Rapture by Blondie

 

Every now and then, Alexa coughs up disco for me, because I still like disco. Recently, she's been playing "Rapture" by Blondie a lot.

When the song was released in early 1981, most listeners didn’t yet have a name for what they were hearing. I remembering thinking it was cool when I first heard it - I'd never listened to anybody rap, and especially not about a man from Mars who eats up cars, bars, and then only guitars!

The song came out of the New York new‑wave scene, and it included rap. It wasn’t a gimmick. It wasn’t parody. It was a moment when two worlds brushed up against each other, and something shifted.

Musically, “Rapture” is a hybrid: new wave, disco, and early hip‑hop braided together into a single track. Even the genre listings today reflect that blend of new wave, hip hop, pop, and rap rock. It's a reminder that the song never fit neatly into one box.

But its importance goes far beyond its sound.

A Doorway Into Hip‑Hop for the Mainstream

Before “Rapture,” rap was largely a local New York phenomenon. The vibrant, inventive structure of this type of music was mostly invisible to the average American listener. Blondie’s single changed that. It became the first song featuring rap vocals to reach No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, a milestone that helped carry hip‑hop from the streets and clubs of the city into national consciousness.

Debbie Harry wasn’t trying to be a rapper. She was trying to shine a light on a culture she and Chris Stein admired and had been moving through. This was a music scene that included Fab 5 Freddy, graffiti artists, DJs, and dancers who were building something new in real time. “Rapture” didn’t invent hip‑hop, but it amplified it at a moment when amplification mattered.

How Early Hip‑Hop Artists Saw It

One of the most striking things about the song’s legacy is how warmly many early hip‑hop figures received it. Blondie wasn’t intruding; they were inviting. The song name‑checks Fab 5 Freddy and Grandmaster Flash, and the band used their platform to introduce these artists to audiences who might never have encountered them otherwise. In that sense, “Rapture” acted as a cultural bridge. Maybe not perfect, but earnest and influential.

The track also helped bring attention to the broader hip‑hop ecosystem, including graffiti culture, which was still largely underground. Contemporary accounts credit the song and its video with exposing mainstream viewers to the aesthetics and energy of that world.

A Strange, Joyful Collision

What makes “Rapture” endure is the way it captures a moment of cross‑pollination at a time when genres were porous, scenes overlapped, and artists borrowed from each other with curiosity rather than caution. It’s quirky, a little surreal, and absolutely sincere.

And it’s historic. In 1981, a new‑wave band fronted by Debbie Harry ended up at the forefront of early hip‑hop history, simply by paying attention to what was happening around them and choosing to celebrate it.

That’s the story worth remembering. Not that Blondie made a rap song, but that they opened a door.

And the video is a trip.

References

• Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. “Blondie, ‘Rapture.’” Background on the song’s chart history and its role in bringing rap into mainstream pop.

• NPR Music. “How Blondie’s ‘Rapture’ Brought Hip-Hop to the Mainstream.” Interviews and retrospective commentary from early hip‑hop figures.

• Rolling Stone. “The Oral History of ‘Rapture.’” Includes perspectives from Fab 5 Freddy and Grandmaster Flash on the song’s impact.

• The Guardian. “How Blondie Helped Hip-Hop Go Mainstream.” Cultural analysis of the band’s relationship with the early hip‑hop scene.

• Billboard. Chart history for “Rapture,” documenting its status as the first No. 1 single to feature rap vocals.

• Smithsonian Magazine. “The Early Days of Hip-Hop in New York.” Context for the scene Blondie was moving through in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

• Interview Magazine. Conversations with Fab 5 Freddy discussing the downtown–uptown cultural exchange and Blondie’s role in it.

• Grandmaster Flash, The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash: My Life, My Beats. Memoir passages describing his interactions with Blondie and the early cross‑scene collaborations.

*An AI tool helped me with this piece.*

Thursday Thirteen

1. Charles Darwin was born on February 12, 1809, in Shrewsbury, England. A Georgian‑era childhood in a riverside market town shaped his early sense of the natural world. His birthday twin was Abraham Lincoln. These two men would reshape how people understood humanity, each in his own sphere.

2. Darwin came from a wealthy, intellectually curious family. Darwin’s mother, Susannah Wedgwood, grew up in a household where reading, debate, and curiosity were encouraged. His father, Dr. Robert Waring Darwin, was a respected physician in Shrewsbury. He was surrounded by wealth, as the Wedgwood's were famous for their pottery and the elder Darwin had a thriving medical practice. Dinner conversations were the kind where ideas were treated as living things. Ideas were examined, debated, passed around like bread.

3. He was the fifth of six children. Being neither the eldest nor the baby gave him a kind of middle‑child freedom. He roamed, collected beetles, and followed his own fascinations without the pressure of inheriting the family profession.

4. His mother died when he was eight. Her absence left a quiet imprint on him. His older sisters stepped in, creating a household where he was both cared for and gently encouraged to pursue his odd little passions.

5. He studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh. He was supposed to follow his father into medicine, but the reality of 19th‑century surgery, including no anesthesia and no antiseptics, horrified him. He drifted toward natural history instead, spending more time in tide pools than lecture halls.

6. He later attended Christ’s College, Cambridge. Officially he was preparing for the clergy, but unofficially he was falling in love with botany, geology, and long walks with professors who saw his potential. Cambridge is where he learned how to observe with intention.

7. His voyage on the HMS Beagle changed the course of science. Five years at sea gave him a world’s worth of specimens, landscapes, and puzzles. The Galápagos finches, the fossils in South America, and the shifting coastlines fed the slow‑burning idea that species were not fixed.

8. He waited more than 20 years to publish On the Origin of Species. Darwin knew his theory would challenge religious and scientific orthodoxy. He hesitated, revised, and gathered evidence. When Alfred Russel Wallace independently reached the same conclusion, Darwin finally stepped forward.

9. His theory of natural selection transformed biology. He proposed that small variations, accumulated over generations, shape the survival of species. It was a radical idea at the time, a thought that life is not static but constantly adapting, responding, becoming.

10. His scientific curiosity ranged far beyond evolution. Darwin wrote about coral reefs, earthworms, orchids, barnacles, emotions, and human behavior. He was a synthesizer who saw connections across disciplines long before “interdisciplinary” was a word.

11. He married his cousin Emma Wedgwood. Their marriage was affectionate, intellectually rich, and sometimes strained by his health. They had ten children, several of whom became scientists, engineers, or artists. For example, his son George Howard Darwin (1845–1912) was a a distinguished astronomer and mathematician who was knighted for his work on the evolution of the Earth and Moon system.

12. Darwin received some of the highest honors in science, including The Royal Medal, the Wollaston Medal, and the Copley Medal. The recognition from institutions that had once been skeptical of his ideas showed that his peers eventually understood the magnitude of what he’d done.

13. He is buried in Westminster Abbey, near Isaac Newton. This is a quiet, astonishing honor: the naturalist who explained life’s unfolding placed beside the physicist who explained motion and gravity. It’s a symbolic pairing of two thinkers who changed how humans understand their place in the universe.

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Thursday Thirteen is played by lots of people; there is a list here if you want to read other Thursday Thirteens and/or play along. I've been playing for a while, and this is my 946th time to do a list of 13 on a Thursday. Or so sayth the Blogger counter, anyway.

Before the Snow and Ice

I grabbed this shot of this buck eating on an evergreen before the snow and fell. I hope the wildlife is making out ok in all of this frozen ground. Snow doesn't often hang around this long.

February Wings

This week the yard has been alive in a way winter rarely allows. With the snow crusted over the fields and the trees rimed in ice, the birds have arrived in waves: robins, starlings, crows. 

They fill the branches like a second, restless canopy. They land on the roof, shuffle across the gutters, and lift off again in a rush that sounds like someone shaking out a heavy quilt.

I do not recall ever seeing so many at once. It feels as if the cold has pushed them all into the same narrow band of open ground, the same few patches of berries, the same sheltered corners of the valley. 

According to ornithologists, what we are seeing is not true migration but winter movement, the kind that happens when snow and ice force birds to concentrate wherever food is still available. They are seeking what is thawed, what is edible, what is possible.

My grandmother used to say that the first robin meant spring was on its way. I have been thinking about that as I watch hundreds of them tilt and settle in the trees.

 

One robin is a promise. A whole flock feels like a reminder that even in the hardest stretch of winter, something is shifting. The season is gathering itself. The world is preparing to turn.

Spring has to be on the way, yes?

For now, the birds keep coming. They rise and fall, dark against the pale sky, like a winter tide. And even though the air still bites and the ground is still locked in ice, I cannot help but feel that familiar tug of hope, quiet but insistent, carried on their wings.

The Botetourt County Courthouse

With Virginia and the nation celebrating 250 years of freedom from England in 2026, I thought it might be fun to occasionally bring up some local history. At one time, Botetourt County stretched all the way to the Mississippi and into Wisconsin, which means my county's history is also the history of much of the nation.

Botetourt County Courthouse 2024

Our county courthouse renovation has caused quite a stir among the local citizens. Many opposed the construction of a new facility because the old courthouse building was an iconic feature of Fincastle, the county seat.

However, the story of Botetourt County’s courthouse is not a simple tale of an old building finally giving way to time. It is a long cycle of loss, rebuilding, and adaptation, stretching back more than 250 years.

Botetourt’s first courthouse dates to the 1770s, when county business was conducted in a log structure that reflected the realities of a frontier region. When Botetourt was formed, this area was basically the wild west.

By 1820, the county had grown enough to warrant a permanent structure. That year former president Thomas Jefferson designed a new courthouse for Botetourt and sent the plans from Monticello. His influence would linger far longer than that single building.

In the 1840s, a more substantial Greek Revival courthouse rose in Fincastle. Built between 1841 and 1848, it became the architectural centerpiece of the town. This courthouse carried forward some of Jefferson’s original design and stood for more than a century. 

That ended in 1970, when the courthouse was destroyed by fire. In the immediate aftermath, historians feared that Botetourt’s records, some dating back to colonial times, had been lost. According to the Virginia Department of Historic Resources, those documents survived because they were stored in a secure vault. The fear of the loss of records to fire forced the Virginia General Assembly to pass legislation requiring deeds, wills, and other vital records to be copied and microfilmed, with the duplicates sent to the Library of Virginia in Richmond for safekeeping.

The courthouse itself, though, had to be replaced. In 1975, a new building went up on the same site. Although it looked old, it was not. Designed as a modern structure wrapped in historical clothing, it incorporated the four surviving columns from the 19th-century courthouse and echoed Jefferson’s proportions and layout. 

For 50 years, that building served the county. Over time, however, its limitations became impossible to ignore. It did not meet the requirements of the Americans with Disabilities Act, for one thing. Nor could it be adapted to modern security standards. Mold infestation became a persistent problem, and water leaks plagued both the roof and the walls. The courthouse may have looked solid, but it was no longer safe or functional for the people who worked there daily, including judges, clerks, and staff, or for members of the public who regularly conducted business inside.

Under Virginia law, specifically §15.2-1643, counties are required to provide adequate courthouse facilities. Botetourt had little choice. Repairing the building was not feasible given the extent of the damage and the lack of space. If the county had not acted, the judiciary could have ordered the construction of a new courthouse anyway.

A rendering of the new courthouse alongside the old structure.

By this point, the county’s historic records were no longer stored on paper alone. They are now preserved digitally, a direct descendant of the reforms prompted by the 1970 fire. Still, the building that housed them had reached the end of its useful life.

In May 2025, the 1975 courthouse was dismantled. Construction is now underway on a new facility, part of a $35.7 million project. When completed, the new courthouse is expected to look much like the ones that came before it, continuing the architectural thread that began with Jefferson more than two centuries ago. Completion is projected for July 2027.

Throughout all these changes, one thing has remained constant. The Botetourt County Courthouse has long drawn genealogists and historians. They know that the county's early records apply not only to Virginia, but to places that are now entire states away. The building itself may keep changing, but the county courthouse remains a keeper of history. Our legacy will survive.

Sunday Stealing

One Word Answers ONLY

1. Where is your cell phone? - Desk

2. Tell us about your hair. - Gray

3. What's your favorite thing? - Sunshine

4. What room are you in? - Office

5. Where did you grow up? - Country

6. What aren't you good at? - Drawing

7.  Your favorite drink? - Water

8. Where do you want to be in 10 years? - Alive

9. Your mood. - Eh

10. Last time you cried. - Funeral

Thank you for playing! Please come back next week.

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I encourage you to visit other participants in Sunday Stealing posts and leave a comment. Cheers to all us thieves who love memes, however we come by them.