It all started with a party in the Bronx, New York, in 1978. Blondie‘s Chris Stein and Debbie Harry were friends with Fab 5 Freddy (Fred Brathwaite), who invited them to a music gathering at the Police Athletic League in the South Bronx.
In the late ’70s, Stein and Harry were friends with rappers in the Bronx and Brooklyn and by 1980, the Sugarhill Gang had “Rapper’s Delight” was getting radio play, while Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five had “Super Rappin No.2,” and Kurtis Blow released “The Breaks.” The new decade also welcomed some of the first rap singles from the Funky Four Plus One, Lady B, Melle Mel, The Fatback Band, and more but the genre was still in its infancy.
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Da Bronx
“It was just super exciting and eye-opening to see all this going on at the same time as the downtown music scene, but there was really no connection between these two scenes at that point,” recalled Stein of the early rap scene in 2022. “We had heard ‘Rapper’s Delight’ on the radio, so I had a basic conception of it, but seeing it in person was really eye-opening.”
[RELATED: Behind the Song Lyrics: “Rapture,” Blondie]
In the Bronx, the performance was a free-for-all for anyone with anything to say something and featured Grandmaster Flash, the Cold Crush Brothers, and Funky Four Plus One. The latter later joined Blondie on their 1981 appearance on Saturday Night Live on Valentine’s Day.
“I don’t remember there being any formality to it,” said Harry on rap music at the time. “It also seemed that there were some no-name kids that just jumped up there because they really had something to say, which was also very exciting. It was like folk music to me, although musically it wasn’t like folk music.”
[RELATED: Top 10 Debbie Harry (Solo) Songs]
Stein added, “I was very excited because, on a socio-political level, it was literally all these marginalized kids finding a voice. It was a really great, very exciting event. It was nothing like what we were used to with bands on and off stage, and one band replacing another. It was this continuous madness of DJs and MCs coming up and performing in this sort of loop.”
The rap gatherings and freestyled music they were being exposed to at the time inspired Stein and Harry to write “Rapture” for Blondie’s fifth album Autoamerican in 1980. The song went to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 on March 28, 1981, and became the first song to top the charts featuring rap. “Rapture” was also the first official music video with rap music to be aired on MTV.
Cadillacs, Fab 5 Freddy—and Punk Rock
Within the song, Stein and Harry wrote in references to Fab 5 Freddy, men from Mars, Cadillacs and Lincoln town cars, punk rock—and being caught up in the rapture of it all.
Fab Five Freddy told me everybody’s fly
DJ spinnin’ I said, “My my”
Flash is fast, Flash is cool
François c’est pas, Flash ain’t no dude
And you don’t stop, sure shot
Go out to the parking lot
And you get in your car and drive real far
And you drive all night and then you see a light
And it comes right down and it lands on the ground
And out comes a man from Mars
And you try to run but he’s got a gun
And he shoots you dead and he eats your head
And then you’re in the man from Mars
You go out at night eatin’ cars
You eat Cadillacs, Lincolns too
Mercurys and Subaru
“We collaborated on most of it,” said Stein. “I was the B-movie stoner at the time, so I wrote all the ‘Man from Mars’ nonsense.”
And you don’t stop, you keep on eatin’ cars
Then, when there’s no more cars you go out at night
And eat up bars where the people meet
Face to face, dance cheek to cheek
One to one, man to man
Dance toe to toe, don’t move too slow
‘Cause the man from Mars is through with cars
He’s eatin’ bars, yeah wall to wall
Door to door, hall to hall
He’s gonna eat ’em all
Rapture, be pure
Take a tour through the sewer
Don’t strain your brain, paint a train
You’ll be singin’ in the rain
Said don’t stop to punk rock
Hip-Hop and Basquiat
The song also references hip-hop—And you hip-hop, and you don’t stop / Just blast off—sure shot. The term “hip-hop” was first used by Robert Flipping Jr. to describe the genre in a February 1979 article in the New Pittsburgh Courier.
In the music video, directed by Keith MacMillan, Harry is walking around makeshift streets rapping about a man from Mars eating bars. The video also features cameos by graffiti artists Lee Quiñones and Jean-Michel Basquiat, who was asked to fill in for Grandmaster Flash who did not show up for the shoot.
‘Yuletide Throwdown’
In 2021, Blondie revisited “Rapture” on the holiday song “Yuletide Throwdown.”
“When we were recording ‘Rapture,’ the first take of it was slower than the existing version,” said Stein of the remix also featuring Fab 5 Freddy. “I just got the master tape and worked it up in my home studio and put Freddy on it, and it became this Christmas thing. It’s been floating around for years, but there’s never been a full-on remix and release of it.”
Stein added, “It’s a Christmas song. It’s like ‘Die Hard.’’
Photo: Graham Morris/Evening Standard/Getty Images
