I totally disagree; it’s one of my favorite Blondie songs.
The rap is amusing and pointless, like much, if not most, rap back then. I mean, ffs, have you listened to the lyrics from Rapper’s Delight?
Debbie Harry does an adequate job of rapping, maintaining flow and rhythm without pause, and the denouement, where she says “…and now he only eats guitars! Get up!” and the guitar comes screeching in for a quick and excellent solo, is perfectly executed.
I agree, and even if the rapping, as rapping, isn’t much good (I am no connoisseur, I will defer to others on that point) the song as a whole works beautifully as pop, and the sung intro, before the actual rapping starts is amazing and very catchy.
I have always assumed that the lyrics are nonsense, and intentionally so. I assumed that this was Blondie’s way of distancing themselves from any pretensions to the serious social message of a lot of black rap, but maybe, as you say, the black rappers themselves were not so serious back then either.
It makes a lot more sense than “I Am The Walrus.”
Wasn’t that the “first” rap song to actually make it big?
The main point is that rap was hardly a huge commercial force at the time.
If a charge of bandwagon jumping were to be laid on Autoamerican, I’d think it would be more for the cover “The Tide is High.” The original Jamaican version was obscure, but reggae as represented by Bob Marley was big; Blondie’s album followed the release of Uprising by a few months.
Still, Blondie were huge in their own right, and both of these tunes are basically about paying tribute to cool stuff that they liked.
QFT. Whether or not it was influential within the genre, it was very probably the first rap song which most American music fans (at that time) had ever heard.
Or disco. You’d certainly be able to say that Blondie was jumping on the disco bandwagon when they released “Heart of Glass” in 1978.
Indeed. That’s a better example.
They were hardly the only ones. The disco bandwagon got crowded pretty quickly.
Considering this “failure” spent two weeks at #1 on Billboard and was influential enough for us to still be talking about it 30 years later, I’d wish that I could fail as hideously.
Yeah, this song has significant import, because it really represents the fusion of rock/punk styles and hip-hop in the early days. Blondie wasn’t the only rock/punk band to experiment with hip hop - The Clash, Big Audio Dynamite, and Malcolm McLaren did as well. But it was authentic considering they namechecked hip-hop pioneer Fab 5 Freddy (and got him to appear in the video).
For some reason years later it was like rock and hip-hop didn’t mix; luckily, that’s been reversed. But it’s a cracking track. I really loved Blondie as a band - they were music fans which made them fun to follow. Like The Clash, they had a broad musical palette and weren’t afraid to try something new.
I think Antony Carmichael’s contemporaneous appearance on British television also played a large part in the mainstreaming of rap.
I was at a Blondie gig last Wednesday: they still got it, and Debbie looked great!
Oh, and they played Rapture…and Debbie definitely didn’t sing “finger-popping”!
Maybe not now. But she definitely did when the song first came out. It even rhymed that way “and it’s finger popping/twenty four hour shopping”.
Nitpick: “Rapture” actually came out about 15 months after “Rapper’s Delight.”
Rapper’s Delight - August 1979
Rapture (on the Autoamerican LP) - November 1980
Rapture as a single - January 1981
I saw Debbie Harry on TV being interviewed not long after Blondie reformed and she herself was rather critical of her rapping on “Rapture.” Chris Stein was saying something like, “no, it was cool, it was old school.” Then I noticed that in one of the reunion shows that was on TV she raps it very much the same way as on the record… maybe because the fans like it that way, I don’t know.
Actually the worst case of "jumping on the bandwagon"on “Autoamerican” wasn’t rap (“Rapture”) or reggae (“The Tide is High”). The final song on the album was the show tune “Follow Me” by Lerner and Lowe’s broadway musical "Camelot"in 1960.
Kind of a strange album aftern four albums of power pop hits with a disco song mixed in. I suppose artists always want to stretch themselves (excuse when they release crap) and some of the more obscure songs are great Blondie (“Go thru it” and the cassette single “Suzy and Jeffrey”). And let’s face it, Blondie was the perfect name considering Debbie’s bleached hair. Short and memorable.
But if you want real crap albums, the followup “The Hunter”, now that was bad, not good-bad, but bad.
You’re right about the “Rapture” release date. It was released as a single in January 1981 not January 1980. My mistake. So in retrospect I’d count its initial release as the Autoamerican release in November 1980.
But Wikipedia says “Rapper’s Delight” was released on November 9, 1979 (it was apparently initially released as a single). Where did you get the August date?
Hm… I got the August date from Wikipedia, but when I go there now it does say November 9. November 9 is almost certainly incorrect, though. The record entered the Billboard R&B chart on October 13, 1979, the Billboard Dance chart on the same day, and then the Billboard Hot 100 on November 3, 1979.
I preferred “Call Me” - my mind plays it whenever I listed to Muse “Uprising.”