“Rapture” (Blondie)

Your classic early MTV song of the day today is “Rapture” by Blondie. Like yesterday’s classic song, “Kid,” “Rapture” actually predates the launch of MTV. “Rapture” was included on the group’s 1980 album, Autoamerican, and released as a single in January of 1981. The song got a lot of radio play before the MTV channel launched in August of that year, peaking at #1 on the Billboard Hot 100, Billboard Dance Club Songs, and Cash Box Top 100 charts.

“Rapture” is a proto-rap song by the genre-hopping group. It was written by Chris Stein and Debbie Harry after the two of them attended a rap party in the Bronx in 1978. The duo were already friends with a number of Brooklyn- and Bronx-based rap artists, including Fab 5 Freddy, who is name-checked in the song. Stein and Harry fused this new rap music with the kind of bass-heavy dance music that Chic was putting out at the time, and the result is a somewhat epic (six and a half minutes in length) mish mash with science fiction-inspired lyrics about a “man from Mars” who eats up cars and bars and then guitars, get up.

The video for “Rapture” debuted on the Solid Gold television show on January 31, 1981, and got plenty of airtime on a number of pre-MTV video shows. The bulk of the video is a single take of Debbie Harry strolling down a busy city street, rubbing shoulders with dancers, graffiti artists, and other street folk. Once MTV launched, the channel was in desperate need of content and latched onto existing, if somewhat older, videos like “Kid” and “Rapture.” So the first MTV generation got to see a lot of this one, which helped extend its life.

Blondie consisted of singer Debbie Harry, guitarist Chris Stein, bassist Gary Valentine, and drummer Clem Burke. That version of the band coalesced in 1975 and quickly became a fixture in the New York City punk rock scene. They released their first album in 1977 but really hit the big time with the release of their third album, Parallel Lines in 1978. That album included the hits “Picture This,” “Hanging on the Telephone,” “One Way or Another,” and “Heart of Glass.” Other hits followed, including “Call Me” (from the American Gigolo soundtrack), “The Tide is High,” and “Rapture.”

Blondie officially broke up in 1982 but reformed numerous times over the years. The band was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2006. They truly were a groundbreaking band, as witnessed by all those hits in all those different styles. Their innovative videos were also constants on the early MTV channel. Everybody knew Blondie and Debbie Harry, and justifiably so.