Tracklisting:
A Rhapazooty in Blue (Vocal) (16:08)
B Rhapazooty in Blue (Instrumental) (9:16)
Here's what http://mixproject.pitas.com/ has to say about it:
Sicle Cell & Rhapazooty: “Rhapazooty in Blue” (5:43), from Super Rap: Original Rap & Hip Hop from Harlem’s P & P Records (Landspeed/P & P 2002; originally released 1980).
This compilation is the very definition of dodgy-as-cheap: the title of this song, for instance, is missing the “in” I found in Ego Trip’s Book of Rap Lists, which names it the 37th-best hip-hop single of 1980, which must’ve been hard. The uncredited liner notes (picked up halfway through by Peter Brown, one of P & P’s namesakes---the other is disco producer Patrick Adams, most famous for Musique’s “Keep on Jumpin’” and “In the Bush”) are full of horrifying grammatical errors (“I have a good friend named Mr. Harvey Miller who own his own record label called Tyson Records and he also owns Harvey’s Barber Shop”), and the improper capitalization is so out of control--“His first Singer was a Blues Singer”--that I started wondering if the writer was from England. (Sorry, that was mean.) The music’s cheap, too: P & P appears to have been the very model of half-assed bootstraps capitalism, recycling the same backing tracks as everyone else (this song features a studio band recreating---gosh, what do you know---Chic’s “Good Times”) and putting them underneath rappers who often sound like they’d never been in front of a microphone before in their lives. The more obscure early hip-hop that gets reissued (i.e. non-Sugarhill or, in some cases, Enjoy), the more obvious it becomes just how many carpetbaggers there were out there trying to cash in and get out.
Which is one of the reasons I like this song so much: it’s completely shameless, and since early rap was, too---shamelessly entertaining, at the very least---the fit is fine. It’s a male-female duet: the man is Sicle Cell---lovely moniker, that--and the woman is Rhapazooty. (It wasn’t till I looked at the Ego Trip book to find out the actual release date that I realized what the pun was supposed to be; Gershwin would have groaned just as loudly as I did). Both of them sound totally fruity: they pronounce “ow” like “AHH-oooo-wuh,” and every word follows suit, like they’re trying to pop the vowels of every word like a pin pricking a balloon. This helps them bring off the song’s greatest moment (He: “Sex!” She: “Oh! And more sex!” He: “I said sex is the best, y’all!”) and it keeps things bubbling up and along in a way that the Chic riff deserves. “Good Times” itself crosscuts Alfa Anderson and Luci Martin’s stentorian vocals (not to mention the string section) over the groove; the Sugarhill Gang plod. These guys don’t make it more buoyant (even the Sugarhill Gang couldn’t undo that), but they keep up, which is all you can ask for, especially on a budget.
--4 November 2002
