“Rapture” (not The)
< author: ill lit >
Ok class, thinking caps on: once upon a time in ‘77, hip-hop sprouted from the post-industrial rubble that was the Bronx and started spreading south into Manhattan. In the early ’80s, punks, new wavers, and avant-garders (ok, pre-hipsters) started noticing black and brown kids kicking rhymes, paining burners, and rocking doubles and thought, “yo, that’s fresh!” Graffiti writers were invited to paint in downtown galleries; bboys jumped the velvet rope at downtown clubs. Things started getting all inter-hybrid-postmodern-cultural and junk.
Sitting in the Relative used vinly section is one artifact that captures the spread of hip-hop into other music and art cultures: Blondie’s “Rapture.” Aside from Debbie Harry rapping the second half of the song, she shouts-out two key figures of hip-hop at the time:
Fab 5 Freddy told me everybody’s high
DJ’s spinnin’ are savin’ my mind
Flash is fast, Flash is cool
Francois sez fas, Flashe’ no do
Graf artist and hip-hop mayer Fab 5 Freddy was key in exposing hip-hop to a broader audience, and later he’d be the first host of Yo! MTV Raps. Grandmaster Flash was instrumental in modifying deejay equipment to better suit hip-hop deejays and, most importantly, rocking parties all across NYC.
Another artifact that illustrates the meeting of these two scenes is the B-movie/quasi-documentary Wild Style, which is regarded in many hip-hop circles as the most accurate representation of what was going down. (Sorry, currently out of stock). Debbie Harry gets stuck-up ouside the club but then given a pass because she’s rolling with Fab 5 Freddy. Nice.
Historical and hip-hip significance aside, Blondie and the fresh, clean copy of their 1981 Autoamerican album that sits in the used vinyl section is imortant in its own right as Blondie was a band to move from punk to new wave to disco–and move with style.
