The Tom Tom Club | Wordy Rappinghood (Change Request ReVision)
The first song recorded by pair of Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz aka The Tom Tom Club released “Wordy Rappinghood” as the lead single from their self-titled album, 1981’s Tom Tom Club.
As the former drummer and bass player of Talking Heads, Weymouth and Frantz continued to carry the post-disco torch that they helped popularize as they, along with David Byrne, galvanized the Downtown Sound of New York’s early eighties scene, centered around the iconic subcultural epicenter, Danceteria.
Resident DJ Mark Kamins would hold court at this seminal Manhattan institution where the cross-pollination of Disco, Post-Disco, Punk, New Wave, Industrial, Boogie, and Art Rock groups like Talking Heads would emerge alongside, Madonna, Jellybean Benitez, LL Cool J, The Beastie Boys, Arthur Russell, and Keith Haring would hang out during their most prolific years.
This leading track from the group was released only a few months after Blondie's "Rapture," which was the first big hit to feature a rap part from a rock-focused group. Heavily embraced by the burgeoning NYC hip-hop community, but distinctively different from the hip-hop of the era that featured mostly sampled breaks, both of these female vocal-driven earworms featuring original music with a dance floor focus.
Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz had bought a house in Nassau, Bahamas, next door to Chris Blackwell, owner of Island Records, and they recorded this song at the Compass Point Studios. Co-written with a 21-year old keyboardist name Steven Stanley, this post-disco classic features Monte Browne on bass, who had a long tenure with the disco all-star outfit, T-Connection.
Using part of a traditional Moroccan children's song and game, "A Ram Sam Sam", “Wordy Rappinghood” is literally just that, a long extended play on words, rhymes, featuring multiple languages all wrapped up as a metaphorical rhetorical question about the dangers and weaponizing nature of language.
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