1981Released
6:27

Did You Know?

Interesting facts and trivia about Wordy Rappinghood. By Songfacts®.

This was the first song recorded by the Tom Tom Club, and also their first single. The group is a collective led by Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz, who are the bass player and drummer of Talking Heads. Chris Blackwell of Island Records arranged the recording session - he was familiar with Weymouth and Frantz because he had passed on signing Talking Heads. Blackwell brought them to his Compass Point studios in Nassau and had them cut a single on the premise that if he liked it, they could do a whole album. After three days of recording and mixing, the band emerged with "Wordy Rappinghood," and Blackwell loved it. He commissioned the full album and released "Wordy" in Europe and Latin America, where it had considerable success. The group's deal with Island didn't extend to America, so this song was not issued as a single there. In the US, the first Tom Tom Club release was "Genius Of Love."

This song was released a few months after Blondie's "Rapture," which was the first big hit to feature a rap. Like "Wordy Rappinghood," it was rapped by a white female vocalist and beared little resemblance to the rap that was emerging from the New York City block parties. Blondie and Tom Tom Club got some blowback from the CBGB's crowd for these songs but were largely embraced by the hip-hop community, which saw how they were legitimizing the genre and pushing it forward. At the time, hip-hop was much more about the beats (typically played by a DJ) than the vocals, so any deficiencies in Debbie Harry and Tina Weymouth's flows were overlooked. An important distinction is that most rap music at the time was created by sampling and looping existing beats, but "Rapture" and "Wordy" had original music. Neither act knew the other was working on a rap song - Blondie was recording theirs in New York while Tom Tom Club was busy in the Bahamas.

Like "De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da" by The Police and "Words" by Missing Persons, this song questions the true value of words and shows how they can be manipulated. Tom Tom Club's music is based on grooves, so they lyric was written to support the beat. The result was a brilliant kind of gibberish, perhaps making the point that words can be so deceptive that it can be best to ignore them. The song opens with the sound of a frantic typewriter, which implies that these words are being generated stream-of-conscious.

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Song Analysis

Key, BPM (tempo) and time signature of Wordy Rappinghood.
EKey
MinorMode
4/4Time Signature
122BPM

Album

The album Wordy Rappinghood is released on.

Released By

The record label that has released Wordy Rappinghood.
Rhino/Warner Records
© 1981 Sire Records Company
℗ 1981 Sire Records Company

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