This was the first rap song most white kids ever heard, from the New Wave band Blondie. I totallt remember when I first heard this song on the radio. We still lived in Ohio, it came out in January of 1981. I was at my friend Tom's house, and the radio station out of Cleveland, G-98, played this song. When it was done, we went, "What was THAT?" Rap didn't exist, we had never even heard of it. I was about 13. The radio must have played it before it was released, because I think we lived in New Mexico in 1981.
Back-up, You guys know the play/movie RENT, about the young artists, musicians, and weird people living cheap, and squatting in empty buildings, in the "Alphabet City" area of New York City. "Rent" takes place, starting on Christmas Day 1989, on Avenue A in NYC. New York City really went downhill in the late 1960's and 1970's, and that area of the A-B-C letter streets, "Alphabet City," was a part that was really run down. A decade before "Rent" was set, in the late 1970's, Disco was the popular mainstream music, but a lot of alternative stuff, like the original punk rock bands, and art and alternative bands, played at a club called CBGB's, and similar dive bars, not far away from Greenwich Village and Alphabet City. Lots of young musicians, artists, and weirdos lived super cheap. The first rap and hip hop was just starting in the ghetto neighborhoods there, and popular in that group of innovators. Madonna also came out of that scene.
Blondie was originally a punk band, but morphed into New Wave, which was punk influenced, but had synthesizers and more keyboards, and became popular music. But Debbie Harry and the Blondie members new and hung out with the punkers, the artists, and the first rappers, like Grandmaster Flash, graffiti writer Fab Five Freddie, and others. So they incorporated the idea of rapping into this song "Rapture," and it was really the first mainstream "rap" hit song. It was a few more years before mainstream radio and MTV started playing much rap and hip hop.
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