Blondie‘s genre-crossing 1981 single Rapture, went No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 six weeks after her Saturday Night Live episode where she brought out Funky 4+1. Rapture—which was on Blondie’s fifth album Autoamerican—was a radical disco song with a rap verse, in which Debbie Harry gives a shout-out to Fab Five Freddy and Grandmaster Flash. Rapture by Blondie was the first song with a rap to go No. 1 on March 28, 1981. The song spent two weeks at No. 1 on the Hot 100.
Debbie Harry has known about Grandmaster Flash since 1977. “She said, ‘I’m going to write a rap about you on my next record.’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, right, And about five or six months later, ‘Eatin’ cars and.. eat up bars.. and Flash is fast, Flash is cool.’ She kept her word.. “I was introduced. So now …white people and people of other colors were, ‘Who is Flash?’ So she tremendously opened the door.” Grandmaster Flash told the Daily News
Rapture by Blondie was the first song with a rap to go No. 1.
Vanilla Ice‘s Ice Ice Baby, released on August 22, 1990, off his debut album To the Extreme, was the first true No. 1 rap song by a rapper on the Billboard Hot 100. Ice Ice Baby spent one week at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 Charts after peaking on November 3rd, 1990. The single also went No. 1 in the U.K. on December 1, 1990.
Ice Ice Baby by Vanilla Ice was the first No. 1 rap song by a rapper.
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Read: Vanilla Ice’s ‘Ice Ice Baby’ was the first Hip-Hop single to go No. 1 in the UK
Read: MC Hammer’s “U Can’t Touch This” was the first song to win a Grammy for Best Rap Solo Performance
