During spring 1979, a funk group called Fatback released the first commercial rap record entitled "King Tim III."
Though most of the popular artists during rap's first five years were African Americans, Puerto Ricans were not far from absent in this scene. DJ Charlie Chase of Cold Crush Brothers and The Fearless Four's Devastating Tito were popular figures in commercial rap's early times.
Given rap's identification as a Black musical form, Puerto Ricans participated within a perceived Black matrix. This had been the case since hip-hop's beginnings in the early 1970's. But rap's mass-mediated view in the 1970's led to even more intense ethno racialization of rap. Furthermore, if the cultural entitlement of Puerto Ricans to rap was sometimes ambivalent in the New York context, this ambivalence was magnified in other locations, most other landing them on the outsider side of the fence. The Afro-diasporic New York context in which Black and Puerto Ricans are neighbors, friends, and allies in a precious exception and hard to conceive of in most other U. S locations. Hip hop's initial Afro-diasporic ghetto base was hard to translate into highly segregated contexts with no corresponding histories of Afro-diasporic cultural production. Audiences unfamiliar with New York life for the most part did not distinguish between Blacks and Puerto Ricans. After its commercialization, rap remained class identified.
