I was at a BYU-I bowling alley with some friends one evening back in the mid-2000s, when I started busting out the opening verse to 1979’s “Rapper’s Delight” for what were doubtless cringe-worthy reasons I have mercifully long forgotten. Why I still remember this otherwise-innocuous memory roughly two decades later, however, isn’t because anyone tried to embarrass my try-too-hard ass at the time, but quite the contrary: for right as I reached the end of Wonder Mike’s opening salvos–“and next on the mic is my man Hank/c’mon Hank sing that song!”–the fellow BYU-I student checking us out our bowling shoes signaled us to let him jump in next, and without missing a beat, promptly delivered a word-perfect delivery of Big Bank Hank’s verse to our surprise and delight. If there’s any lesson to be gleaned at all from that little episode, I suppose it is that when you witness someone being a totally earnest dork, to pay it forward by not shaming them, but join in and cheer them on. Life is too short to be denigrating each other for having fun, anyways.
What’s remarkable about “Rapper’s Delight” in general is that at the time of its release, when the entire genre of Hip-Hop was scarcely a half-decade old, it had already established the template for all Hip-Hop to come: the braggadocio (“we don’t mean to brag, I don’t mean to boast/but we like hot butter a breakfast toast”), the defiantly crude boasts of sexual prowess “He can’t satisfy you with his little worm/but I bust you out with my super-sperm”), the Funk samples, the danceability, the free-styling, the story-telling, are all present right from Hip-Hop’s very first Top 40 hit. Alfred Whitehead once said that all philosophy is just footnotes on Plato, and an argument can be made that all Hip-Hop over the past 50-odd years are just variations on “Rapper’s Delight.”
The communal nature of the track’s production is also of a piece with all Hip-Hop to come: in addition to the three separate MCs riffing on each other, the bass-line was a sample of the then-recent Disco hit “Good Times” by Chic, who was on tour in 1978 opening for The Clash along with Debbie Harry of Blondie. Harry it was who suggested they go check out together one of those new-fangled Hip-Hop events while in New York, where teenagers gathered together with boom-boxes to breakdance and freestyle. That is, Hip-Hop first started out not as a staged concert genre, but an expansive communal space that erased the divide between audience and performer entirely (Chuck D of Public Enemy later said that what most stood out to him about “Rapper’s Delight” wasn’t that it was so long, but so short–the idea of stripping down this sprawling communal performance so that it could fit on a single record was revolutionary to him).
Hence, when Chic was performing “Good Times” on stage in New York a year later in 1979, it didn’t strike any of them as odd when the future members of the Sugarhill Gang abruptly jumped up on stage with Chic and started freestyling new lyrics on the spot. It was an act of spontaneous and impromptu creation–not ex nihilo, but organized together from pre-existing matter.
It was almost a more Mormon concept of creation, something that you would find in the Book of Abraham or the Temple Endowment–one that is moreover also accomplished via a collaboration between equals, “and the gods organized the world,” rather than any sort of imperious dictatorial authority, even a divine one. Our own most sacred Temple ceremonies establish that God did not create the Earth solo, but with the accompaniment and participation of Jehova and Michael—explicitly identified as Christ and Adam respectively. That is, Adam the first man took part in his own creation; and since we are all to symbolically consider ourselves Adam and Eve during the endowment, then implicitly, we all participated in the creation of the Earth as well! Like the Brooklyn Hip-Hop events that so inspired Blondie and Chic, the boundary between artist and audience is erased altogether, as we all create as one, At-One. This is also all the underlying logic of the United Order and Law of Consecration, as outlined in D&C 42:30-39 and the highest covenant of the self-same Temple endowment ceremony, wherein we’re have “all things common” (Acts 2:44-45; 4 Nephi 1:3), because we have already created all things in common, together.
Maybe that’s why there are an astonishingly spread-out number of LDS youth who all seem to have memorized the lyrics to “Rapper’s Delight” as well, despite our utter lack of any sort of Hip-Hop scene of our own: the genesis of the track resonates on a bone-deep level, for it came together with a similar energy to our own most cherished creation accounts. It is also above all else a deeply joyous track, one that emerged from one of America’s harshest and fallen ghettos–but then, “Adam fell that men might be, and men are that they might have joy.”
At a bare minimum, maybe that’s why it was entirely apropos for a couple of random BYU-I students to be spittin’ bars from the seminal track at a Rexburg bowling alley, of all places.