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Will Dennis

on paper routes, walkmans and rapper’s delight

11.18.08 | 18 Comments

so i’ve basically worked a job since i was like 11…yeah, hard to believe since i’m such a chilled out person. and by “chilled out” i mean moody and easily annoyed.

i only mention it cus today i happened to hear RAPPER’S DELIGHT by the SUGAR HILL GANG and it reminded me of my first job (a paper route delivering the ITHACA JOURNAL) and my first exposure to rap music and something new and fantastic called a “WALKMAN”.

see one Sunday night in the dead of winter (had to be late 1979/early 1980) i was out collecting for my route. that meant going door-to-door to get the deadbeats who got the paper all week to pay up for the week. it was a lonely job and — as anyone who’s ever lived through a winter in central new york can tell you — it was a cold-ass job as well.

so i would often beg my younger brother to come with me…most of my ‘clients’ were hippie college kids, so occasionally a girl would come to the door in a towel. that was usually enough of a lure to get him to come and one night his best friend came too.

he was a cool kid who’s parents had some dough and he always had the latest toys. but on this night, he had something more magical. he called it a SONY WALKMAN. now we had a SONY “Trinatron” color TV set (purchased hastily by my father at Woolworth’s during the Watergate hearings when our old B&W set literally blew up) at home so i knew the brand name, but this was a device that played tapes and you carried them around to listen to music. i mean WTF?!…

i recall it was blue (could that be correct?) and bigger than his hand. i don’t think it even had what we would consider headphones but more like an ear plug that would come with a transistor radio…i could be wrong about that tho. anyway, this thing blew our fucking minds. it’s hard to conceive of it today, but it then it was like something that had been beamed down from another planet.

but what was even more mind-blowing was the tape inside. it was something called RAPPER’S DELIGHT…god knows where the hell he got it, but it was like nothing our brains had ever heard before. i mean were living in the disco age so we knew dance music, roller skating music, make-out music but this was a completely different life form. and they cursed!

ok, maybe not cursing but they did reference “s—m” (which in hindsight is a little creepy) and that was enough for us. i think we prolly broke the rewind button listening to the song. more than 25 years later, i still know every goddamn word.

but we didn’t know much else…we didn’t know anything about the band, the music, the hip hop scene and had no way to find out — no wikipedia to check, no music magazines to buy, no MTV to watch. we were just three nerdy white kids on a freezing cold sunday nite in upstate new york getting hit in the face by a new age.

god bless mike, hank and master gee.
god bless sony walkmans.
god bless us all everyone.

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