking.
Another holiday episode earlier that year, however, would prove more historically significant in the long run. On February 14th, 1981, Blondie were booked as the primary musical guest for Saturday Night Live’s Valentine’s Day episode. The band were also invited to bring another artist with them to the taping, though, and Debbie Harry campaigned for it to be the upstart New York rap group known as the Funky Four Plus One, AKA Funky 4+1.
To this point, Saturday Night Live had yet to book any artists from the world of hip-hop, despite the show’s relative proximity to the heart of that new musical movement in the nearby borough of the Bronx. The same was true for the other late-night American talk shows, as networks were slow and/or hesitant to pick up on the new phenomenon.
Fortunately, the members of Blondie were more perceptive and attuned to the cultural tea leaves than the producers at SNL. Having already ventured into rap themselves with their hit song ‘Rapture’ in 1980, the band had befriended several hip hop acts in the city, and vouched for the Funky 4+1, in particular, with Harry eventually introducing them on the SNL stage as “the best street rappers in the country”.
“Debbie Harry fought for us,” recalled Funky Four’s sole female member, MC Sha-Rock, when interviewed during SNL’s 50th anniversary celebrations earlier this year. “At the time, we didn’t know the impact of what we did to become the first rap group, you know, to ever be on national television.”
The Funky 4+1, which formed in 1977 and included Sha-Rock, Keith Keith, DJ Breakout, KK Rockwell, Lil’ Rodney C, and Jazzy Jeff (not the same one that joined up with the Fresh Prince) among its members, performed their hit ‘That’s the Joint’, which has often appeared on subsequent lists of hip-hop’s all-time greatest tracks.
As for how the group came to Blondie’s attention, “We were playing in every park in New York City, but we were not just in the South Bronx,” Sha-Rock said. “We were headed downtown. The Funky Four was the one that introduced hip-hop to punk rockers [in Manhattan]. That’s how we wind up running into Debbie Harry.”
The Funky Four didn’t get a huge boost from the SNL performance themselves. The group dissolved two years later, and its members went their separate ways. The impact their appearance had on hip-hop as a whole, however, was considerable, as Saturday Night Live’s large, mostly young audience was further clued into a musical genre that would soon become the most dominant style of music in America and much of the world.
