Hip-Hop Has No Social Security. Paid in Full Is Trying to Change That.

Today we’re running a Weekend Culture special, welcoming acclaimed music journalist Jeff Weiss. To learn more about the Paid in Full Foundation, check out their website and listen to our podcast with them here.

In the fall of 1979, a 12-inch record from a small New Jersey independent label changed the world’s understanding of rhythm, slang, and Newtonian physics. The 15-minute single featured three previously unknown rappers who called themselves the Sugarhill Gang. They rhymed about everything from the joys of watching Knicks basketball in color to Superman’s bedroom shortcomings to the beat’s ability to “move you out of this atmosphere.”

“Rapper’s Delight” sold at least two million copies by the label’s own count and became the first hip-hop song to crack the Billboard Top 40. To outsiders, it was a mystery, a curio, a novelty fad. Many in the older generation claimed that it wasn’t even music. Where were the melodies? The harmonies? This is just noise! But teenagers everywhere embraced its playground jokes, slick braggadocio, and funky groove lifted straight from Chic’s “Good Times.”

From the genre’s first steps toward world domination, its business side was fraught with chicanery, intimidation, and exploitation. The “Rapper’s Delight” phenomenon doubles as the story of hip-hop’s original sin. The Sugarhill Gang was assembled like a boy band by a former soul singer named Sylvia Robinson and her son Joey. Few in the five boroughs ever rated them as rappers. In fact, one of their members, a former nightclub doorman named “Big Bank Hank” (born Henry Jackson), was discovered only while blithely spitting bars to pass the time during shifts at a pizza parlor in Englewood, New Jersey.

When it came time to enter the studio, Hank turned to Grandmaster Caz of the Cold Crush Brothers, whom he had briefly managed. At the time, almost no one believed that hip-hop would ever translate to wax, let alone travel past the New Jersey Turnpike. So the 18-year-old Caz shrugged his shoulders, let Hank borrow his rhyme book, and inadvertently rewired history. On “Rapper’s Delight,” Hank recited Caz’s verses verbatim without even bothering to alter the part where Caz spells out his name (“I’m the C-A-S-A, the N-O-V-A, and the rest is F-L-Y”).

Despite composing lyrics that kickstarted hip-hop as a commercial entity, Grandmaster Caz never received royalties or official songwriting credit for his contributions. His futuristic and complex rhyme schemes became a foundational influence on Golden Age legends like Big Daddy Kane, Rakim, and Kool G Rap. But to casual fans, Caz’s contributions were overlooked. Instead, the Sugarhill Gang became the first faces of hip-hop.

If the betrayal of Caz was frequently retold as a fundamental part of hip-hop lore, far fewer knew the depth of the improprieties. On October 24, at the Paid in Full Foundation’s fourth annual Hip Hop Grandmaster Awards, the crowd inside the Bellagio Hotel’s Tower Ballroom heard Nile Rodgers of Chic – this year’s recipient of the nonprofit’s Quincy Jones Achievement Award – explain the full magnitude of the swindle.

After discovering that the Sugarhill Gang’s smash swiped “Good Times,” Rodgers and his Chic partner, Bernard Edwards, threatened to pursue hip-hop’s first copyright lawsuit. What they didn’t know at first was that the Sugar Hill label was funded by the notoriously unscrupulous Morris Levy, a Genovese family associate widely believed to have inspired the Hesh character on The Sopranos.

Rodgers described an impromptu studio ambush at New York’s Power Station by Levy’s sumo-sized goons – who only halfway concealed their pistols to try to scare the young musicians. The studio employees cleared the room, leaving Chic to their fate. According to Rodgers, Levy’s stooges menacingly warned him, “Even if you win, you’ll lose.”

Undeterred, the members of Chic hired an attorney, who, as Rodgers put it, “knew where Levy’s bodies were buried.” It led to a negotiated settlement that gave Chic publishing and a lucrative royalty. They were the lucky ones, a disco band with #1 singles, platinum plaques, and the means to retain the best lawyers. It took some of the Sugar Hill rappers nearly forty years, and decades of litigation, to recover what they were owed.

Until this year in Las Vegas, Caz and Nile Rodgers had never taken the stage together. To the uninitiated, that sentence may seem unremarkable. But for those aware of the history, it was a landmark step toward healing a psychic wound that had festered since hip-hop’s genesis. There is no way to fully redress the missed opportunities and profiteering of the past, but to watch Caz rap the lyrics that he wrote as a teenager in the South Bronx, backed by Rodgers and Chic, was to see what could have and should have been. The DJ running it back to where the needle was always supposed to be dropped.

It was one of at least a half-dozen surreal moments of the evening that made it seem as though a pop-up sanctuary for hip-hop history had materialized several hundred feet away from where high rollers played $100 hands of Pai Gow poker.

Founded by Ben and Felicia Horowitz, the Paid in Full Foundation honors the hip-hop immortals whose artistic contributions far outweigh the financial remuneration they received in return. As Ben described Eric B. & Rakim’s debut masterpiece, the foundation’s namesake Paid in Full: “I bought it for $10 and got at least $5 million worth of value out of it. It needed to be paid back.” Each honoree receives a five-year grant with no strings attached. Inspired by Quincy Jones’ work with the Jazz Foundation, the grants have allowed past recipients, among them Rakim, Scarface, George Clinton, Roxanne Shanté, Grandmaster Caz, Kool Moe Dee, Grand Puba, and Kool G Rap, to purchase homes, pay off medical bills, and finish long-delayed creative projects.

In addition to the Horowitzes, the Board of Directors and Advisory Board include Nas, Quincy Jones III, Fab 5 Freddy, record industry veteran Steve Stoute, and the president and CEO of the Apollo Theater, Michelle Ebanks. It’s something like the old Veterans Committee at the Baseball Hall of Fame. The yearly selections are shaped by those who have made indelible contributions in their own right. They know ball.

Kool G Rap never went platinum or gold. He never even got nominated for a Source Award. But his warp-speed beat vivisections and cinematic storytelling make him akin to hip-hop’s Scorsese. Nas once said, “G Rap wrote the bible.” And when the late Big Punisher met the Queens legend, he literally kneeled to kiss the ring. But it was Paid in Full that finally paid him.

At this year’s event, G Rap ferociously rapped his underworld hits in army fatigues, still grimy, strafing the black-tie crowd with verbal artillery. Grand Puba glided at his Brand Nubian apex. Mr. Wiggles of the Rock Steady Crew danced like he had just stepped out of a battle from Beat Street. It can make you feel like you understand how the pyramids got built: not through advanced technology bestowed by ancient aliens, but through shared wisdom and communal effort. A collection of extraordinary engineers furthering the art form one acrobatic cadence and rhyme scheme at a time.

The most poignant moments occurred during the Fireside Chats, where some of the greatest of all time paid homage to their own heroes. Paid in Full is about watching Nas tell the 2026 honoree, Kurtis Blow, that he remade “If I Ruled the World” because he was “so impressed by you … it did something to me seeing you do that song in Krush Groove.”

“At the same time that the Bronx was burning, you was telling a different story than the news,” Nas continued. “You was uplifting the Bronx and giving the message about the people – how beautiful we really were during the worst times ever … This Black man had the audacity to be on the silver screen and say ‘If I ruled the world.’ [And] you did rule the world!”

It is about hearing Kurtis Blow respond to Nas, while Roxanne Shanté and Run from Run-DMC looked on admiringly. The first solo hip-hop superstar talked about getting a cassette tape of Nas and Lauryn Hill’s song, listening to it for hours, rewinding it to decode the meaning. Then excitedly calling Sony to tell them how great it was.

“[I told them] that if they just did normal promotion behind it, I guarantee it will go double platinum,” Blow said. “And it did.”

Paid in Full is about putting the art over old grudges. In 1985 at the New Music Seminar’s Battle for World Supremacy, a 15-year-old Roxanne Shanté squared off in the finals against Busy Bee Starski. According to Shanté, Blow scored her final round a lowly 4, thereby handing the title to the veteran. In her retelling, Blow did this because he believed the fledgling genre wouldn’t be taken seriously if a teenage girl was crowned the best in the world. But when it came time to pick this year’s honorees, Shanté herself nominated the “Breaks” rapper. And she was sitting beside him onstage, the first to give him his flowers.

Paid in Full is about watching Ice Cube pay tribute to his fellow West Coast hip-hop pioneer, the D.O.C. In 1988 and 1989, the pair were the chief lyrical masterminds behind N.W.A., at least until Cube acrimoniously split from the group to pursue a solo career. But before Cube declared war against the world’s most dangerous group, the D.O.C. dropped a Dr. Dre-produced No One Can Do It Better, which remains arguably the best West Coast gangsta rap record in the East Coast tradition.

A few months after the album’s release, the D.O.C. slammed his car into a concrete divider late at night on the freeway. The accident and the life-saving intubation that followed wound up permanently damaging his voice. Despite the tragedy, the D.O.C. went on to help Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg write The Chronic, Doggystyle, and Chronic 2001, but the financial depredations done to him along the way offered more evidence for the necessity of the foundation. According to the D.O.C., Eazy-E gave him a gold chain in exchange for his publishing. And during the incorporation of Death Row Records, the Dallas-born rapper was allegedly promised a 35 percent ownership of the label that Vibe estimated to be worth $100 million in 1996. But like so many of his peers, the D.O.C. never received his promised share.

Ice Cube went on to become a multimedia juggernaut – a film and television actor, director, producer, and the star of Coors Light commercials. But in Las Vegas he delivered a heartfelt encomium to the D.O.C. as “an emcee that was years ahead of his time, exactly on time, at the same time … an architect of West Coast Hip-Hop … not only for his lyrical brilliance, but for his foundational role in shaping the sound, spirit, and legacy of Hip-Hop culture.”

In a landscape predicated on the immediate and ephemeral, it is easy to lose sight of how much the D.O.C. meant. Perhaps the comedian Chris Rock put it best in a 2004 Rolling Stone list of his all-time favorite hip-hop albums.

“I was going to school in Brooklyn, and the only time you could see rap videos was on a weekend show with Ralph McDaniels called Video Music Box,” Rock wrote. “D.O.C.’s video for ‘It’s Funky Enough’ premiered, and D.O.C. had an L.A. Kings hat on. When I came to school on Monday, half the kids in Brooklyn had L.A. Kings hats on.”

Rock’s memory of late ’80s Brooklyn is also a testament to the seismic impact of McDaniels, this year’s recipient of the Contributor Award. Debuting on local New York television in 1983, his Video Music Box was Yo! MTV Raps and BET’s Rap City long before either of them existed. It was McDaniels who popularized the phrase “shout out,” and who directed the music videos for Nas’ “It Ain’t Hard to Tell,” the Wu-Tang Clan’s “C.R.E.A.M.,” and Shanté’s “Roxanne’s Revenge.” Few, if any, contributed to the documentation and early visual aesthetic of hip-hop more than the man often called the genre’s greatest archivist.

Over the last fifty years, hip-hop has evolved from a rebellious subculture birthed by teens in the rec rooms, parks, and smoldering ruins of the ’70s South Bronx into a multibillion-dollar global behemoth. Its superstars are courted by presidential candidates of all parties; it has soundtracked revolutions and soda commercials, transformed the speech patterns and lingo of multiple generations, and its rhythms and philosophies have been absorbed into all facets of popular culture. No one thinking of a master plan could have devised anything more effective.

In the process, the tradition was diluted. It started as a close-knit community, almost entirely circumscribed within New York, and ruthlessly protected by stewards of the art form: a self-contained subterranean culture that arrived with its own code of ethics and conduct. Spontaneous innovation, originality, and creative integrity mattered most. The “wild style” reigned supreme. The early culture embodied a point that Quincy Jones would later make: when you think about money, God walks out the room. But as with the nation writ large, the emphasis on valuations over values took root.

For those who built it, the dividends rarely trickled down. In 2011, Kool Herc, the DJ widely credited as the inventor of hip-hop, turned to the internet for help to pay for his kidney stone surgery, due to his lack of medical insurance. Jay-Z can sell out multiple nights at Yankee Stadium, but the overcharge never reached the Cold Crush; Grandmaster Caz was still living in the projects until his first Paid in Full checks arrived.

It’s an old American story. King Oliver, a founding father of New Orleans jazz, was a pool hall janitor at the end of his life. He died broke, and his sister was forced to spend her rent money paying for his burial. Jelly Roll Morton, the first great jazz composer, died in poverty, still fighting with his publishers over unpaid royalties. And Billie Holiday was said to have spent her final days with 70 cents in the bank and some cash taped to her leg, under police guard in her hospital bed. Caz is already older than any of them lived to be.

Of course, a few grants a year can’t repay an entire generation, but they’re a start. Paid in Full refuses to let these cultural giants languish in our midst, and its grants have fundamentally changed the artists’ lives, though still not as much as the artists changed ours. And if you’re lucky, you might witness Grandmaster Caz, at an age when most Americans start collecting Social Security, offering a glimpse of what it was like at the break of dawn, rapping the words from the fabled notebook he lent out nearly a half-century ago. This time under his own name.

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