what are you listening to THIS VERY SECOND?

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DeepHour
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30 Mar 2022, 2:36 pm

Early 1981 again, and it's XTC. The lead singer looks exactly like a member of the Economics department at a school where I once worked. I think the band came from Swindon in Wiltshire, or somewhere like that.

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DeepHour
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30 Mar 2022, 2:38 pm

More XTC, this time from 1982. An even better song than the previous one, IMHO.

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TenMinutes
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30 Mar 2022, 7:38 pm

DeepHour wrote:

Early 1981, and Blondie's phenomenal chart success from 1978-80 is about to go into decline from now on: although this went to number 1 in the USA, it didn't do so well elsewhere. Very different from anything they'd previously recorded, I like it a lot.

That song is important in a number of ways, but on a basic level it is essentially two songs in one, the first part totally in line in style with their biggest hit, Heart of Glass. But the song literally heralds the end of disco and the beginning of rap. The second half of the song is the first rap vocal to appear in a number-one song. The music video for Rapture was also in MTV's first set. Rap would become far more influential on MTV later in the decade, but the platform actually launched with this rap song, so rap was there from the beginning.

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30 Mar 2022, 7:49 pm

I believe this is the first rap vocal to hit the top 40 pop chart in the USA, in late 1979, in what would otherwise be a disco song. This was most people's intro to hip hop. I remember it well, and I actually bought this record while it was popular. My dad was mystified lol.

There was a 7-inch version that played on the radio, but this 14-minue single was actually launched as a 12-inch, the first I'd ever seen such a thing.

This was also the first controversy over the wholesale, unashamed use of a melody from another song. THe groove of this song came from a Chic song called Good TImes. It was re-recorded, but unmistakably the same melody. Later, sampling, actually using bits of the recording, would be widely used in rap music.