Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s Sugar Hill Records debut, “Freedom” peaked at #19 on the R&B chart in 1980. This was the group’s first successful single, and the middle portion was sampled on (and scratched into) their later single “Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel.”
The song heavily sampled “Get Up and Dance” by Freedom, and it has been incorporated into several subsequent hip-hop songs, such as De La Soul’s “Fanatic of the B-Word.