“Hank the Bank” Jackson, formerly of the Sugar Hill Gang has died at age 57 of renal failure. Those above a certain age will faintly recognize the group (if not the man) as the poetic overlords who brought “Rappers Delight” to fruition. In a time when men with golden sharks teeth wore open-chested silk shirts, and women let nothing come between them and their Calvins, this 15 minute sonic tour-de-force burst forth from the cultural wasteland of North Jersey via the Walkman mix tapes of countless youth worldwide. The IBM PC and “Trickle Down Economics” were a dim flicker ghosting along the rim of a distant horizon the first time I heard this song at the StarDust Roller Rink in Clearwater Florida during 1979. The world was a different place then... Your phone had one ringtone: the bell, and only fancy people had phones that unplugged from the wall without a screwdriver. Television (all 5 channels) was off limits to kids on “Lawrence Welk night” (a struggle my children can scarcely comprehend as they complain about our “crappy rural 10mb DSL broadband” limiting simultaneous HD video steams.) That was the year tampons were first advertised on TV to great public outcry – laughably quaint when I see vibrator informercials now. No, a part of the past is truly gone, never to be replaced. As more and more of the iconic pillars of my youth pass on to memory, I am filled with a sense of sad ennui I can not shake. So here, as an ode to that magical time, is “Rappers Delight”, a seminal touchstone for expatriates of that departed era:
Posted on: Wed, 12 Nov 2014 03:09:36 +0000
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